If you’ve spent any amount of time trying to figure out what highly selective colleges actually want, you’ve probably encountered approximately 47 different answers.

You need perfect grades. You need a “spike.” You need leadership. You need national awards. You need an incredible essay. You need to cure a disease, start a nonprofit, win a gold medal at the Olympics, and be a flute prodigy. 

The reality is both more complicated and, thankfully, a little less ridiculous.

Highly selective colleges generally use a process called holistic review, which means there isn’t one accomplishment, number, or section of the application that determines whether you’re admitted. Admissions officers are looking at your academic preparation, extracurricular involvement, intellectual interests, personal qualities, experiences, and the context in which all of those things developed.

And at the most selective colleges in the country, that distinction matters enormously.

At colleges this selective, the admissions office isn’t choosing between a pile of obviously qualified students and a pile of obviously unqualified ones. A huge percentage of the applicant pool is already academically qualified to attend.

Many applicants will have:

• near-perfect high school transcripts
• the most rigorous courses available to them
• standardized test scores in the top percentiles, when submitted

In other words, great grades and test scores don’t stop mattering. They just aren’t enough to distinguish you on their own.

“Can this student succeed here?” becomes something much harder: “Why this student, among all the other students who could succeed here?”

Once thousands of applicants have demonstrated that they can handle the academic work, the question admissions officers are trying to answer shifts from: “Can this student succeed here?” to something much harder: “Why this student, among all the other students who could succeed here?” That’s where the rest of the application comes in.

Highly selective colleges evaluate applicants across several different dimensions, looking not only at what you’ve accomplished, but how you’ve spent your time, what seems to matter to you, how you’ve taken advantage of the opportunities available to you, what kind of person emerges from the application, and what you might contribute to the community they’re building.

Understanding those different dimensions won’t give us a magical formula for getting into Harvard (sadly, I would be charging significantly more for this guide if I had one).

But it will help you understand what admissions officers are actually evaluating, why seemingly “perfect” applicants are sometimes denied, and how all the different pieces of your application work together to tell them who you are.

When an admissions office has tens of thousands of applications to read, it needs some way to organize all of that information and evaluate applicants consistently. At many highly selective universities, applications are read by multiple admissions officers, and readers use internal rating systems or qualitative assessments to evaluate different parts of the application.

Depending on the college, those ratings might separately evaluate things like:

• Academic preparation and achievement
• Extracurricular involvement and accomplishment
• Personal qualities and character
• Teacher and counselor recommendations

This doesn’t mean admissions officers plug your GPA, activities, and essay into a secret formula and wait for the computer to spit out ADMIT or DENY.

These rating systems are simply internal tools that help admissions officers make sense of an enormous amount of information. The exact categories, scales, and processes vary from one university to another, and those ratings are ultimately considered alongside the rest of the application and the college’s broader institutional priorities.

We know quite a bit about some of these systems because internal admissions documents from several highly selective universities have become public over the years. While we shouldn’t assume that every college uses the exact same rubric (or that the systems we do know about haven’t changed), those documents give us a rare peek behind the admissions curtain.

And what they show is useful: highly selective colleges tend to be evaluating applicants across several of the same broad dimensions, even if they use different names, rating scales, or review processes.

Understanding those dimensions won’t allow us to calculate your admissions decision. But it can help explain why a student with perfect grades isn’t automatically admitted, why extracurricular depth matters differently from academic achievement, and why things like essays and recommendations aren’t just decorative extras attached to the “important” part of the application.

So let’s look at what admissions officers are actually evaluating in each of those areas.

One of the clearest glimpses we have into how this works comes from Harvard University, thanks to internal admissions documents released during a federal court case.

Harvard’s system is particularly useful to look at because it shows just how high the bar becomes when admissions officers are evaluating students within an applicant pool where exceptional academic achievement is already incredibly common.

At Harvard, admissions readers evaluate applicants across several categories, including:

• Academic achievement
• Extracurricular achievement
• Athletic achievement
• Personal qualities
• Letters of recommendation

Each category is assigned a rating from 1 (highest) to 6 (lowest).

Again, these numbers aren’t a formula where enough 1s and 2s automatically add up to an acceptance. They’re a way for admissions officers to summarize different aspects of an application and compare applicants during the review process.

The academic rating is particularly revealing. It considers a student’s overall academic strength, including grades, course rigor, standardized testing (when considered), and evidence of unusual intellectual achievement.

A simplified version looks something like this:

That sentence probably sounds insane if you’ve spent your entire high school career working toward exactly those things. A 4.0, 15 AP classes, and a 1550 SAT would make you an extraordinary student in almost any normal context.

But highly selective admissions is not a normal context.

