What was the college admissions process like for the Ivy+ Schools prior to the age of the internet(Late 90s)

[slyone]

I applied in 1985 (starting in 1986). Applied EA to Yale, deferred, admitted regular (seemed a lot of my friends at Yale were the same). Wound up applying to 8 schools RD – other Ivies were Dartmouth and Princeton. In the end, I was admitted everywhere I applied – 710V/700M SATs; I have no idea how that compared with other applicants, I don’t remember any of that being published. I did interview with alumni at several places – I remember distinctly different vibes from the Yale, Dartmouth, and Duke interviews!

I went to a private school in the south that was pretty college-focused (fully a third of our small graduating class were National Merit Scholars or close to that, and one student had a perfect 1600 on his SATs). But even so, we didn’t start thinking about college applications until late spring junior year, when we did a bus trip up the east coast over spring break with another private school in our city. I don’t remember doing any prep for the SAT – I don’t even remember taking it; I def only did it once. I remember I had two basic essays that I could use for all the applications. No one was asking “why Yale?” or "how will you add to our community and how will our community be meaningful to you – academically and socially – in 300 words… Which was good since everything had to be typed. I remember finding somewhere that Yale’s admission rate was between 18 and 19% the year I got in. There were still surprises with the admissions process; it wasn’t all numbers, but it seemed more predictable.

I don’t remember admission days, but they did have something orientation-like over the summer, I can’t remember the details – I did an outdoor orientation trip, a week of camping, a program that was only a couple of years old at the time. Even then, it was a mix of old money, multigeneration Yale people and first-gen students from all over the country. The overall vibe was prep school+NYC cosmopolitan, but in truth that wasn’t a majority of the school; they just had a presence (an they often came in knowing each other!).

[comtnmom]

Cornell has admissions data that can be broken down by school going back a while - I think it’s under their institutional research section online. I graduated Cornell in 1999, paper app and had an interview with an alum of the school I applied to, not sure I’d get in today!

[BKSquared]

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pierson_update_1976-2000.pdf Great source of all statistics Yale from 1976 to 2000. Highlights:

1. The admit rate went from 27% to about 18%
2. From 1984 to 2000, minorities went from 17% to 32/33%
3. Tuition went from $5,000 in 1979 to about $23,000 in 2000
4. Legacies went from around 20% to 14%
5. The 50% percentile for SAT scores before re-centering was, eyeballing it, about 670 verbal and 700 math

Yale went fully coed in 1969, but there are records of women registered and attending the University in some school as early as 1873. It was in the hundreds by the turn of the century.

My own experience was that you could only apply to maybe 5-10 schools because each application was unique and had to be typed or handwritten. I had interviews with HYP. I was an athlete but not recruited (had no clue there was such a path), although I was asked to try out for both of my sports after I got in. My FA aid package was all loans, no grants. Tuition room and board were just under $10k freshmen year, which represented about 20% of my dad’s gross income. I made “pizza” money being the subject of psychology experiments and working in the dining halls.

[blossom]

I applied mid-1970’s.

Had interviews at Radcliffe, Barnard, Penn. Disastrous Radcliffe interview (the interviewer walked me to the door and basically said “this was a waste of time, you aren’t getting in”; the other two were fine. Never had an interview at Brown, but applied (regular decision) and quickly got a “likely letter” which mystified my guidance counselor who said I was the weakest student to apply to Brown that year. Most of my volunteer/EC work was not school related, so her comments had to do with me not being a “campus leader” which at the time was a big thing.

Brown required hand-written applications at the time.

I don’t know anyone who took the SAT’s more than once, and nobody prepped.

Things were just as perplexing back then as they are today, even though the confusing things are different.

[Franklynn]

This is kind of a dumb fight. Posse is an outside scholarship even if they are “partnering” with the schools that host posse scholars.

[fretfulmother]

I applied in 89-90. I remember that Princeton and Yale were ED (binding), but Harvard and MIT were both EA unrestricted, so I applied to those (rejected H, admitted M and subsequently went to M). I also got into P during RD and got an academic likely letter and into Cornell RD. I was also offered almost a full ride to Wash U and some kind of merit at UIUC (Illinois resident).

My DH had a similar portfolio; he was offered a full ride or close at CMU and got into MIT and went there.

Now for the outrageous part: my SAT scores were 740 M / 660 V (no writing at the time); DH’s were 760 / 640. Neither of us had all As, and neither of us had any “research” in high school though I did Math and Latin Teams and DH did marching band.

I remember on the MIT tour they told me and my dad that the rate for EA admission for women was around 30% (!) but the other rates were not too much lower. When I got to MIT, it was still almost 2/3 men. We learned the sexist and offensive saying, “the odds are good but the goods are odd”. There was actually quite a bit of sexism at MIT at the time, including very few women’s bathrooms in some of the main buildings (including the whole math department - but it was justified because there were no women working in that building, you know, except the secretary). There was a huge banner in the math department when I walked in, “Great Men of Mathematics”. I did start out as a math major but felt alienated and eventually switched to Civil Engineering which was somewhat better.

No one I knew had a private college counselor, even though all of my peers applied to fancy colleges. One of my classmates was in the newspaper because she was choosing between Stanford and MIT (she chose Stanford). My best friend chose University of Chicago over MIT because UofCh gave her substantial merit aid.

There was such thing as “need-blind” and “meets need,” at least in the HYPSM level of school. The total tuition/fees were about $25K per year. That is a lot less than now even accounting for inflation, i.e. compared to salaries and home values.

At the time I qualified for a Pell Grant and interest-subsidized student loans, even though we were middle class (dad was a college professor and mom owned a small business). I believe those are much harder to get now.

There were no TVs in dorm rooms by and large (I got one senior year), but we would go together to dorm lounges to watch [the first round of] 90210 and Simpsons. There were no cell phones, but at MIT there was IM and email, even when I started in 1989. We had push-button touch-tone phones in our dorm rooms and had to memorize long strings of numbers to dial home and have it charged to credit cards (it was more expensive to call “long distance” or even “regional”). I brought an answering machine (like standalone voicemail) to our dorm room. It was considered smart to have a vague outgoing message that didn’t make it clear you weren’t home and subject to robbery.

Washers/driers used quarters so we had to have a lot of those. To get readings for class, we had to walk to the bookstore and look for our course lists on the shelves and buy physical books and carry them to our dorms. We took notes on paper and very few kids had their own computers (though my DH did get one sophomore year, a large desktop in his dorm that he let me play games on like Rodent’s Revenge since I was his gf).

There were a lot of phone hotlines to find out things that a person might Google nowadays. For instance: campus information, movie listings, weather… There were also printed books that would come out annually with information like telephone numbers or campus resources or course catalogs. It was great if you had some reference books around like a dictionary, thesaurus, or even a Halliwell’s Film Guide to settle arguments.

[Lindagaf]

Closing. The OP is a previously banned user.