For some majors, this is straightforward, even if it isn’t necessarily easy. There are many research programs for students interested in medicine, competitions for students passionate about engineering. For students interested in business, however, things are trickier. There are far fewer easy pathways to get involved at the high school level, and far fewer simple ways to demonstrate their passion.

In this article, we’re going to explore how high school students can build their profile to apply to business programs at top colleges. We’ll look at what extracurriculars they should pursue, how they should spend their summers, and what these universities are looking for specifically. Let’s jump right in!

What a Good Business Profile Looks Like

Admissions officers are looking for certain things from applicants. Some of these are general; all applicants should have strong grades and high standardized test scores. Others, however, are more specific. Top colleges want to see that you were passionate about something in particular. If you are applying to a competitive major (such as business) that passion should be tied to your intended major. 

We also want to note that many top colleges don’t have official business majors; out of the Ivy League, only Cornell and Penn do. This advice holds true for students interested in studying economics, applied math, or statistics with an eventual interest in a career in the business world as well. 

For any students in this position, here is what top colleges expect to see when they examine your application: 

• High grades. They are particularly looking at your math scores. You should take calculus in high school; you can take statistics as well, but if you have to choose one, take calculus. 
• Test scores. These are a standard requirement for these schools. Exceptional scores won’t get you in, but they are expected for all serious applicants. 
• Essays. You should be able to clearly articulate your passion for a certain field, and be able to show (with examples and evidence) how you have engaged with it in the past. Colleges do not care about your future dreams of being a business leader, they want to know why you want to learn these principles now.
• Extracurriculars. Admissions officers want to see how you have actively pursued your passions in high school, through whatever opportunities are available to you, and the values you have developed by doing so. 

The last of these is the most difficult, and this is what we are going to spend most of the rest of this article discussing. 

High School Extracurriculars for Business Students

There is no singular correct extracurricular you can take part in to wow admissions officers and secure your place as a business major. We will go through some of the options available, and detail what each of them requires, so you can see which most appeals to you. Note that unlike many other potential fields of study, there are far fewer preset options for business students, and pursuing these will often take far more work and creativity on your part. 

High School Clubs

Joining or starting a high school club related to business is a good low-level commitment, a way to dip your toes in the water and see if this is the kind of thing which interests you. This is a good way to build community in your high school, and can lead to interesting opportunities, such as hosting speakers or networking events, or leading seminars for your fellow students. As far as activities go, this is a good way to show community commitment, and is a good choice for freshmen to get involved with.

Stock Trading

Trading in stocks as an amateur has a much lower barrier of entry than it used to, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea for a budding entrepreneur. We advise simulations first, and learning all you can about the market, before jumping in without knowing what you are doing. 

There are a number of online courses you can take on stock trading; we advise focusing on those offered by universities on reputable platforms, such as or . There are many self-proclaimed gurus on Youtube and elsewhere who claim to have mastered the secrets of the market, but their advice is rarely worth much. 

Building and maintaining a small portfolio of stocks over time can be impressive if managed well. The goal here is to show your interest in understanding the market and the deeper principles at play. Making money is good as well, but that serves mostly as a demonstration of competence, an external validation of what you have learned. 

Competitions

There are a small and limited number of business competitions available, and these are much less impressive than their counterparts in the sciences or engineering. You can partake in these, and they add a nice note to a profile, but they are not where you should focus your main efforts, for they are not terribly impressive for universities. We discuss a number of business-related competitions here. 

Internships

Internships are one of the best ways to build a business profile for college admissions; the trick is finding a good one. You can read our general guide to finding an internship here, but we want to elaborate on what makes one particularly suitable to build the profile of a business student. 

You do not specifically need to be working in finance or accounting or other strictly market-focused fields in your internship. Working at a startup or in an industry you find interesting works just as well. What’s really important is what you learn from doing so, the soft and hard skills you acquire. You should also be able to show off your contributions to the company, how things there were meaningfully improved by your presence and efforts. 