The highest academic rating is generally reserved for applicants who demonstrate some form of truly unusual intellectual distinction beyond simply excelling in their high school coursework.

And that illustrates one of the most important things to understand about highly selective admissions: Admissions officers aren’t evaluating your accomplishments in a vacuum. They’re evaluating them within the context of an applicant pool filled with other extraordinarily accomplished students.

At most colleges, outstanding grades and rigorous coursework may make you one of the strongest academic applicants in the pool. At Harvard, they may simply establish that you belong in the pool.

That’s a very different standard, and it’s one of the reasons students can seemingly “do everything right” academically and still be denied admission from the country’s most selective universities.

Research from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), along with data colleges report in their Common Data Sets, consistently shows that grades and course rigor are among the most important factors in admissions decisions.

Before a highly selective college worries about your extracurricular activities, essays, leadership, or the fascinating personal qualities you’re going to reveal elsewhere in your application, admissions officers need to answer a much more basic question: Can this student handle the academic demands of our university?

Your transcript is the strongest evidence they have.

But as we just saw with Harvard’s rating system, there is an important distinction between being academically qualified and being academically distinctive.

At highly selective colleges, enormous numbers of applicants have excellent grades and challenging course loads. Admissions officers therefore aren’t simply looking for “good academics.” They’re looking much more closely at what you studied, how well you performed, what opportunities were available to you, and what your academic choices reveal about you.

Grades and Academic Consistency

Your GPA gives admissions officers a useful summary of your academic performance, but the transcript underneath that number matters much more than students sometimes realize.

Admissions officers will look at things like:

• your performance in core academic subjects
• your grades in advanced courses
• consistency across semesters and years
• patterns or trends in your performance

Generally, several years of strong performance across demanding courses provides the clearest evidence that you’re prepared for challenging college-level work.

That doesn’t mean one B suddenly launches your application directly into the trash.

Admissions officers are looking at the overall pattern, not treating every individual grade as a referendum on your intelligence. An upward trend may show growth, maturity, or improved study habits, while a temporary dip may make sense in the context of a particularly demanding semester or significant circumstances happening elsewhere in your life.

What matters is the story the transcript tells over time.

Course Rigor

Grades also don’t mean much without understanding what you actually took.

A 4.0 earned while taking the least demanding curriculum available doesn’t communicate the same thing as a strong GPA earned while consistently challenging yourself with honors, AP, IB, dual-enrollment, or other advanced courses.

But course rigor is always evaluated in context.

Admissions officers know that not every high school offers 25 AP classes, an IB Diploma, multivariable calculus, and six obscure electives that sound suspiciously like graduate seminars. You aren’t expected to take opportunities your school doesn’t offer.

What colleges want to understand is how you challenged yourself relative to the options available to you.

Did you take advanced courses when they were available and appropriate? Did you continue challenging yourself across the core academic subjects? Did your course choices make sense in light of your interests and goals?

A student who consistently chooses demanding coursework signals a willingness to stretch academically. A student who repeatedly avoids challenge despite having access to it may raise a different question: Why?

We’ll talk more later about how admissions officers know what opportunities were available at your particular high school, but this is why your transcript can never be evaluated entirely on its own.

Intellectual Curiosity and Academic Engagement

At the most selective colleges, though, academic strength can extend beyond doing really well in your classes. Remember Harvard’s highest academic rating? Perfect grades and extraordinary test scores alone don’t necessarily get you there.

Admissions officers may also look for evidence that you’re genuinely interested in learning, particularly when that interest leads you beyond what was required for school.

That might include:

• independent research projects
• academic competitions
• advanced coursework beyond your high school’s curriculum
• intellectual or creative projects outside the classroom
• academic writing or publications

And no, this does not mean every future history major needs to publish original research at 16. Intellectual curiosity can show up in many different ways. What matters is the underlying pattern: Do you engage with ideas because you’re actually interested in them, or does your academic life seem to begin when the teacher assigns something and end when you turn it in?

At the most selective colleges, that distinction can matter.

Standardized Testing

Standardized testing has become one of the more confusing pieces of the admissions landscape as colleges have moved between test-required, test-optional, and other testing policies.

Regardless of a college’s particular policy, when SAT or ACT scores are submitted and considered, they become one additional piece of academic evidence alongside things like:

• course rigor
• grades
• school context
• teacher recommendations

A strong score can reinforce the picture created by the rest of your academic record. But at highly selective colleges, even an exceptional score rarely distinguishes an applicant by itself.

A 1550 can help demonstrate that you’re academically prepared for Harvard. It does not answer the question: “Why you instead of the thousands of other applicants with similarly strong academic records?” That’s what the rest of the application has to help answer.

There are two misconceptions I see constantly, and conveniently, they’re almost exact opposites.

