For reference my class rank right now is around the top 6% (61/920), but I am a rising junior so next year if I get all As in my classes I could probably boost that to around the top 3%-5%. Everyone in my high school who has attended a t20 or HYPSM has all been in the top 1% of their class. Will my class rank hurt me when I am applying to these top colleges?
There is a lot more than rank - unless you are in a state that guarantees admission to someone ranked x %.
Be the best you.
Princeton took a student from our hs who was not I. The top 25 of 650 - all that gets ranked.
You are far more than a rank
Be the best you - inside and outside class. That’s all you can do.
You don’t control anything else.
2 Likes
That is normal. I did know one student at MIT who had only graduated 7th in their class of maybe 400 or 500 students (top 2%), but they had graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. If the same student had attended a more normal high school, then they probably would have been in the top 1% of their high school class.
What do they call a student at MIT who graduated high school at the top of their class? Average.
And these students still find MIT to be very challenging and a LOT of work.
I attended two “HYPSM” schools (one for a bachelor’s degree, one for a master’s). These are very good schools. However, there are a couple of hundred other very good colleges and universities in the US.
What makes the highest ranked schools in the US different, if anything other than hype, is that professors can assume that every student is an academically strong student who wants to work hard. Classes can go faster. There is more homework, and the homework is tough. Exams are tough. Students who were in the top 1% of their high school class find themselves to be average, and find the classes to be tough and a lot of work. A few students find themselves to be in the bottom 10% of the class in very tough classes, which is not a good place to be for someone who was used to being near the top of their high school class.
I think that your class rank will be an issue when you apply to the highest ranked universities in the US.
However, there are lots and lots of very good universities. You really should not care about university rankings. Instead find a school that is a good fit for you.
And MIT and Stanford graduates routinely find themselves working alongside U.Mass and San Jose State and IIT graduates, and no one cares where any of us got our degree.
You should be the best version of you that you can be. You should make sure to apply to a range of universities including some that are safeties. Keep your budget in mind.
Otherwise really do not worry about it. If you are in the top 6% or top 10% of your high school, there will be a very good university for you.
6 Likes
The vast majority of students attending such colleges do not submit rank. Some example numbers from 2024-25 CDS are below.
Harvard – 29% submit rank (CDS says Harvard does not consider rank)
Stanford – 19% submit rank
Cornell – 18% submit rank
While class rank is rarely submitted, admissions can usually figure out approximate ranking based on school profile stats and GC remarks. This can and often does have an influence on admissions. How a college uses class rank in admissions if submitted or not submitted varies by college. At some public colleges, crossing a particular class rank threshold may be critical for admissions. At some of the colleges you listed, I expect crossing a particular threshold has little, if any impact. However, submitted rank or estimated rank if not submitted still may or may not have a notable impact, sometimes in a holistic sense of putting context of grades in transcript. It’s difficult to generalize.
Anecdotally one can find countless examples of students who did not have super high class rank that were accepted to Ivy+ college. However, many such students attended highly selective high schools such that they were exceptional students in spite of not having the highest rank, in many cases more exceptional that the students with highest rank.
1 Like
School-reported class rank is unlikely to matter per se, including because these days a lot of schools don’t report. But the most selective colleges often mark Class Rank as “Very Important” in their CDS. I think that means while they do not care about school-reported ranks, they do tend to look for kids who are among the top students in their HS, at least for unhooked applicants.
And then at some high schools, they may be relatively generous with what that means, and will regularly accept multiple kids without absolute top grades. At other high schools, they may be more expecting a kid to meet their standards not even once per year, but rather it may be several years in between even one admittance. And anything in between.
So if from your HS the students being admitted unhooked to a certain college or group of colleges all or almost all have better grades than you, then probably that means that is what they are usually looking for at least from unhooked applicants. There may be exceptional cases, but by nature those are rare.
This may not be great news, but it is what it is. You are defining groups where the total number of enrollment slots is very small in comparison to the college-bound population, so necessarily they can afford to be picky about everything including transcripts. Fortunately, there are many other great colleges in the US, and I am sure many of those will be happy to consider you well qualified.
Class rank matters, whether provided directly by the high school or estimated by the college.
But the cutoffs for admission can vary according to the high school. For “feeder schools”, a student might only need to be in the top 10%, compared to top 1% for typical high schools.
9 Likes
Essentially, rank – when used - is another way for an admissions officer to calibrate your grades and rigor to the norms in your school. At many schools, many students have very high GPAs, and rank can be a way of determining whether a high GPA is exceptional. Likewise, colleges want to see rigor, and the weighting system used by schools that rank can be a short-cut to seeing how much challenge you took on.
Small differences are unlikely to matter as they can be a reflection of course availability/interest.
There are no hard and fast rules about what a class rank needs to be, but at the uber-selective schools, they are looking for the tippy-toppiest of students.
Remember too that this is just one piece of the equation.
1 Like
Even if not declared explicitly by a school, rank is often implicitly part of the recommendation letter from your teacher. For a school that sends relatively few students to a top college, the admissions reviewer might be looking for a statement like “my best student in the last five years”. For a school that sends lots it might be more like “has all the attributes of our students who’ve attended college X”.