Quality internships can be hard to find; these are generally set up through personal connections and networking. Standardized internship pathways generally only exist for college students, with little available for high schoolers. This is part of what makes a significant internship so impressive to colleges, for they know the work required to land one. You can pursue an internship during the school year or the summer, but longer term commitments do more to raise your profile. You should aim for an accomplishment of this caliber by the summer after your junior year.

Starting a Business

Starting a business is hard, but if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, it can be a great way to demonstrate your drive and passion to admissions officers. Starting a full business can be a complicated affair, and we don’t suggest going into this blindly; begin with a concept, plan carefully, and get advice and input from your parents. You don’t want to waste your time or money, or worse yet, end up on the wrong side of the IRS.

Starting a business is impressive because it is a practical thing, and often teaches you many lessons outside of what you can expect. Hard work and resilience are traits colleges look for in students, along with the drive to create something new. Most students will struggle with this, but if you have a solid idea and can make a good business plan, this can be something worth pursuing. 

Doing Research

This is more applicable to students who are interested in economics, but it is a good way to showcase your intellectual vitality to colleges, your desire to pursue knowledge for its own sake. Economics is a particularly tricky discipline for high school students to enter, even amongst the other social sciences, but publishing your work in a high school journal still shows a depth of understanding and commitment. 

Working

Having a job isn’t usually thought of as an ideal way to impress colleges (though many do appreciate students who have done an honest day’s work), but it is particularly useful for students interested in business. After all, what better way to understand how a business operates than by being inside one as it operates, what better way to understand the value of money than by working for it?

The benefits come regardless of the work you do; waiting tables and flipping burgers can give you valuable insights. This is particularly true because high school students generally can’t get hired to do accounting or manage sales; if you get an internship covering those topics, excellent, but otherwise, a simple job can grant many of the same benefits. 

A Note on Hospitality

As a final note, if you are looking at a program which focuses on hospitality management (notably, Cornell’s ), then your profile will need to include experience in hospitality specifically. This generally takes the form of working experience, though internships are also common. 

The summer after your junior year is often the best time to pursue these opportunities; child labor laws make doing so earlier in high school quite difficult. This is something you should think about when deciding on your future goals in business. Note that working in hospitality does prepare you for other business-related majors, but the reverse is not true. 

Final Thoughts

There is no single ”right” profile to have as a student interested in applying for a business major, but many different pieces you can put together into a unified whole. You can and should have extracurriculars outside of business as well, but we hope this article has given you insight into what admissions officers expect to see from competitive applicants, and how best you can give that to them. 

If you’re looking for help finding the right activities for you to pursue in high school, or aren’t sure how to get started on your path to a business degree, �ԹϹ��� can make your life easier. Our mentors are experts at every aspect of the admissions process, from finding the best activities to crafting the best essays to tell your story. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

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But how does this impact your odds of admission? What do admissions officers think, reading dozens of applications from the same high school? Will you be compared to your classmates, weighed and judged relative to them? These are common and understandable concerns, and in this article, we’re going to address them. Our goal is to help you understand how colleges handle students from the same high school, and how it does (and doesn’t) matter for you.

Colleges Do Not Directly Compare Students

This is the first and most important point, since it informs all the ones which follow. When colleges read your application, they are evaluating it on its strengths and merits alone. You aren’t compared to your classmates, your neighbors, whoever’s application was in the stack next to yours; you are judged as yourself alone. 

This does not mean that your highschool doesn’t impact your chances of college admissions, nor does it mean that this impact will differ if there are many or few applicants from your school. What it does mean is that you won’t be admitted and another student from your school cut, or your application binned because they liked someone more from your school. 

Now, you will not be compared to individual students, but admissions officers are people, not machines, and so your application will be read in context. If your essays sound exactly like everyone else’s, they are more likely to be forgotten. If your activities have nothing that stands out, they won’t be remembered. This, however, is true regardless of whether other applicants are from your school or not. 

In some ways, this is very liberating. You are not directly in competition with anyone, you simply need to be the best student possible. This brings things back full circle, with a lot of pressure on you to present yourself to colleges well. If you want any specific advice on that, �ԹϹ��� can help. 