This is why the strongest applicants usually aren’t choosing between academics or extracurricular achievement. They have the academic foundation and something more.

If academics tell admissions officers what kind of student you are in the classroom, your extracurricular activities answer a much more interesting question: What do you do when nobody is making you do anything?

This is where admissions officers start to see what you actually care about. What catches your attention? What are you willing to spend hours getting better at? Where do you take initiative? What kinds of problems do you notice? How do you contribute to the communities you’re part of?

And, importantly, they are not counting clubs.

There is no secret admissions formula that awards one point for student government, one for varsity soccer, one for volunteering, and a bonus point because you somehow squeezed Model UN into Wednesdays.

In fact, a student who has spent four years deeply involved in three or four activities may have a much stronger extracurricular profile than a student who joined twelve organizations and didn’t do much in any of them.

What admissions officers are really trying to understand is how deeply you engaged, what you actually did, what changed because you were involved, and whether anything about the way you pursued your interests distinguishes you from thousands of other accomplished applicants.

Depth of Engagement

Let’s start with depth, because this is one of those admissions words that sounds more mysterious than it actually is.

Depth basically means: How far did you go with this?

Maybe you stayed involved for several years. Maybe you became increasingly skilled. Maybe you took on more responsibility over time. Maybe you started competing at higher levels, moved into leadership, began teaching younger students, or found ways to pursue the same interest outside of school.

Both students can write “Orchestra” on the Common App. But those activities tell us very different amounts about the students behind them.

That’s why sustained involvement tends to matter. Over time, an activity can become evidence of commitment, perseverance, skill development, curiosity, and genuine personal investment.

And this is also why I would much rather see you spend more time doing something you genuinely care about than join another club in March of junior year because you suddenly noticed there was an empty line on your résumé.

Initiative and Leadership

Then we get to leadership, another area where students occasionally lose their minds.

You do not need to be president of everything. In fact, a title tells an admissions officer remarkably little without the description underneath it.

“President” could mean you transformed an organization, doubled its membership, created three new programs, trained younger members, and spent approximately nine hours a week keeping the entire operation from collapsing. It could also mean you won an election and occasionally sent a GroupMe reminder. Admissions officers care much more about what you actually did.

Initiative might mean:

• starting a new organization or project
• noticing a need and creating a solution
• expanding or improving something that already existed
• organizing events or programs
• mentoring younger students
• taking responsibility for something that mattered to a group

And you can do all of those things without ever holding an official leadership title.

The student who notices that new members keep quitting a club because nobody teaches them what they’re doing and decides to create a training program has demonstrated leadership. The student who becomes the unofficial person everyone turns to when something needs to get done has demonstrated leadership.

The student who sees a problem and thinks, Well, somebody should probably fix that, and then realizes with mild horror that they are apparently somebody has demonstrated leadership.

That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for.

Impact and Contribution

“Impact” is another word that college admissions has managed to make unnecessarily intimidating. Students hear that colleges want impact and immediately think: Oh no. I have not founded an international organization serving 70,000 people.

You’re fine.

Impact simply means: What happened because you were there?

Maybe you:

• created a program other students now use
• helped an organization grow
• taught or mentored younger students
• improved how a club or team operates
• created something that reached an audience
• raised money for something important
• became the person your organization could consistently rely on

Sometimes impact comes with a beautiful number you can put directly into the Common App: raised $8,000, recruited 50 volunteers, taught 30 students, grew membership from 12 to 75.

Fantastic. We love a number.

But not everything meaningful can be quantified.

Maybe you helped change the culture of a team. Maybe younger students started coming to you for advice. Maybe you spent three years doing something that mattered enormously to a relatively small group of people. That still counts.

Distinction and Achievement

Now, at the most selective colleges, we do have to raise the bar a little.

Remember the problem we’ve been talking about throughout this guide: the applicant pool is already full of impressive people.

Lots of applicants will have excellent grades. Lots will also be club presidents, varsity athletes, musicians, volunteers, researchers, student-government leaders, employees, or some alarming combination of all of the above while apparently still finding time to sleep.

So at universities admitting 3%, 5%, or 8% of their applicants, simply being “involved” usually isn’t what makes someone stand out. Admissions officers are often looking for some form of distinction. And distinction does not mean: Become nationally famous by Thursday.

It means there is something about the way you’ve pursued an interest that feels unusually deep, accomplished, original, or specific to you.

That can happen in several different ways.

Achievement and Recognition

For some students, distinction is relatively easy to see because someone else has already handed them a trophy for it.

