Advice for Finance major

NiceUnparticularMan
Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:30:55 +0000

I note if, say, you are an already-advantaged upper-middle-class kid with good numbers who is looking to move up even further into the pure upper class, call it the top 0.1%, there are in fact options for being “authentic”, namely all the schools that will largely admit you just based on your numbers. Some don’t even have supplemental essays, and don’t really care about your Common App essay either. So you can write that on something bland but truthful and it won’t matter to them.

Recent studies do suggest that the most selective holistic review private colleges might MAXIMIZE your chances of making it into the top 0.1% (or whatever), probably mostly because you are going to have more students from such families around you with whom to try to network (or, you know, marry–still works!). Although you better include in your budget the costs of all those expensive vacations and such . . . .

But still, a less heralded fact about those studies is they also show that path to the top 0.1% (or whatever) is still POSSIBLE from many other schools. The controlled success rates might be around half, give or take, which is not a trivial distinction, but they aren’t zero.

The world being what it is, I am aware many individuals in this situation with such ambitions are not going to choose to limit their options to the authentic ones, they are going to try to BS their way into the ones where their odds of fulfilling their ambitions would be maximized. And I am sure it sometimes works. But I do suspect it works less often than some people think, that in fact fairly regularly admissions officers recognize the BS for what it is.

And actually, if they think you are being actively dishonest, it might backfire. Since they don’t have to tell you why they rejected you, they can quickly reject applicants on suspicions of dishonesty without further consideration, and not have to worry about appeals, lawsuits, and so on. You then get the same rejection letter as everyone else and never know this happened. And can never report it on social media, or so on.

But anyway, if you are just within the realm of sort of normal BS, basically concealing your real values and such but not actually lying about awards or activities, well, even if they suss you out and don’t admit you as a result, they probably didn’t really see a reason to punish you either. In fact, I suspect sometimes they see the BS and yet you fufill some other institutional priority anyway, so you get an offer.

In that sense, as long as don’t cross the line into active fraud, you can probably treat this as a free roll. Hence why the application volumes just seem to keep on going up.

But to bring this all back home for the OP–I continue to think the actual best chance you have to get admitted to these sorts of colleges is to actually make a point of authentically being who they are looking for. I strongly suspect if you have to BS about it, your chances are not zero, but they are already a lot lower.