 Each one of these kidney beans represents 100 students applying to college for the first time. How many of you think you're in the jar? Now I know because I counted each one of them by hand and I'll tell you in just a minute. Today I want to talk about how incredibly difficult it is to get into some of the top universities in the United States. We're talking about Ivy Leagues, T10s, the best of the best. But I also want to show you some tricks that you can use to make your application more powerful and make it more likely for you to get in. Back to our jar. This jar contains 674 beans, which represents 67,380 students. I rounded up to the nearest bean. Now that is the number of people that applied to Cornell. How many actually got in? I'll just scoop out the accepted beans from this jar and put them into this little jar here. So that's 59 beans. That's an acceptance rate of 8.7%. Now let's do Columbia. Nine, seven, 26 beans out of 633. 4% acceptance rate. Harvard is also 4%. 23. 23 beans for Harvard. Stamford is even less. Only 22 of these beans are going to get in here. 22. Stamford. 472 beans here and 25 beans are going to go into the accepted jar. Here's Brown with 26 beans out of 466. Only 16 of the 376 Princeton beans will make it into the acceptance jar. Dartmouth is 18 beans. And finally, we have Caltech, which is the most exclusive school on the list. 130 beans apply and only 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 beans make it in. How do you go from being one of these beans to being one of these lucky beans right here? Fortunately, I don't have to hack Harvard's computers or get admissions officers drunk so they reveal their secrets. All of the information that we need is publicly available in a document called the Common Data Set. This right here, this is what we're looking for, the Common Data Set. This has everything we need to know to figure out how to get into these top universities. The current Common Data Set gives us information about students who started university in Fall 2021, part C7 in particular. This section explains what factors these universities use to determine who they admit. Now, it breaks it down into two sections, academic factors and non-academic factors. Let's take a closer look at how each of these categories works and then we'll talk about how each of these elite schools uses these categories to determine who they will admit. In the academic section, we start off with the rigor of academic record, essentially saying how difficult your school was. An IV diploma, for example, will be considered more difficult than a standard high school diploma. From there, you have class rank and GPA, pretty self-explanatory. Then we've got test scores, either the SAT or the ACT. All of these universities were test optional, so did they really admit a lot of test optional students? The answer will surprise you. And finally, we have your essays and recommendation letters. Under the non-academic factors, we have a whole bunch of different things. For example, your interview with your admissions officer, extracurricular activities, talent or ability, character or personal qualities. Whether you're a first-generation university student, whether you have a legacy admission like your parents went to the university, that's alumni relation, what country you're from or what state you live in. And then we've got things like religious affiliation, volunteer work, work experience and demonstrated interest. How do our top 10 universities consider these factors? Well, each one can be ranked as either very important, important, considered or not considered at all. And this is what we need to look at if we want to figure out which university is the best fit for you. Unfortunately, of our 10 universities, Columbia is the only one that does not publish a CVS and so I don't have the data for Columbia. Maybe if you guys want to learn more about how to get into Columbia, you can subscribe to the channel because I'm going to be interviewing the first-ever score student to get admitted to Columbia with a full-ride scholarship. That's Ms. Claudia. In Columbia and I have $81,000. Anyway, here's Caltech. They don't care where you're from or who your parents are, but they love a hard school and good test scores. Dartmouth clearly values all the academic factors more than anything else, aside from some extracurriculars and character. Penn places more importance on your interview than anywhere else and considers everything except your religious affiliation. Brownsheet is similar. Cornell claims to only consider test scores and they seem to love talent. Stanford looks a lot like Dartmouth's. Princeton's is identical to Stanford's and Yale is also identical, except they do consider whether you live in Connecticut. And then we have Harvard that just ranked everything as considered and wouldn't put anything above anything else. Thanks, Harvard. Now, if we add all these up, we can get a clearer idea of which points are most important in general for university admissions. I'm going to put a bean in each box, according to how many universities marked it in that place. The rigor of school record is unanimous. All