How Multiple Students From a School Does Impact Admissions

Now that we’ve covered the most important disclaimer, we can dive into how admissions officers actually view and evaluate multiple students who come to them from the same high school. There are several ways this impacts applications; none of which inherently make you more or less likely to get admitted, but which can impact how you should approach your applications. 

School Reports and Familiarity

Top colleges try to evaluate students in context. This means your grades and test scores are evaluated in large part based on the school you attended. Students who attend schools with fewer resources and opportunities are judged based on that, not directly compared to students who attended a well-resourced school. 

The way admissions officers do this is by reviewing school profiles; these are compiled and sent by a school’s guidance counselor. These cover what courses your school offers, and the average performance of students at the school on everything from AP tests and SATs to graduation rates and college attendance. 

A single admissions officer generally reads for a region; the more students from your school who apply, the more that admissions officer will see that profile, and the more familiar with your school they’ll be. This can be both good and bad, but is generally a good thing. The admissions officer will fully understand the context of your school if many students apply, and be able to judge you accordingly. All you have to do is stand out as exceptional within that context. 

If your school is less well represented, then the admissions officer will still do their best to evaluate you in proper context, but this can be more difficult for them. You can always ask your guidance counselor what your school’s profile looks like, and add any information you think is pertinent to your additional information section. 

Letters of Recommendation

If multiple students are applying from your school, then admissions officers are probably going to be reading letters from a small group of teachers. This is not bad necessarily, admissions officers will still only care what your teachers say about you, but they will notice if they’re reading letters from the same teachers over and over again.

This is especially true because many teachers will evaluate students in comparative terms. Only one student each year can be the best, or their favorite. You don’t have to suck up to teachers, or be the star pupil in every class, but you should be sure to get letters from teachers who like you, where you served as a positive presence in their classroom. 

You also don’t want teachers to praise you falsely. Admissions officers have noticed that some teachers (especially at private schools) will go over the top with superlatives. When a teacher has named four students over the past four years as “the best student they’ve ever seen,” that phrase loses some of its impact. Familiarity with your teachers can be helpful, but only if they can write letters that genuinely speak to your abilities and presence in the classroom. 

Test Scores

Colleges evaluate your standardized test scores in the context of your high school. The choice of whether or not you should apply test optional depends much more on how your scores look compared to your high school’s averages than compared to what the college’s average rates are. (This does depend a bit on the college. This holds true for Harvard, while Texas A&M generally only looks at raw scores).

This is true regardless of how many students from your school who apply. This also means there can be a disconnect between a student’s test scores and their admissions outcome, especially if they used test optional policies at some colleges strategically. You should try to determine the average test scores at your school; if all else fails, your guidance counselors should know. 

What All of This Means for Your Applications

When you are deciding where to apply to college, where everyone else in your high school is applying shouldn’t be a major factor in your decision. It is possibly something to take into account, another piece of strategic information, but it should not make or break your choice of where to apply. 

Colleges do not have quotas from particular schools, but there is often a limit to how many students from a school get admitted. This is because colleges want a bit of geographic diversity in each class. Rice loves students from Texas, but they do want to admit students from Florida and Vermont too. Your high school isn’t the determining factor here, but your state or town can be. 

What colleges are looking for varies with each student, and here too you want to be careful when comparing yourself to other students from your high school. Doing the most activities, winning the most awards, won’t automatically get you in, and risks burnout. 

Colleges want unique specialists, so even looking at students from your school who got in in previous years won’t give you an automatic path to follow. After all, they already have a student like that, why would they want to admit one who’s exactly the same. This can be overwhelming, but the truth is if you focus on yourself, on developing your interests and passions, on following those to the highest possible level, you’ll become the kind of student and scholar colleges love to admit. 

Final Thoughts

We hope this article has helped answer your questions on this. The high school you attend very much matters when it comes to college admissions, but not always in the ways you think. From the classes you can take to the clubs you can join, high school is often fundamental to forming who you are as a person, and sets you up for your whole future. Just remember you aren’t competing directly with your peers in college admissions, that will make the whole thing a little bit less stressful.