That might include:

• high-level achievement in athletics, music, or the arts
• recognition in academic competitions
• significant awards within a field
• research contributions or publications
• entrepreneurial or creative accomplishments

Recognition can happen at the school, regional, state, national, or international level, and obviously the level matters. But awards are only one form of distinction. You do not need a national title attached to an interest for admissions officers to take it seriously.

Original Work

Some students become distinctive because they don’t just participate in existing opportunities. They make something.

Maybe they:

• launch a project, organization, or initiative
• build an app, website, or product
• conduct independent research
• write or publish original work
• organize a community program
• create music, films, designs, or other original projects

And please do not take this paragraph as instructions to go start a nonprofit. The world has enough nonprofits created primarily because somebody wanted to get into college. The interesting part isn’t Founder & CEO in the activity title. It’s the thinking and work underneath it.

What did you notice? Why did you care? What did you decide to make? Did anyone actually use it? Did it evolve? Did you keep going when it became significantly more annoying than you expected?

That’s where initiative becomes revealing.

Unique Interests and Uncommon Pursuits

And then there are the activities I personally love because they make me think: Wait, you do WHAT? Tell me everything.

Admissions officers read thousands of applications from students doing many of the same things. So when someone has gone very deep into an interest that doesn’t appear in every tenth application, it can naturally make that student more memorable.

Maybe you:

• restore vintage electronics or cars
• compete in surfing, figure skating, curling, or another less common sport
• have become weirdly knowledgeable about an obscure period of history
• study linguistics for fun
• cosplay or participate in historical reenactments
• produce music or experiment with audio engineering
• compete in strategy games or puzzle competitions
• build, design, collect, repair, or make something incredibly specific

These interests aren’t compelling because curling > soccer or historical reenactment > student government. They’re compelling because they often reveal something very particular about the person doing them.

And to be extremely clear: do not manufacture a quirky hobby because you think admissions officers want quirky people.

Please do not take up competitive mushroom identification tomorrow because you suspect Dartmouth needs a mushroom kid. A common interest pursued with extraordinary depth is far more compelling than an unusual interest you picked up because you thought it would look good on an application.

Authenticity and Exploration

Which brings us to the thing I wish students understood much earlier in high school: The best extracurricular strategy is usually to stop thinking so much about extracurricular strategy. Your activities are supposed to be the part of high school where you explore things.

Try something because it sounds interesting. Quit something because you discover you hate it. Get unexpectedly obsessed with something you thought would be a minor hobby. Follow one interest into another. Get better. Take on responsibility. Meet people who care about the same weird thing you care about.

That’s how strong extracurricular profiles usually develop. Not because a ninth grader sat down with a spreadsheet and carefully engineered the exact combination of activities most likely to impress Stanford four years later.

Students who genuinely care about what they’re doing tend to stick with it longer, get better at it, take more initiative, and eventually accomplish more. Authenticity and achievement aren’t competing ideas. Very often, one produces the other.

At some point, admissions officers have to move beyond what you’ve done and start trying to figure out who you actually are.

Which is admittedly a slightly ridiculous task when you consider that they are attempting to understand an entire human being from a transcript, ten activities, several essays, a couple of recommendation letters, and maybe a 30-minute conversation with an interviewer.

But that’s essentially what this part of holistic review is trying to do.

Highly selective colleges aren’t just assembling a class of students who can handle difficult coursework and accumulate impressive accomplishments. They’re building a community of people who are going to live together, learn together, argue about things in seminar rooms, work together in labs, start organizations, become roommates, and spend four years affecting one another’s experiences.

So admissions officers want some sense of what kind of person you’re likely to be once you arrive.

Most of that information comes from:

• Personal essays and short-answer responses
• Teacher and counselor recommendation letters
• Alumni or admissions interviews, when offered

Together, these pieces can reveal things a transcript and activities list simply can’t: how you think, how you treat other people, what you value, what makes you curious, how you respond when things don’t go according to plan, and whether you seem like someone who will actually contribute to the community you’re asking to join.

There isn’t one correct personality colleges are looking for. You do not need to somehow be curious, charismatic, resilient, hilarious, deeply empathetic, intellectually fearless, community-minded, and an absolute delight in group projects all at once. But there are certain qualities that tend to come through repeatedly in the way highly selective colleges describe the students they’re looking for.

Intellectual Curiosity

We’ve already talked about intellectual curiosity in the academic section, but here I want to think about it a little differently.

This isn’t just “Does this student do impressive academic things?”

It’s: “Does this person seem genuinely interested in the world?”

Curious students ask questions. They follow ideas down rabbit holes. They get interested in something mentioned briefly in class and then spend three hours learning about it when absolutely nobody asked them to. They make connections between subjects, challenge assumptions, and occasionally send their teachers emails beginning with, “Okay, but I was thinking about what you said today…”

Evidence of that curiosity can show up through:

• independent research or academic exploration
• reading, writing, or projects pursued purely out of interest
• thoughtful engagement with ideas in essays
• recommendation letters describing the way a student participates in class, asks questions, or thinks about problems

And importantly, intellectual curiosity does not require an impressive academic product at the end.

