MIT Early Action for Fall 2025 Admission

Colleges & Universities Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Here is my opinion. I wrote an article on this after going through the whole process with my son and I would like to share with you because it really makes you think. It is an exhausting process for our students that creates unrealistic expectations. You can fulfill all criteria, but statistical figures show that your chances are close to none. Not sure if it is worth it. Hope it helps you reflect.

Title: The Myth of the Ideal Student at MIT: A Critical Look at the Admissions Process

Introduction

MIT is one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, renowned for its academic excellence and technological innovation. On its website and blogs, MIT claims to seek “normal” students—those who excel academically, have diverse passions, and lead balanced lives with friends, sports, and intellectual curiosity. However, many wonder: is this really true? Is MIT admitting the type of candidates it claims to value, or does the admissions process prioritize extraordinary achievements that are beyond the reach of most applicants?

In this article, we reflect on the lack of transparency and apparent contradictions in MIT’s admissions process, raising questions about how the “ideal student” is defined and the impact this narrative has on young applicants.

What MIT Says It Seeks

MIT states that it seeks curious, passionate students with balanced lives. On its official admissions website, MIT emphasizes that it does not have “quotas by school, state, or region” and that “legacy status is not considered in our process”. Additionally, they highlight that they look for students who are “intensely curious and motivated to explore,” valuing “rigorous analytical thinking, ingenuity, hands-on problem-solving, and big new ideas”. These criteria suggest a search for academically strong students with a variety of interests and backgrounds.

The message MIT sends is clear: they want “normal people” who are exceptional in their dedication to their interests and communities. This seems encouraging, but is this really the type of student they admit?

The Contradiction with Reality

A Despite these statements, admissions statistics indicate an extremely high level of selectivity. For example, it has been reported that “75% of students accepted to MIT in 2018 scored 780 or higher on the SAT Math section”. Additionally, testimonials from admitted students reveal achievements that include participation in international robotics competitions and awards in scientific Olympics. These examples can create the perception that only students with extraordinary accomplishments have a real chance of admission, which contrasts with the image of seeking “normal” individuals with balanced lives.

For international students, the acceptance rate is even more daunting, hovering around 2.04%. To put this into perspective, an international applicant has about the same chance of being admitted to MIT as a high school basketball player has of eventually playing in the NBA.

Issues with the Selection Process

  1. Lack of Transparency: While MIT provides general information about its admissions process, specific details on how different aspects of an application are weighted are not publicly disclosed. This can lead to misunderstandings about what is truly valued in a candidate.
  2. Elevated Expectations: The promotion of profiles featuring extraordinary achievements can set standards that seem unattainable for the average applicant, causing demotivation and anxiety among prospective students.
  3. Implicit Biases: Although MIT states that legacy status is not considered in its admissions process, the lack of clarity in other criteria can lead to perceptions of favoritism or bias.

Impact on Students and Society

The discrepancy between stated criteria and perceived reality can have negative effects on applicants, including stress and a sense of inadequacy. Additionally, it may perpetuate inequalities by favoring those with access to resources that enable extraordinary achievements from a young age.

Conclusion

The admissions process at MIT, like that of many elite universities, is surrounded by contradictions. While they promote the idea of seeking “normal” and passionate students, the results seem to favor those who have achieved extraordinary feats at a young age. This raises important questions: Should MIT be more transparent about its selection criteria? How could they reevaluate their processes to be more inclusive and realistic?

It is time to reflect on how we define success and “merit” in higher education. Future students deserve a system that values both their accomplishments and their human potential.

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I believe that MIT is very transparent about their selection process. I am an alumnus and an EC who interviews applicants for MIT. I do not know their GPA or test scores. I only get their name and contact info. But I see very normal students that do get admitted (I only get info on students that I interview).

You do see some applicants that win competitions. Some get in, some don’t. You have to realize that the caliber of students that apply to MIT are more likely to participate in those competitions and even win them.

As a whole, the majority of applicants are very accomplished students. The large number of applicants results in a very low admit rate. It seems to be a very fine line between who gets admitted and who does not.

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I wouldn’t say any college is “very transparent” about their selection process. You never know what the institutional priorities are or the why of why you were deferred or denied.

I do agree the applicant pool here is probably so similar it comes down to minuscule things and that really they could admit 3x as many if they had room and it would still be an amazing class. It’s a reach for even the best students and that just is what it is. But I’d never call their process “transparent” no admissions process is.

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I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree as to the transparency of MIT’s selection process. The MIT admissions web site tells you the process of how they select the applicants to be admitted. It states what they are looking for in those applicants. There are no legacy admits, maybe (maybe not) a very slight boost for athletes.

I don’t know of any college (maybe there are some I don’t know about) that will tell you the specifics as to why you were not admitted. The colleges don’t want a debate about the why or why not, they’ve already made their decisions.