If you’re looking for help choosing the right high school to support your needs, or want advice on how to make sure your application stands out and is memorable amidst the crowd of thousands, �ԹϹ��� is here for you. Our mentors are experts on every aspect of the admissions process, and we love helping students tell their unique stories, showing off their strengths to colleges. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

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The New York Times recently published a piece on the ; click bait in part, but also an interesting examination of a significant amount of data. In this article, we’re going to look at that same data and the New York Times’s conclusions with a more critical eye, to try and formulate the best advice for students and parents trying to decide on the right college education to invest in.

What Does the New York Times Say?

The New York Times is itself analyzing and reporting on data from the , an organization which does statistical research into higher education. The point of their research was to compare the average earning from majors at colleges with benchmarks set out by the Department of Education. These benchmarks are meant to ensure a reasonable rate of return; that is that graduates from programs earn a reasonable amount. 

The HEA Group’s findings are quite positive; almost all college programs (~98%) meet the set benchmarks; almost all majors at almost all colleges outearn their high school graduate peers. Approximately 14% of programs perform exceptionally well, outearning their high school peers by at least $50,000 annually. 

This data is all in a very large excel file; what the New York Times did is make it much more easily searchable, so that you can check out the average salary for a particular major at a particular college. This is a useful tool, though there are some limitations in the data. 

The largest is the limit of sample size. The data only comes from students who graduated in 2017-18 and 2018-19; this is a snapshot, not a long-term trend chart. The data also only comes from students who received financial aid form the federal government; thus the wealthiest students and international students aren’t represented in these datasets at all. In spite of this, the data is quite useful, as is the New York Times’ tool for exploring it more granularly. 

What Does the Data Say �ԹϹ��� College Majors?

Some of the data is completely unsurprising. If you simply sort the universities by which schools have the top earners, institutions like Caltech, UCLA, Duke, MIT, and Harvard top the list. Indeed, all of the top ranked universities in the US do quite well in terms of the average salary of graduates. 

The top earning majors list is also full of the usual suspects. Computer science, mathematics, and electrical engineering hold the top spots. Math may surprise some people, but recent trends in hiring show that firms on Wall Street prefer math majors over business or economics majors. The more quantitative the field of finance becomes, the more valuable a deep understanding of math is. 

Some fields are harder to parse; any major with fewer than 15 graduates from a school is not included in order to preserve student anonymity, so less-subscribed fields like languages and area studies are harder to gauge. Other fields, like biology, may lead to high paying fields for doctors eventually, but that won’t be shown in this data because those one-day doctors are still in medical school, not yet earning. 

The New York Times has also helpfully provided a full list of the majors and institutions with the highest overall average salaries. These are: 

1. Mathematics, Duke University: $297,029
2. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, $268,121
3. Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, $250,168
4. Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, $241,380
5. Statistics, Harvard University, $230,867
6. Computer Engineering, UCLA, $228,705
7. Computer Science, MIT, $225,141
8. Computer Science, Cornell University, $223,309
9. Computer Science, Princeton University, $217,973
10. Computer Science, Pomona College, $217,051

Again, this is merely a snapshot, but the pattern in the data is hard to miss. Going to college generally does offer students good earning, but some majors and schools do far better than good, while a few schools and majors underperform expectations. The most surprising of these are music; even top ranked music schools often have remarkably poor earnings. Several of these are even at risk of running afoul of the new Department of Education rules.

What This Data Means for College Applicants

We do want to caution against using this data to decide what you want to major in. This is employment data from only two years of graduates, and reflects a very particular market trend; computer science majors graduating in 2018-19 were entering right into the start of the AI boom, and an incredible windfall for many Silicon Valley companies.

It is impossible to predict what the financial or jobs market will look like four years from now when you are graduating college, or if you’ll be entering into a boom or bust cycle for any particular field. There are some overall trends which are more useful to consider however, and which we do think students should look at. 