You don’t have to publish a paper every time you become interested in something. Sometimes the revealing part is simply what captures your attention and what you do once it has it. For colleges built around the idea that students will spend four years exchanging ideas with professors and one another, that matters quite a bit.

Initiative and Self-Direction

Admissions officers also tend to like students who make things happen. Not necessarily students who start six organizations. Students who don’t always need someone else to hand them the next step.

Initiative can show up when you:

• start a project or organization
• identify a problem and decide to do something about it
• pursue an opportunity independently
• teach yourself a skill
• organize an effort or bring people together
• take responsibility for improving something that matters to you

Sometimes initiative produces an impressive extracurricular accomplishment. Sometimes it’s much smaller.

What admissions officers are ultimately learning is something about how you move through the world.

When you’re interested in something, do you pursue it?
When you notice a problem, do you think about what you could do?
When there isn’t an obvious opportunity available, are you willing to go looking for one or create one yourself?

Colleges provide students with an enormous number of resources and opportunities, so it’s not surprising that they value applicants who seem likely to actually do something with them.

Character and Integrity

And then we get to the qualities that are much harder to capture in a Common App activities description.

Are you kind?
Are you reliable?
Do you treat other people well?
Are you the person who makes a classroom better, a teammate feel supported, or a group project slightly less likely to end in homicide?

This is one reason recommendation letters can matter so much. Your teachers and counselor have seen you operate in a community over time, and they can tell admissions officers things you really can’t convincingly announce about yourself.

You probably shouldn’t write an essay explaining that you’re an exceptionally kind person.

Your teacher writing that you were the student who noticed a classmate struggling and quietly stayed after class to help them? Much more convincing.

Recommendations can provide insight into qualities like:

integrity kindness responsibility resilience empathy generosity toward classmates maturity willingness to support others

And at universities where thousands of talented teenagers are going to spend four years living and learning together, these aren’t fluffy bonus qualities. Nobody wants to build a freshman class of 1,800 brilliant people who are all terrible to be around.

Collaboration and Community Engagement

Relatedly, colleges care about whether you’re someone who can function well with other humans.

College is incredibly collaborative. You’ll work on group projects, participate in discussions, conduct research with other people, join organizations, live with roommates, and encounter approximately seventeen thousand situations where you do not get to do everything exactly the way you would prefer.

So admissions officers may look for evidence that you:

• work effectively with others
• contribute meaningfully to group efforts
• support and encourage peers
• listen to perspectives other than your own
• participate constructively in teams and communities

This doesn’t mean colleges only want extroverted students who love group projects. Introverts, you may remain seated.

Collaboration can look like leading from the front, but it can also mean listening carefully, making space for other people, being dependable, resolving conflict, contributing thoughtful ideas, or becoming the person who quietly makes a group work better.

Authentic Voice

And then we have the part of the application where you get the most control over how admissions officers understand you: your essays.

Essays generally aren’t going to transform an academically unqualified applicant into a qualified one. But they can play an enormously important role in helping admissions officers understand the person behind everything else they’ve read.

A transcript tells them that you earned an A in AP Biology. An activities list tells them that you spent six hours a week volunteering at an animal shelter. An essay might tell them why you keep an ongoing ranking of every weird name the shelter has given its cats, why you can’t stop thinking about a conversation you had with your grandmother, or why you became completely obsessed with designing the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

In other words, essays have room for the parts of you that don’t fit neatly into an application category.

Strong essays often reveal:

• self-awareness
• reflection and growth
• curiosity
• humor
• values
• perspective
• sincerity
• the way you actually think

Notice what is not on that list: “Sounds extraordinarily impressive at all times.”

One of the fastest ways to make an essay less revealing is to become so focused on impressing an admissions officer that you sand away every weird, specific, funny, vulnerable, contradictory, human thing that would have helped them understand you.

The goal isn’t to sound like the most accomplished 17-year-old who has ever lived. The goal is to sound like you.

And at the most selective colleges, where so many applicants already have extraordinary academic and extracurricular credentials, giving admissions officers a clear sense of the human being behind those accomplishments can matter enormously.

Here’s one of the most important things to understand about holistic admissions: Admissions officers are not evaluating your accomplishments in a vacuum. A transcript, activity, or achievement means very little without knowing the circumstances surrounding it.

Taking six AP classes might represent an incredibly rigorous curriculum at a high school that offers seven. At a school that offers 28, it tells us something different.

