@T26E4 FWIW, I also attended a top Ivy and the world back then was completely different than it is today. Yale’s admit rate was about 25% in the early 1980’s and 22% in 1987 (which may have been when you applied?). There’s a big difference between having a 1 in 4 or 5 chance vs. today’s 1 in 18 -20 chance. Even in the early 2000’s when Yale started ED, the admit rate for ED applicants was about 38%.
Here is what someone posted in the chance thread about a recent Asian applicant:
The kid was actually the 2nd place Intel STS Grand Prize winner ($75,000) not the 1st but the other stats seem to check out. He also was a third degree black belt, active in sports and president of various clubs, etc. No way to know about his acceptance history though other than he does attend Harvard.
Nevertheless, contrast his accomplishments with your story and I think it highlights just how crazy competitive things are today. We had no internet back then and so it was pretty hard to see what other kids were doing or just what was expected of us. The model that I and all of my friends who got into top schools followed was simply to get good grades and test scores, play sports, join some clubs, and do volunteer work (actually, most didn’t do this). If we checked off that we didn’t need financial aid (which we actually all did need) our chances went up. If any of us were a legacy (I was, sort of), our chances shot up. Our essays were not perfect because it took so darn long to type each one up (and every college had their own unique essay questions) and making corrections was a huge pain.
I fully subscribe to theory that many of us (not you, but me certainly) who are walking around with Ivy League degrees would not have been accepted to these schools in today’s hyper-competitive environment.