Should I Even Apply?

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Inside the Yale Admissions Office. I'm Hannah and I'm a Yale Admissions Officer. And I'm Mark, I'm also a Yale Admissions Officer. The title of today's episode comes from a question that we get quite a lot. So much. This question takes a few different forms and has a few different specifics, but it almost always is phrased something like this. Listen, I know Yale is really hard to get into, but, and then they, at this point, insert some sort of personal narrative, like something about themselves that they think, in their mind, makes them maybe less competitive for Yale. They wrap that part up and so they end the question with, "So, do I have a chance? Should I even apply?" Yeah, and honestly, we don't love this question. And that's for a few reasons. I mean, the first one is it's so dangerously close to that "Chance Me" question that we've already talked about on this podcast. It's not a useful exercise, and it's impossible for us experts to give you your chance of admission based on a few basic pieces of information about yourself. It's usually not the case that whatever you tell us about yourself when you're asking this question is going to give us a clear sense of what your full application would look like. Right, and remember a whole lot of the decision-making process at the end of the day boils down to the rest of the applicant force. Right. A lot of this is just going to be, it depends. And the kind of more complicated reason that we don't like this question is that we don't like being in the business of discouraging applicants, though not for the reasons that you might expect. Right, so, okay, before we go any further on this, let's explain how we, or at least I, typically answer this question. I've gotten it hundreds of times in all kinds of different ways. We're going to say, listen, the good news about Yale's admissions process is that it's holistic. So everything you just told me, it's going to be considered by a real person. And the full context and your individual circumstances are going to be part of the review. Remember, anyone applying to Yale, even if they've never gotten below 100% on any exam they've ever taken, and they've won every possible award. They should understand that Yale is still very highly selective, which means that many of our very highly qualified applicants aren't admitted. In fact, most of the students in our applicant pool who are highly qualified aren't admitted. And I usually wrap up by saying something like, listen, our rate of admission is low, you should recognize that, but it drops to zero for those who don't apply. Yeah, and that's all true. We don't give that answer because we want to drum up applications and make ourselves feel good about how many students were rejecting every year. We've talked about that in a previous episode. That is not our goal here. We give that answer more because we've seen students make really compelling applicants despite a whole variety of circumstances that they may have overcome. Right, and there's also a really very long and well-documented history of students from lots of marginalized and underrepresented groups who've been discouraged either implicitly or often explicitly from reaching for top colleges. Yeah, Michelle Obama. She wrote about how her counselor discouraged her from applying to Princeton. And there are so many stories like that, which begs the question, how many people who could have been admitted never applied because someone told them they weren't qualified or they weren't the right fit? If you walk around the Yale campus, you're going to find plenty of students who were told by someone in their lives that they were wasting their time by applying to Yale. So we don't like this business of saying, "No, you really shouldn't. It's a bad idea. Don't throw your hat in the ring." It's just not in our nature. Yeah, and most of the time, whatever that thing is about yourself or your circumstances that has you concerned, isn't something that's going to be a deal breaker. Right, but. Oh, here's the but. We also want to be as honest as possible on this podcast. This whole exercise is about transparency, about being real. An alternative title for this episode was "Real Talk" with Hannah and Martin. Yeah. Maybe we'll still title it that. I haven't given up on that yet. Yeah, I mean, we would be dishonest if we said that every single one of our 50,000 applicants was a realistic candidate. It's just not the case. It is the case that most of our applicants are very strong, very realistic candidates, for whom an application to Yale makes perfect sense. Hopefully this episode can be something of a public service to help you understand what sorts of things make an applicant truly uncompetitive. And we'll also share a few things that aren't actually deal breakers that you might think are. So as you know, if you listen to our podcast, we try to keep positive vibes here, right? So we are not only positive vibes. Only positive vibes. Even though we're in a business where we deliver a lot of bad news, we're pretty positive people. So we're going to frame this positively. Yes. Instead of wrapping this whole conversation around the kinds of things that are sort of deal breakers, we're going to talk about some things that I call necessary, but not sufficient criteria. Uh oh. Yeah. Mark the philosophy majors back, y'all. So we're back into some logic language here. Necessary, but not sufficient criteria. What does that mean? That means in order to be competitive, certain things are going to need to be true. But even if they are all true, you shouldn't interpret that to mean that that's sufficient. That okay, if I say yes to all these things and all these things are true, that bam, I'm suddenly, you know, definitely going to be admitted. And if not all of the following things are true about you, applying to a school like Yale may not be a wise part of your college search strategy. And fortunately, there is an amazing collection of schools out there across a wide range of civil activity. We go through our jobs knowing that any student who's put forward even just the effort to put together an application for Yale is someone who's going to have a very bright college teacher. So the number one thing, and this is something that I certainly see a lot, you need to have a very strong command of English to be a successful Yale student. It's kind of as simple as that. I will say we get a whole range of applicants from from