nine universities say that this is very important. Class rank and GPA are still quite important, but there is a split as to whether they're considered very or just important. Test scores, though, is where we see the biggest gap. Five universities say that they consider test scores very important. The others just say they consider them. And I'm going to show you in a minute why test scores are way more important than these universities want you to think. Essays and letters of recommendation also have almost unanimous support with the exception of Harvard, which refuses to rank anything as important. In the non-academic factors, it surprised me to see that the interview was not as highly ranked as I thought it would be. Most universities just consider it. Several didn't consider it at all. Extracurriculars consistently rank highly about on par with the talent or ability column. I wonder what qualifies as a talent? Like, if you can poop on command, is that... I mean, that's a talent. Dave England can do that. This is the non-academic factor that stood out to me most. Character or personal qualities. Eight beans going in the very important column people. It's one of the only ones on this non-academic section that gets such unanimous support. What does it mean when they talk about character or personal quality? To me, it screams maturity. If you come off as naive or inexperienced or maybe just a little too new to the world, I could see you not getting into these universities. None of the other factors were rated higher than considered. Pretty much everything from this point on is just either a nice to have or it's not considered at all. I guess it's nice to know that your religious affiliation does not matter to any of these universities. How can we use this data to get into these top schools? Well, it's all about finding a good fit for you. Which university matches your profile? If you're great at interviews, but you don't have the world's best extracurricular activities, maybe you, Penn, is the right place to apply. You didn't get an amazing SAT score, but you do have a really good academic record and you've got some talents like, I don't know, maybe you can moonwalk like Michael Jackson. You should apply to Cornell. It's all about matching your profile to this CDS. I want to go back and talk about those SAT scores because a bunch of these universities just said that they considered them. In every single one of these universities, the majority of the students who were admitted and enrolled ended up presenting an SAT or ACT score. Of the 23 beans admitted to Harvard, 13 had an SAT score and 7 had an ACT score, leaving just three beans admitted without a standardized test. Yale had 25 beans, 14 did the SAT, 9 did the ACT. Princeton had only one bean that didn't take any test. Here's Brown and Cornell. And at U Penn, 100% of the admitted students presented a test result. Dartmouth and Caltech declined to fill out this portion of the CDS, but I'm willing to bet they were similar to the other universities we saw here, which makes me wonder why won't they share their data? These universities are not all that test optional. Use that to your advantage. If you're going to apply to these elite universities, take the SAT, maybe even take the ACT and the ACT. Something else you can do to boost your chances is to apply early decision. If you apply early decision, your acceptance rate goes way up. Brown, your acceptance rate triples to 16%. Cornell does more than double by going from 8.6% to a whopping 21.4%. U Penn more than doubles, going up to 19.5%. And Dartmouth goes up to 25% acceptance rate for early decision applicants. If your profile matches what we see on the CDS for any of those universities that have early decision, get your stuff done early and apply early decision. You increase your chances a lot. So what can we learn from all of this? Well, first of all, I hope you understand that you cannot only apply to these universities. Even if you think you are an amazing candidate, they all have extremely low acceptance rates. And with test optional policies continuing for the near future, they're going to continue to receive large volumes of applicants. All of these universities are dream schools for everyone. I don't care how qualified or amazing you are. You need to have a balance. You need to have a couple of fit and safety options just in case you get rejected from these dream schools. These are always dream schools. But you can use the data to your advantage. You can use the CDS to figure out which universities are the ones you're most likely to get into. Take a test. Take the SAT. Take the ACT. Don't listen to the test optional crap. I'm pretty sure it's just an excuse to get more money from applications even though a bunch of them are just going to end up in the garbage. You might want to think about applying early decision as well. Hopefully you can be one of these beans. And speaking of beans, I didn't waste any food today. I am going to be making my world famous chili using these kidney beans. So this is going to be a delicious video. Thank you for watching. I appreciate it a lot. And I will see you next week.