Spending ten hours a week working at a grocery store might not sound as conventionally “impressive” as spending those ten hours conducting research in a university lab. But what if the first student is working because their family needs the income, while the second student’s parent is a professor who helped arrange the research position?

Context changes how we understand accomplishment. That’s why admissions officers aren’t just asking: “What did this student do?” They’re also asking: “What opportunities did this student have, what challenges were they navigating, and what did they do with the circumstances they were given?”

School Environment

Let’s start with something students worry about constantly: “My school only offers six AP classes. Am I competing against students whose schools offer 25?”

Yes.

But admissions officers know that.

Colleges receive information about your high school through something called a school profile, which gives them context for interpreting your transcript and, to some extent, the opportunities available to you.

A school profile typically includes information like:

• which AP, IB, honors, or dual-enrollment courses are available
• graduation requirements
• grading policies and GPA distributions
• extracurricular programs available at the school
• college-going patterns and other information about the student body

This means admissions officers aren’t simply counting how many AP classes you took and comparing that number with every other applicant. They’re asking: How challenging was this student’s course selection relative to what was actually available to them?

If your high school offers six AP courses and you took five, that’s very different from attending a school with 25 AP courses and consistently avoiding advanced classes.

And no, you do not need to compensate for attending a school with fewer advanced courses by frantically enrolling in 14 online classes and driving 45 minutes to a community college every evening.

Admissions officers aren’t expecting you to manufacture opportunities that reasonably weren’t available to you. What they are interested in is whether you made good use of the opportunities you did have.

Admissions offices may also be familiar with the broader academic environment at your high school, particularly if they regularly receive applications from it. They may know that a particular school is extraordinarily competitive, that certain courses are notoriously demanding, or that dozens of students from the same graduating class routinely apply to the same highly selective universities.

In other words, your transcript isn’t being read without a map. Admissions officers have information that helps them understand the environment in which it was created.

Access to Opportunities

The same principle applies outside the classroom. Students have wildly different access to extracurricular activities, research, internships, summer programs, competitions, and other enrichment opportunities.

That access can depend on things like:

• the size and resources of your school
• where you live
• whether you have reliable transportation
• your family’s financial resources
• whether specialized programs exist nearby
• whether you have access to mentors or professional connections
• how much free time you actually have

A student living near a major research university may have access to laboratories, hospitals, professors, and specialized programs that simply do not exist for a student living in a rural community.

A student whose family can pay several thousand dollars for a summer program has different options from a student who needs to work all summer.

A student who has access to a car can pursue opportunities that may be physically impossible for someone who depends on a parent getting off work or the existence of public transportation.

None of this means admissions officers automatically value one student’s accomplishments more than another’s. It means they’re trying to understand what an accomplishment actually represents. And this is why I don’t want you obsessing over whether your activities sound prestigious enough.

The better question is: What did you do with what was available to you?

Maybe you didn’t have access to a university research lab, but you became fascinated by marine biology and spent two years volunteering with a local conservation organization, took an online course, designed your own project, and somehow became the teenager everyone in town calls when they find a suspicious-looking tidepool creature.

That tells us something.

Family Responsibilities

This is another area where students sometimes dramatically underestimate what “counts” as an activity. If you spend ten hours a week caring for younger siblings, that counts. If you work because your family needs your income, that counts.

If you regularly translate for your parents, help manage appointments, care for a grandparent, or spend weekends working in your family’s restaurant, those hours did not magically occur outside the space-time continuum just because there wasn’t a school club involved.

Family responsibilities might include:

• caring for siblings or other family members
• contributing to household responsibilities
• working to help support your family financially
• translating or helping family members navigate systems or appointments
• taking significant responsibility within a family business

These commitments can require enormous amounts of time, maturity, patience, and responsibility. And importantly, they also provide context for everything else on your application.

If Student A has five major extracurricular activities and Student B has two, that comparison looks very different once we learn that Student B spends 20 hours every week working and caring for younger siblings.

Admissions officers aren’t expecting every student to have the same amount of discretionary time. They’re trying to understand how you chose or needed to spend the time you actually had.

Challenges and Obstacles

Context also helps admissions officers understand periods of your high school experience that may not make sense from the transcript or activities list alone.

Maybe your grades dropped during one semester.
Maybe you had to step away from an activity you’d been involved in for years.
Maybe there is a six-month stretch where your extracurricular involvement seems to disappear.

There may be a reason.

Students can experience:

• health challenges
• difficult family circumstances
• financial hardship
• disruptions in schooling
• natural disasters or community disruptions
• other significant unexpected circumstances

Applications generally provide places where students, counselors, or both can explain circumstances that meaningfully affected the student’s high school experience.