6 Likes
Thank you guys so much for the feedback! If I get mid-high As in all my classes junior year, will the upward trajectory of my grades help my case a little? I had a few struggles with my mental health this year which caused me to earn Bs, but I’m not sure whether to report that to colleges.
And sometimes the context helps boost a student who is NOT top 1 or 5%.
“Susan’s class rank does not reflect what her teachers say about her- deep intellectual curiosity, would rather get a B in a challenging course than an A in a subject that comes naturally to her, always eager to expand her worldview. She is a joy to teach because her focus has been on learning and growing and not on grades and rank”.
6 Likes
So higher grades will help just because they are higher grades. Then in terms of trends, upward is better than downward, but it may or may not be seen as any better than someone who consistently got the same overall mix of grades.
So my suggestion is you do your reasonable best, but don’t put undue pressure on yourself to be perfect going forward. Indeed, that can be counterproductive if you end up burning out or otherwise compromising your health.
4 Likes
Nothing wrong with Bs. Don’t excuse them.
Your mental health is FAR MORE important than whether you go to Harvard or Hofstra. - so make sure to take care of yourself.
Going to a top school assures nothing in life. Just like not going assures nothing.
Harvard grads work for, at my company, a Fairleigh Dickinson one.
Stay healthy.
Focus on being a great you in and out of class and good things will happen regardless.
3 Likes
Even at a large school with 920 students in the senior class? A single school could get 92 students into HYPSM?
Yes, an upward trajectory will help you. If you do very well in your junior year of high school, yes this will help you. It will help with university admissions. Probably more important is that it will help you be better prepared to do well once you get to university.
Whether it will help you get into Harvard or Yale or Princeton might be hard to predict and is really not important. There are a lot of very good universities in the US. Doing well next year and the year after definitely will help you one way or another.
And perfection is not necessary and is quite rare in life. The vast majority of successful people were successful even with some imperfections in their record somewhere along the way.
3 Likes
My kid is currently at a HYP school and was close but not in the top 10% of their class. Focus on what you can achieve and do not dwell on what you can not fix. Mine focused on internships, college essays and making their own opportunities.
2 Likes
The feeders with a high percentage of students admitted at the HYPSM level tend to be smaller private high schools.
But in terms of number of students admitted, some of the large public feeders can exceed them. Harvard has been admitting 20+ students from Boston Latin for years. I heard around 30 students this year, but that’s atypically high, and that’s about 5% of the class.
1 Like
Note that even if the high school does not report numerical rank, your counselor’s subjective ranking of you in your class can matter. See the counselor’s form for The Common Application, particularly the bottom of page 2.
2 Likes
Just a few things…often, counselors from HSs that do not report rank also do not fill out any questions that allow for comparison to the class on the counselor form, or any forms. Plenty of counselors don’t even use the common app form at all.
It’s not that simple. There is certainly a correlation between rank and admit rate with consideration of context of selectivity/quality of student body – A lower ranked kid is more likely to be admitted from a highly selective high school that is full of stellar students than an unselective public high school that has few stellar students. However, highly selective private colleges rarely use a simple rank threshold. As an example, some stats from Harvard-Westlake are below, as copied from other threads. These are combined stats across several classes, increasing sample size. Note that admit by rank stats are all over the map for different selective colleges, and most don’t seem to have a hard rule of rejecting students that have GPA corresponding to outside of top 35% rank, based on school profile.
Unhooked Applicants from HW to Harvard
- More than 65th Percentile Rank (top 35%) – Admit Rate = 9%
- Middle 35th to 65% Percentile Rank – Admit Rate = Low (less than 1 per year)
- Less than 35th Percentile Rank (bottom 35%) – Admit Rate = 0%
Unhooked Applicants from HW to Cornell
- More than 65th Percentile Rank (top 35%) – Admit Rate = 26%
- Middle 35th to 65% Percentile Rank – Admit Rate = 20%
- Less than 35th Percentile Rank (bottom 35%) – Admit Rate = 9%
Unhooked Applicants from HW to Chicago
- More than 65th Percentile Rank (top 35%) – Admit Rate = 22%
- Middle 35th to 65% Percentile Rank – Admit Rate = 47%
- Less than 35th Percentile Rank (bottom 35%) – Admit Rate = 13%
Unhooked Applicants from HW to Georgetown
- More than 65th Percentile Rank (top 35%) – Admit Rate = 77%
- Middle 35th to 65% Percentile Rank – Admit Rate = 42%
- Less than 35th Percentile Rank (bottom 35%) – Admit Rate = 11%
Unhooked Applicants from HW to Pomona
- More than 65th Percentile Rank (top 35%) – Admit Rate = 0%
- Middle 35th to 65% Percentile Rank – Admit Rate = 0%
- Less than 35th Percentile Rank (bottom 35%) – Admit Rate = 0%
2 Likes
This data is interesting.
One question - do any unhooked HW applicants ever get into Pomona?
More seriously it’s a bit surprising that students from the bottom third of a class would be getting into these top ranked schools when they are unhooked. They may be at a great school but isn’t that what many of these schools claim they don’t prioritize ie. a student is judged within the context of their school. Seems that students from HW that are in the bottom third of the class may be more likely to get in than students in the top 10% from many schools.