around the world. And some of them just, it's very clear from just a glance at their essays that they do not have the level of English that's going to be required for them at Yale. We know why these applicants end up in our pool. We have amazing financial aid for students from outside of the United States. We're one of few colleges in the US that is completely need blind in our review process for all applicants regardless of citizenship and immigration status. But the fact is we are still looking for students who are truly going to be able to thrive at Yale. Another necessary, but not sufficient criterion, is that you have strong and consistent academic strength, especially in your most recent semester. So I think it's pretty easy for us to identify that a student's high school transcript is the most important piece of the application. That's something that really builds a foundation for us to understand, okay, is the student really going to be well prepared? We need to see that a student is being consistently strong across a wide range of courses. This is important both because it's an indication the student is actually prepared. You also have to recognize that most of those 50,000 applicants have consistent academic strength. If you're applying to Yale and your transcript is just not very consistent and your grades are not very strong, you're going to find yourself sort of behind the pack, behind literally tens of thousands of people who have pretty strong and consistent transcripts. Number three, stepping up to the plate for the academic challenge. And this really just comes down to not only demonstrating that you are earning the good grades in high school, but that you have challenged yourself and taken classes that are maybe the advanced level classes offered to you. This is pretty nuanced because we are very cognizant that high schools vary dramatically. Your context plays a big role in us understanding what kinds of academic challenges you have available to you. Some students have been taking college level courses since ninth grade and they're able to pack their schedule every single semester with three, four, five or more sort of very rigorous college level courses. Those might be AP, those might be IB, they might be A-level, they might be dual enrollment courses. We're familiar with all of them. Some students have lots of access to lots of these. Some students have access to almost none of these. Our evaluation for this has to be contextual. You aren't taking advantage of the rigorous courses that are available to you. Again, it's going to put you behind many thousands of other students who are stepping up to the plate. It's also not a great sign that if you're applying to a place like Yale that has 2,000 courses and 80 majors and has really rigorous courses across the board that you're going to be someone who's really excited about that. So there's an element to fit here. It's not just a matter of how academically accomplished are you. Yeah, and just to be clear, when we say taking advantage of the rigorous courses available to you, that doesn't necessarily mean filling every single hour of your day with the hardest classes you can find. It means finding those best fit classes for you and if those best fit classes happen to be the more rigorous classes, that is a good sign that you would be up to the academic challenge of Yale. And just a piece of personal advice here. If you find yourself really having a hard time personally, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, as you are going through particularly your sophomore and junior year and a very rigorous course schedule, we are not going to be the ones to tell you, like, keep out. Right. It may very well be absolutely the right decision for you to take a step back from those things and to take care of your needs. That's going to be important for you as you prepare for college. We are very aware of the fact that this sense that students have to do x, y, z in order to get into college just period can really be to the detriment of students' mental health. So, this is nuanced, but we'll say that the students who are most successful in our process are those for whom that decision to challenge themselves consistently across the board is just kind of a reflection of their interests and their strengths and not a sense that it's something that they are sort of drowning in as they go through. Right. If you're miserable in your high school classes, you're going to be miserable in your Yale classes. Yes, that's a good way to go. The next necessary but not sufficient criterion is having academic and personal integrity before and throughout the application process. So, to put this very simply, if you are a lying cheating or stealing as a high school student, if you are lying cheating or stealing in putting together your application, game over. Yeah. I'm going to make this one the deal breaker. Super clear. Yeah. Yeah. That's really critically important to us across all dimensions, but I would say particularly academic integrity. So, if any of you are listening and you are tempted to cheat, to plagiarize, to misrepresent yourself either in your courses or in your application process, know that if you do that before, during or after you apply, things are not going to end well for you. All right. Number five would be academic interests that align with a liberal arts approach. And this kind of goes back to challenging yourself academically because you're looking for challenging yourself in college. We don't admit students who are going to come to Yale and study one thing in a vacuum that is not the type of education we offer here at Yale. It's a place where students kind of inform their studies across disciplines and you need to really be excited about that in order to be a successful happy Yale student. I know that every year I've read some really accomplished and very impressive applications from students who have just done amazing things and they're going to do great things in college. But they are just a terrible academic day for you and it seems that they've applied to Yale less because they're actually interested in the four year experience of learning here and more just because it has, you know, an impressive sounding and prestigious name. Yeah. And sometimes they're confused like, how did I get denied? Like I'm so accomplished and we say, well, did you know what you were signing up for? Right. Right. We want to set you up for success. We want to admit students who are really going to