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I think MIT is probably about as transparent as it can be realistically. You are talking about what is probably the best engineering school in the world that is highly desired by just about everyone in the field to attend and they accept about 1400 per year. If you took the absolute best 2000 high school seniors for engineering by any measure I would guess half are in the applicant pool even if they don’t attend with the rest going ED to other highly selectives. Remember that most highly selectives aren’t engineering focused either they are liberal arts schools like the Ivies or most of the Top 20’s that may offer engineering or not but it’s not the majority of students. So if you are a pure STEM kid MIT is the cream of the crop with probably the only real competition being Stanford (which still has a lot of Liberal Arts majors).

So you are talking about choosing diamonds among diamonds and all are high quality. Most kids self select out of applying to MIT as you simply aren’t going to see a lot of kids wasting their time with a unique application since MIT doesn’t do Common App if they are in the “really good but not great category”. For instance if you have a 3.8 GPA with 12 APs and a 1450 SAT but no real hook you have no real shot at MIT but lots of other schools would love to have you and people know that.

So a lot of it is about institutional priorities and what MIT wants the class to look like. For instance they want as close to 50/50 Male/Female as they can even though the reality is that the applicant pool quality isn’t 50/50 in Engineering. BTW, as a side not I fully expect MIT and Duke who openly discriminate on sex to eventually get the crap sued out of them over it just like the recent AA case for Harvard/UNC and they should but that’s another topic. Most of what they are choosing is based around making sure they have a balanced class but the most exceptional kids they can find and trying to choose that among so many exceptional kids is a crapshoot.

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It appears that MIT does make a 50/50 male to female ratio a priority. And I believe that MIT gets far fewer female applicants than male applicants. But, from the information I get, the quality of the female applicants is quite good to the point that a gender-blind selection process would give about a 50/50 gender ratio.

I interview applicants as an EC and find that, in my very, very small sample, the female applicants I interview are typically quite good. The male interviewees are more of a range from OK to very good.

The admissions staff does have a tough task determining who to admit with so many good applicants.

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It sounds like you are suggesting that “normal people” cannot have extraordinary achievements. I don’t find that to be true, if we define “normal people” as kids who pursue interests that they love, as opposed to pushed into it by tiger parents, and still have time for other fun activities.

The reality is that there is a talent distribution where some kids are simply not challenged by their local high school curriculum, and have ample time to pursue other things they are interested in.

I also think it serves a social purpose for an institute like MIT, Harvard, and others to collect a critical mass of these students with extraordinary accomplishments together so they can challenge each other.

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If you seriously believe that though female candidates are far fewer than males but are far more qualified let’s just say I am more than skeptical. Hey but if they get sued and can prove that I’d be happy to say I’m wrong. I understand that MIT makes a 50/50 ratio a priority but I don’t know how that can be based on merit. At Duke for instance they give a significant boost for female candidates simply because they are female. Maybe you think that’s good, I disagree.

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Women at MIT have a slightly higher graduation rate then men.

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Well the graduation rate at MIT is 95.4% so not sure that means much. Not a lot who don’t graduate period and likely most who don’t are starting a business or something similar. Not many straight fail out of school, they are all very smart students.

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There is no way to graduate from MIT without doing a lot of hard work, so it makes no sense to suggest it admits women that are unqualified. This is quite different from some Ivys, which allow the student to determine where they want to push themselves, or not.

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Never said women are unqualified. The reality is MIT could admit 3 or 4x the number it does and they would have little dropoff for graduation. Every kid has to work hard. The question is who is best qualified and that is not the measure MIT is using by their own admission. They want a 50/50 class when the applicant pool is significantly higher male/female. Now you may think that’s a good thing but it is still discrimination because there are going to be males who are denied in favor of females in spite of having stronger qualifications almost certainly, the statistical probability that a minority number of females are stronger than the majority of males every year is extremely unlikely. Duke openly gives females twice the value of males when admitting to Pratt (Engineering) in order to achieve the 50/50 balance and my guess is MIT does the same.

I’m all for women being given every opportunity to succeed and there are some amazing women in STEM and engineering. I just don’t know why they should be given preference when colleges overall are already about 60/40 female nationally and there are countless female only programs for boosting women in STEM. The reality is that women don’t prefer STEM fields outside of Biology/Health related disciplines at the same rates as men and that’s ok. It just means you will have fewer women who go into those fields because they feel called to something else, there are many majors that are 70 plus percent female but there is no call to make sure we have more men in those fields.

Those who do want to be a Mechanical Engineer should certainly be able to they just don’t need a boost based on sex. Math doesn’t care about what sex you are.

It actually detracts from the outstanding women in STEM to have the policy of bias towards them because it makes someone naturally question if they got in purely on merit or because of their sex.

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Each school gets to determine how they evaluate the applicants they admit and what ‘best qualified’ means. ‘Best qualified’ does not always mean those applicants with the highest stats.

