Brown and Dartmouth

tk21769
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:32:27 +0000

The conventional wisdom seems to be that top private schools are less numbers-driven than top public universities. But when you get into schools like Brown and Dartmouth, for the ordinary un-hooked schlub, that’s likely to mean they care about factors in addition to scores and rank, not that they’ll set aside the numbers for your particular charm and sincerity.

I recall reading on this board somewhere that one of the Ivies tags ~40% of their places for legacy, development, athletic, and other “hooks”. If they are admitting many of these with slightly relaxed academic standards, it means the rest need that much more impressive numbers to keep the class SAT and rank averages up.