The purpose isn’t to make excuses for every B+ or explain that sophomore chemistry was very stressful. It’s to give admissions officers information they genuinely need in order to interpret the application accurately.

If something significant affected your academics, your activities, or your ability to access opportunities, admissions officers can’t consider information they don’t have.

Context gives them the missing pieces.

Why Context Matters

This is ultimately why two students with very different-looking applications can both be extraordinarily compelling candidates.

Admissions officers aren’t necessarily asking: “Which student did more?” They’re trying to understand: “What does what this student did tell us about them, given the circumstances in which they did it?”

That distinction is enormously important.

Holistic admissions isn’t about lowering expectations for students who had fewer opportunities. It’s about recognizing that the same accomplishment can require very different levels of initiative, persistence, creativity, and effort depending on the environment in which it happened.

You don’t need to have had access to every opportunity. You don’t need to have overcome some enormous hardship for context to matter, either.

Everyone has context.

The question is what opportunities were available to you, what responsibilities and circumstances shaped your high school experience, and what you did with what you had.

Colleges are not simply lining up all of their applicants from “most impressive” to “least impressive” and admitting everyone from the top until they run out of chairs.

It would certainly make this process easier to understand if they were.

Instead, highly selective colleges are trying to build a class.

They need brilliant students, yes. But they also need students with different academic interests. They need musicians for their ensembles, writers for their publications, athletes for their teams, and people who will participate in the hundreds of organizations and communities that make a university actually function.

They may be trying to increase enrollment from certain geographic areas, expand access for first-generation or lower-income students, support new academic programs, or respond to other priorities set by the university.

And somehow, from tens of thousands of individual applications, they have to assemble one incoming class that accomplishes all of those things at once.

This is what we mean by class building.

And it explains something students often find incredibly difficult to understand: Your admissions decision isn’t determined solely by the strength of your application. It can also depend on what the university needs from the particular class it’s building that particular year.

Those needs can change.

Academic and Intellectual Balance

A university isn’t one giant academic department. It may need students interested in:

• engineering
• humanities and social sciences
• natural sciences
• business and economics
• arts and design
• interdisciplinary fields

At universities that admit directly by major or undergraduate school, this can have an obvious impact on admissions. Applying to an extremely popular Computer Science or Business program, for example, may put you into a very different competitive environment than applying to a less oversubscribed program.

At colleges that don’t formally admit by major, academic interests can still matter as part of class building. A university probably doesn’t want to enroll an entire freshman class of future computer scientists any more than it wants 2,000 English majors and nobody particularly interested in chemistry.

That doesn’t mean you should try to game the process by announcing a sudden lifelong passion for Assyriology because you assume fewer people are applying for it.

Please don’t invent an academic interest because you think it will get you into Brown.

Admissions officers are perfectly capable of noticing when an application says Classics while every course, activity, essay, summer program, and waking moment of the student’s life says Computer Science.

The point is simply that your academic interests become one piece of the larger class a university is trying to assemble, and demand for particular programs or fields can change from year to year.

Socioeconomic and Educational Background

Many highly selective universities also want their incoming classes to include students from a wide range of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds.

That may include students who are:

• first-generation college students
• from lower-income households
• recipients of significant need-based financial aid
• graduates of under-resourced schools

Colleges may also seek students coming from different types of educational environments, including:

• public schools
• private schools
• charter schools
• magnet or specialized academic programs

This connects directly to the context we just discussed.

A university isn’t necessarily trying to build a class consisting entirely of students who had access to the greatest number of AP classes, expensive summer programs, private research opportunities, and highly resourced high schools.

It may deliberately seek students whose experiences, opportunities, and educational paths look very different from one another. That’s part of building a campus where students actually have something to learn from the people sitting next to them.

Geographic Representation

Geography can matter too. Highly selective universities generally want to enroll students from across the United States and around the world rather than building an incoming class almost entirely from a handful of major metropolitan areas.

That means they may consider representation from:

• different states and regions
• rural communities
• urban and suburban areas
• international locations

And here’s where geography gets particularly interesting: Applicants are not distributed evenly.

A highly selective university may receive enormous numbers of applications from places like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, or other areas with large populations of academically competitive students.

Far fewer may come from certain rural states or communities. So two equally qualified students living in different parts of the country may be applying within very different competitive environments.

This doesn’t mean there is some magical state where admission to Harvard becomes easy. There isn’t. But geography can become one small piece of the much larger class-building puzzle.

Gender Balance

Another interesting shift in college admissions has been happening quietly for years: Women are going to college at significantly higher rates than men.

Women now make up a clear majority of undergraduate enrollment in the United States, and at many colleges, they also make up a larger share of the applicant pool. That creates an unusual challenge for universities that are trying to maintain a reasonably balanced campus population.

