I’m not perfect ofc and have had some A-s. Junior year I can maintain a 3.9 for sure, will this be fine when applying to these competitive schools?
It’s an unfounded rumor. Students with a 3.9 (and lower) will still get in to Ivies.
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And people with perfect GPAs get rejected.
If you don’t get accepted at one of these competitive schools…or do, you will never know why.
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If even perfect gpa get rejected doesn’t that mean 3.9 have a lower chance (even lower than the lowest)?
Bet Imma stop stressing over my A-s then I have better stuff to do
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No. Admission to highly rejective schools isn’t simply a numbers game. Once you’re fully qualified, and arguably 3.9 is, then it is about other compelling reasons from your personal life to select you.
There are two important things to know. One, those compelling things aren’t necessarily better or worse per se. They are what they are looking for and it isn’t public facing information. Two, the vast majority of students who are fully qualified and that have compelling stories are still rejected. It’s the nature of having too many highly qualified applicants.
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Ok thanks I’ve been stressing but I realized it don’t matter just need to lock in right now
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Your GPA is NOT all that is reviewed by most of these colleges when determining who will be admitted…or not.
Please get over that idea.
Yes, you need a competitive GPA, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.
In my opinion, the MOST important thing you can start doing is looking for colleges that are NOT Ivies. You need at least one sure thing for admission, that you like, that is affordable. Ivies are not a sure thing for admission for anyone.
So…start looking for colleges with the characteristics you want in a college…that are NOT ivies. Actually…start there!
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I’ll expand on this. A safety is a school that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will be admitted to AND that you’ll be able to afford.
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Talking an asian parent out of that one is like fighting a bear (impossible) but ofc i’ll keep this in mind
@allenski before you decide to have a student apply to only elite schools, please read this thread. Read all of it…from post 1 to the end. It’s an old thread, but the message is there. This student was a tippy top student, NMF, class val, excellent ECs and LOR, and essays. No one expected him to be rejected everywhere he applied, but that’s what happened. The last half of his senior year was just awful as rejection after rejection came in. And he was a very strong student. Period.
He took a gap year that was very productive and applied for admission the following fall. He DID land on his feet very well, but let’s just say…if he had not applied to all highly competitive colleges the first time, his senior year would have been a much happier one.
You don’t want to be the 2025 version of this story.
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No one is talking you out of applying to as many highly rejective schools as you want to. We are trying to also talk you into inking at least one guaranteed admit.
At the end of the day, they can want what they want, but there’s no guarantee they’ll get it. What you want is a solid college education. You can guarantee that happens.
Good luck!
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I agree with all the posters above. A 3.9 won’t keep you out of any Ivy, because they don’t have specific cutoffs. That said, unhooked applicants to these schools have an incredibly low chance of admission. So everyone, and especially unhooked candidates, need a list that also contains more likely schools.
If you are interested, consider doing a “match me” thread where you tell us your intended major, budget, stats, preferences etc. and we help you come up with a good list of schools at all different levels of selectivity.
Best wishes!
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For any school you apply to, someone with better stats than you will get rejected and someone with worse stats than you will be accepted. College admissions is not a clearly defined process with well-understood guidelines. It is an opaque mess that comes down to the personal wants & desires of people you will never know or even meet.
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I always like to introduce a little interesting math into this sort of conversation, since I think it is illuminating.
So suppose an Ivy-type college has a really low admit rate for unhooked applicants, let’s say 4%. A lot of people then intuitively think something like you must need to have something like top 4% academic qualifications among their already self-selected applicants. But you do not.
That is because these holistic review colleges more or less have three different factors, academics, ECs/activities, and personal/fit stuff. And while there is some correlation between them–like someone with really strong academics is somewhat more likely to have really strong activities–it is not nearly as much as some people assume. And then personal/fit stuff is really quite different.
OK, so let’s crudely assume no dependence at all, and an equal amount of selectivity for each factor. What top X% you would need in all three to be top 4% overall?
About 34.2%, or just over 1/3rd. I think for some people this is a surprising large number, but it is just math: .342*.342*.342 is right at .04. And while being in the top third academically among the unhooked applicants to a college like that is hard, it is not like impossibly hard. Hence why lots of people can do it without perfect grades as long as they have other strong academic indicators.
OK, but how close is this to a realistic model? Quite close, as it turns out! We got a lot of data on this from the Harvard lawsuit, and a lot of it was summarized here:
It isn’t quite this simple, but the easiest and most common path to having a very good chance of being admitted to Harvard unhooked was to get “2s” in all of academics, ECs, and personal. .423 of applicants in that era got an Academic 2, .238 got an EC 2, and .208 got a Personal 2. If you naively multiply it out, that’s down to 2.1%–if anything lower than the actual Harvard unhooked admit rate in that era, and for that you only needed to be in the top 42% academically!
Note, by the way, they were not equally selective for each factor–Harvard was most selective for Personal stuff, followed pretty closely with ECs, and then Academics were a pretty distant third. I think this in some sense is the exact opposite of what a lot of people assume, but it makes sense for just that reason.
Basically, more people can pretty accurately determine whether their academic qualifications are competitive for these colleges, and so more such people decide not to apply because they know they are not competitive. It is a lot harder to know if your ECs are competitive, and then hardest of all to know if you will get a competitive Personal/Fit rating. So, self-selection does the least work for colleges like Harvard when it comes to Personal/Fit factors, second-least for ECs, and then easily does the most work for Academics.
Anyway, again there was actually some dependence, and some other paths to unhooked admission, and so on, all of which explained the actual unhooked admissions rate being higher than 2%. But point being yes, as long as a college like Harvard is applying these other two factors in addition to academics, then the academic factor itself does not have to be ridiculously hard to meet, just normally hard to meet, and that college can still have a very low overall unhooked admissions rate.
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