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Correct. Many things to evaluate but sex is a significant one in terms of qualification. MIT is pretty clear about that, they want 50/50 and thus half the finite slots go to males and half to females. They do not look at who are the top candidates regardless of sex. That is their right to do so but at some point they may well get sued over it because that is the literal definition of discrimination even if it is with good intentions.

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MIT certainly isn’t the only school that tries to balance gender. Many elite LACs do this and admitted males tend to have lower average GPAs as compared to women because many more women apply to many of the LACs.

If one doesn’t like how a given school fills its class, they can apply elsewhere.

ETA I will note that there is an organization challenging MIT’s gender balance goals. Why FairAdmissions@MIT is Challenging MIT’s Illegal Sex Discrimination — Minding The Campus

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Yes, I’m aware of some of those schools. Part of the reason btw is for Liberal Arts schools if they hit a 60/40 Female/Male ratio they start to die. Men don’t want to go there and neither do women on average and they become a niche. Problem is the market can only bear so many niche schools. It’s also why many of them have created multiple new sports or expanded what they have (Lacrosse is a good example) so they can offer more minor scholarships to get males to attend.

Men tend not to have the same issue, especially in STEM. They are less concerned with how many women attend. The information I have above comes from those who attend NACAC btw.

I have no issue with the concept being applied equally but the issue at those schools is very different. Personally I think they are short sighted but I don’t envy that position, we are likely to see a lot of LAC’s fold in the next few years as they are fighting for survival. MIT is not. It is the best Engineering school in the world with a monster endowment and has the cream of the crop to choose from to attend.

It will be interesting to see how the issue evolves. For now most think sex discrimination is fine. At least MIT is private so they have some justification to make up whatever rules they want. I guess we will see if they do get a lawsuit and what the result might be.

I also think this hurts MIT more than the students it rejects long term. Those students will have other great opportunities and many will so on to great things, they just will do it after attending another school.

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0.02% chance to make the NBA if you played in high school, not 2%, that stat is off by 100x.

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I’m a female engineer and an MIT alum. I don’t know if I was accepted because of merit or* my gender, but I NEVER doubt that they made a good choice. I excelled at MIT and graduated at the top of my class (they don’t rank but I earned a pretty great GPA). You’re assumption that this takes away from STEM women is invalid.

That being said, the likelihood that I would be accepted if I applied now is very low - its just so competitive and there are so many supremely qualified candidates.

I second HPuck35 in that of the very small data set of students I interview (I am also an EC and interview candidates in a highly competitive urban area), the male candidates seem to be more varied in skills/ability/fit than the female candidates - maybe ‘average smart boys’ are encouraged to apply more than ‘average smart girls’?

*This statement can be used for so many admits - did they only get admitted because a coach supported their application, that they are from Montana, first gen, etc
? What pushed them from the amazingly qualified pile to the accepted pile? Its not going to be grades, lots of APs, test scores or some research/job - because they all have it!

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I think this is the part that gets to me because every single thing you list aside from athletics is something entirely out of the students control. Gender, geography, first gen, SES, none of it they can control. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell my son this he still feels like he isn’t “good enough”. It’s why this process is broken, because should your college decisions be based on factors you have no control over? No.

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I don’t begrudge you at all for getting admitted to MIT and I think it’s great you have been so successful. That’s not really the point. As stated MIT graduated almost 96% and there is no one getting admitted that isn’t already exceptional. You have succeeded because of your own talent and hard work and that’s great.

The “taking away” point is that you will never know if you were accepted because of your sex or because of your merit and even though it may be unfair others may assume that it was because of your sex. That “takes away” from you because clearly you were good enough to succeed.

Thomas Sowell has some good perspectives on this. He went to Harvard in the 50’s when only a handful of black people were able to get in. He found when he was in school and shortly afterward people actually looked up to him more because they KNEW he had to be that good in order to overcome what he did to be admitted and to graduate. White kids would come to him for tutoring and help because they knew he had to be really smart. Then a decade later after Affirmative Action became the norm he found the opposite in how he was treated. People then assumed he ONLY got in because of his race and people started viewing him differently. It infuriated him but it also made him see how those policies backfire and thus he wrote many books on the subject such as “Preferential Policies”.

It’s also virtually impossible that it’s a coincidence that the females are more qualified than the males at a 2 to 1 rate that makes the ratio a 50/50 one. It’s also wrong because MIT outright says they want that 50/50 rate. Maybe in your experience female candidates are better than males but I’m more than skeptical. The math simply doesn’t add up and it runs counter to logic.

In the end the males who don’t get in will be just fine but it will hurt the institution. People succeed far more because of themselves than where they go to school. The danger to the school is what is happening with UCLA Med School where they have taken a significant reputation hit after years of adjusting admissions and now the failure rate for standardized tests and the rank has dropped from 6 to 18 and still falling. I don’t see that happening at MIT but the perception is negative.

Just don’t evaluate based on sex or race, it’s pretty simple.