Imagine a college receives substantially more applications from women than men but hopes to enroll a freshman class that is relatively balanced. The math starts to get complicated pretty quickly.

At some institutions, this can mean that men and women are effectively competing within somewhat different applicant pools. If significantly more qualified women are applying for roughly the same number of seats, admission may become more competitive for women even when the university isn’t consciously sitting down and saying, “Let’s make it harder for girls to get in.”

And the imbalance isn’t necessarily the same everywhere. It can vary substantially by institution and academic area. Some STEM-heavy universities and programs may still receive more applications from men, while many liberal arts colleges and other universities see the opposite pattern.

This is another example of why an overall acceptance rate can hide quite a bit.

A college might report a 20% acceptance rate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean every applicant had something resembling a 20% chance of admission. The composition of the applicant pool matters, and gender can sometimes be one piece of that picture.

More importantly, this is yet another factor that you cannot control. You don’t know exactly who else will apply in your year or what the applicant pool will look like when the admissions office opens all those files.

But admissions officers will. And when they’re building a class rather than simply ranking applicants, the composition of that pool can influence the decisions they ultimately make.

Institutional Programs and Campus Needs

And then there are all the things a university needs outside the classroom. A college isn’t just admitting 2,000 individual résumés. It’s admitting the people who will become its:

athletes musicians and performers journalists and editors debaters entrepreneurs researchers community organizers student leaders artists approximately 400 different varieties of club presidents

Some of these needs are extremely concrete. A coach may need a goalkeeper. An orchestra may need an oboist. A university launching a new initiative may be particularly interested in students whose experiences align with it.

Other institutional priorities are much broader and may change from year to year.

Maybe the university is expanding a particular academic program. Maybe it wants to increase enrollment from certain regions. Maybe a new university initiative has created demand for students with particular interests or experiences.

And here’s the maddening part: You usually don’t know what all of those priorities are. Neither do I. Neither does the person on TikTok confidently explaining the three extracurriculars that will “guarantee” admission to an Ivy League school.

The admissions office knows what it needs from the class it’s building. Applicants generally don’t.

If you’ve made it this far, you may currently be thinking: Okay, great. So I need perfect grades, intellectual curiosity, extracurricular depth, leadership, impact, distinction, initiative, excellent recommendations, fascinating personal qualities, AND I need to somehow fulfill an institutional priority I don’t even know exists?

No!!!

Please do not turn this guide into a 27-item checklist. If there’s one thing I want you to understand about highly selective admissions, it’s that there is no single formula for getting in.

Admissions officers aren’t looking for one particular type of student, and they’re certainly not sitting there counting how many clubs you joined, leadership titles you collected, or impressive-sounding things you managed to squeeze onto your résumé.

They’re trying to understand what kind of student and person you have become through the choices you’ve made.

Did you challenge yourself academically and take your education seriously?

Did you find things you genuinely cared about and pursue them beyond the point where someone was requiring you to?

Did you get better at something? Take on responsibility? Notice a problem and try to solve it? Make something? Help someone? Contribute to a community? Follow an idea because you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

And, eventually, can you reflect on those experiences well enough to help someone who has never met you understand why any of it mattered to you?

Those are much more useful questions than: “What extracurricular looks best for college?” or “How many AP classes do I need for an Ivy?” or my personal favorite, “Should I start a nonprofit?”

The strongest applications usually aren’t built by students who spent four years trying to reverse-engineer an admissions rubric. They’re built gradually by students who challenged themselves, explored their interests, followed opportunities, created new ones when they could, and became increasingly engaged with the things and people around them.

Over time, those choices tend to produce the things admissions officers are looking for anyway: depth, skill, initiative, impact, curiosity, strong relationships, and a clearer sense of who you are. And even then, none of this guarantees admission to a highly selective college.

That’s important.

At universities admitting 3%, 5%, or 8% of their applicants, there will always be far more extraordinary students than available seats. You can build an application that is genuinely outstanding and still receive a rejection because admissions officers aren’t awarding spots to the objectively “best” students in descending order. They’re choosing among thousands of qualified applicants while simultaneously trying to build a particular class.

Some of that process will always be outside your control. So don’t spend four years of high school trying to become the person you imagine Harvard wants.

Become more of yourself.

Take hard classes because you want to challenge yourself. Follow the subjects that make you curious. Get really good at things you care about. Try something new and discover you’re terrible at it. Make things. Help people. Take responsibility. Change your mind. Go down weird rabbit holes. Contribute to the communities you’re already part of.

Do those things seriously enough, and by the time you apply to college, you won’t just have built a stronger application.

You’ll have built a much more interesting high school experience. And unlike an admissions decision, that’s something you actually get to keep.