thrive in that kind of interdisciplinary approach. Yes. All right. Our last necessary but not sufficient criterion is maturity independence and interpersonal skills to live on a college campus with other people from very diverse backgrounds. Yeah. This one's a little bit vague, understandably. But again, you know, sometimes we read applications from students who are just clearly not very interested in using their four year college experience to live and learn with other people from a diverse set of backgrounds. Yeah. That's a really important part of the education that we're offering here. So you need to be interested in that. You also need to be kind of ready for that. If that seems to sort of like something you would rather avoid, there might be a very different, excellent school that's available for you. But you would be, again, barking up the wrong tree if you're looking at Yale. So remember for each of these examples, there are simply so many thousands of applicants who are very strong in all of these areas. So if there's one that's a real deficiency for you, you'll be pretty far behind in the pool. If you, however, feel good about all those things, then you earned that original answer to the question. Right. Right. Should I apply? Yes. The answer to that question, remember says, listen, our rate of admission is low, but it drops to zero if you don't apply. Yeah. So here are a few of the things that I've found that sometimes people think we'll disqualify them that really aren't deal breakers at all. Right. Like, oh, yeah, kinds of things that get inserted into the middle part of that question. Right. It's kind of easy for us to say, like, listen, listen, no, no, no, no. The first one, I would say switching high schools for whatever reason. I know students change schools for a whole lot of reasons. Their families move, whatever. And often it causes a lot of stress because I say, oh, I don't have these kind of four consistent years at one school. How is this going to be looked at? And the answer is, as with everything else, it's going to be looked at contextually. We understand there are all kinds of reasons beyond your control for what high school you attend or if you switch high schools. So this is never a deal breaker in itself. It's pretty ordinary and it's something that we're very used to dealing with. Yeah. All right. Next on the list would be changing your extracurricular activities, again, for whatever reason, maybe because of switch schools. Maybe because your interest changed or maybe because there was a new band director and you didn't click and your interest went some other way. Right. There is a myth out there that students have to have four years of continued increasing involvement in all of their activities. And so we get a lot of these questions that say, well, for whatever reason, this switch and either it's just my interest went this way or this context change that couldn't do this anymore, not a big deal at all. What you hope though is that when you're applying, hopefully the things that you do outside of the classroom are reflection of your interest and your values. Hey, which is to say that particularly it's early in your high school experience and you're finding yourself doing a lot of things that you don't really like. Right. Think about switching totally. Don't double and triple down on something you don't like just because you think, oh, I can't possibly switch. You will have a better high school experience and therefore be a better college applicant if you spend your time doing the things that you actually want to be doing. Yeah. All right. This is a little bit of a tricky one getting less than straight A's or not being ranked number one in your school. People feel if this is the case for them, they're like, all right, well automatically I must be out. We obviously talked about a strong and consistent academic record being very important, but there are a lot of reasons that students don't get straight A's and many of those students get admitted to Yale. It might be that you had a little bit of a bumpy start in your freshman year of high school that you took some time to adjust, but there is an upward trend on your transcript where it shows you're clearly getting better. Maybe you took a risk and challenged yourself with a class that you weren't quite 100% ready to ace and you got to be on that class. And again, we're looking at that class and we're trying to understand what happened. Next up here would be similar to this, not taking every possible AP, I be a level dual normal course, whatever had you. This question is often framed in terms of some tough choice that you have. It might be a particular scheduling conflict. The orchestra class meets at the same time as AP Physics. If you love orchestra, you're really dedicated to it, but you also want to take this other AP class, like what should you do? And this question, we usually get it with a lot of angst because it seems like it's just not possible to do everything that you want to do. And we get that. We are very, very well aware. I like to say that in my experience, most applicants, truly most of them don't have the sort of high school schedule that they would want. It falls short of their ideal for some reason or another. We aren't going in with a sense that students need to have X number of these courses, even if a lot of other students in your high school have those courses. The only thing I'll say here is that if there is some very clear reason why you wanted to take some challenging course, some particular challenging course that would probably make sense for you. Again, given what we were talking about in terms of challenging yourself consistently across the curriculum. And for whatever reason, you just couldn't. That's a good thing to kind of explain to us in the additional information section of the application. Very easy for us to understand that. But even absent some sort of contextual sort of challenge where just limitations of space and time are what's preventing you from taking that class, even if you just for whatever reason haven't taken the maximum number of challenging courses that some other student in your high school has taken, that's not a deal breaker. That's not the end of the story for us, right? Right. And look at your transcript and get a sense of does the student have a really strong academic foundation? Are they well prepared to thrive here? Have they challenged themselves? All those things can be true, even if you don't have the maximum number of AP, I be a level dual enrollment courses, whatever other acronym are going to come up with next year. Yeah, yeah. Say it again for the folks in the back. You don't need to take every single challenging class available to you. All right, spending your summers doing something that's not academic. You'll notice that we did not include an academic summer activity in our necessary, but not sufficient criteria list. You certainly do not need to do some sort of summer college program on a college campus or some kind of special academic program in order to get into a school like Yale. We want to see that you're spending your summers doing something other than sitting around on your couch, but that something might be volunteering, it might be a continuation of your extracurricular activities, it might be, you know, a paid job that you're doing over the summer. Yeah, so we're recording this in the summer, and I will say every summer when I go and get ice cream. I have fond memories of my first summer job, which was scooping ice cream. Oh, nice. And I like now feel this, like, this bond, this connection with the teenagers who are scooping ice cream, you know, speaking from experience, scooping ice cream, awesome way to spend my summer. Yeah, it's a great job. I got paid $5.25 an hour back in the day. I got pretty ice cream. It was great. It was great. Okay, next thing that's not a deal breaker is managing a learning disability, a physical disability or illness, mental illness or other kind of illness. We get a lot of questions before students apply saying I've had this challenge or I have this challenge, is that a deal breaker should I even apply? And we want to be crystal clear that this is not going to be something that is going to be held against you in the application process. We are not going to discriminate against students who have faced or are facing any of these challenges. Our best advice is for you to be as forthcoming as possible about what those challenges have looked like. You do not need to paper over them. You do not need to sort of make it seem like you've just had some sort of charmed experience where this thing sort of isn't part of your story. I think the best thing you can do is be sort of as forthcoming as possible. Understand that we are going to be contextual and holistic in our evaluations as you've heard us say a few thousand times on this podcast. We know that students from a wide variety of experiences and challenges can still thrive and do fantastic work on our campus. We also know that our students benefit from a fabulous collection of resources through our student accessibility services office. You would not be the first student who has been facing challenge X, Y or Z to to enroll at Yale and thrive at Yale. All right. The last thing on this list is a one time dip in academic performance connected to a specific challenge. And this goes back to that, you know, getting less than straight A's. Sometimes folks will have had some sort of huge life event or something that caused them to not perform at their best academically for a semester or for a year. And that is not necessarily, you know, an immediate deal breaker for us. The best advice we have is to explain to us what happened. Use that additional information section of the common app or ask your counselor to address it in their letter to us. Just let us know if there's some context that we should know about surrounding a dip in performance. Right. So if you imagine when we're reading an application and looking at a transcript, if we see that there's one semester where the grades are just much lower than the other semesters, our immediate gut instinct is to say, what happened? Yeah. It's not to say, okay, next, disqualified or rubber stamp reject like move on. We say, I bet there's a story there. Right. We want to know that story. Be sure that you're telling us that story. Yeah. And we want to know that you've developed some sort of tools to help you get through that if a similar challenge happens to you in college. Right. We want to make sure that you are well equipped to handle handle anything that that life throws at you. Right. So don't leave that a mystery. We sort of hope that we don't notice. Make sure that we get the full story there. Yeah. Okay. So let's wrap things up here. I think it's important to point out that there are two things that are true at the same time. Thing number one, you shouldn't disqualify yourself from applying to selective schools. And two, you should be realistic about your college search. Yeah. We can't say this enough. Remember that admissions decisions from one school are not value judgments about your worth or your potential to be a successful college student somewhere. Right. If you learn about a school, you like what it offers. And you start to really imagine yourself thriving there academically, socially, personally, you should apply to that school. Yeah. Yeah. Let's make that crystal clear. Yeah. I would say though, but applying, you know, just to see if you'll get in isn't a great approach. Applying just because it's Yale and all through my hat and the ring is not great either. And applying even though you know you're unlikely to do well over four years here, just isn't a good use of your time or ours. So remember you are in the driver's seat here. I think sometimes people ask us this question because they're having a hard time answering it for themselves. Should I apply or not and say, well, can I just outsource this to the admissions office? Should I apply or not? Right. This is your decision. Remember there's three big decisions that are going to determine where you go to college. First one is where do I apply? And second one is where do you get in? The third one is where am I going to matriculate among the great options? You get to make two of those three choices. The first one where you apply, the third one where you matriculate, don't hand over one of those somebody else. It's your decision to make. Thanks to our friend and colleague Jill, who's both our sound engineer and a great admissions officer. Thanks to Reed, who is lending us his office. And thanks to former admissions officer Andrew Brick Johnson, who composes our music. You should check him out at AndrewBrickJohnson.com. If you have comments or an idea for an episode, drop us a line at Yale admissions [email protected]. And finally, remember that the views expressed in this podcast are ours and don't necessarily represent those of Yale University. Thanks for listening.