The first is the relative value of different colleges. Top colleges are more costly (though often not by much), and offer generally higher salaries across the board; the highest earners from top ranked colleges outearn their peers, and even in less popular or well-paid majors students who attend higher ranked colleges still have higher average salaries. 

The next tier of colleges for earning tend to be the top performing state schools. They don’t always have the same prestige, but graduates from UT Austin, Michigan, UIUC, and Purdue all do quite well in terms of their earnings. They tend to be a bit more lopsided; certain programs at these schools do better than others, but they do a solid job preparing students for successful careers. 

What this data doesn’t factor in, and what should be a major part of your own considerations, is the cost of attending these colleges. College is an incredibly expensive investment; this data shows that it often pays off quite nicely, but you still want to be cognizant of how much you’re investing and what you’re getting for that. 

How to Make College Pay Off for You

So how should you apply all of this data to your own college applications? We recommend factoring it in most when building your college list, considering not just the price of schools, but how much attending a particular school is likely to benefit you. Here’s some key tips for doing so.

Always Consider Top Schools

Not every student is qualified for, or wants to attend, Harvard. That said, if you have the kind of application profile that makes you a legitimate contender for top universities, then you should consider applying to them. Colleges claim they aren’t job training centers, but top rated schools are consistently the best at this thing they claim not to do. 

Top universities often also have the most generous need-based aid, so even middle class and upper middle class students can get a better deal on college tuition at these schools than at other institutions. This makes them even better as an investment, since you will be paying less and likely earning more. 

Public Colleges Offer Good Returns for In-State Students

Public colleges may not top the list of top earning alumni, but many of them aren’t that far behind the top private universities in how much their students earn. More appealingly, many of them have far lower tuition costs for in-state students. While they tend to have less generous financial aid, the overall cost for many students is low, and acceptance rates are more forgiving than top private schools. 

For out of state colleges, however, the tradeoff is often far worse. Out of state public colleges often charge nearly as much as private universities, acceptance rates for students are lower, and there is far less financial aid available. In certain cases, this can still be a good idea, but this should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. 

Lower Ranked Private Universities

There are many private universities which are lower ranked. These are still good schools, and you will get a good education from them, but they often have worse financial aid. The pay rates for alumni at these schools are somewhat lower on average than top schools, but not by much, and getting a degree from them will still lead to good career outcomes for most students. 

Instead, what you need to be aware of for these schools is how much you’re paying. These schools often have high tuitions and far less financial aid available, as they do not have the large endowments many top universities enjoy. These can be fine schools to have on your list, but you should consider cost when deciding where to attend. 

Choice of Major

Almost across the board, students who attend college outearn their peers who don’t. Your choice of major does matter, but we caution you against choosing a major based solely on this data. Many students don’t end up working in the field they major in, and many different major paths can lead to gainful and enjoyable employment. Your choice of major should reflect your profile, in order to maximize your chances of admission to these schools. 

Final Thoughts

Students and parents are rightfully concerned about the rising costs of college tuition, and want to be sure that they pick a college to attend that will be a good investment, and set them up for the future. The article by the New York Times provides some helpful data, but that data only tells part of the story. We hope that this article has helped you understand some of the nuances of choosing a college, and how the right choice can help set you up for success in the future. 

If you’re looking for advice building your college list, or finding the best schools to prepare you for the future, �ԹϹ��� can help. Our mentors specialize in helping students find schools that will support them, and in guiding you through the overly complex application process. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

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But how dangerous are college campuses really? Violent crimes and sensationalized stories grab the headlines regularly because they drive attention, but those don’t provide a full picture. In this article we’re going to cover campus safety at top colleges, including a safety rating based on reported crime incidents. We’re going to cover how concerned you should be, and how this may impact your college choices. Let’s dive in.

How Much Crime Takes Place at College

Overall, the number of crimes committed on college campuses has been steadily declining for years, mirroring broader societal trends. You can see this in the data collected by the US Department of Education, which collects these statistics nationwide:

This table does not differentiate crimes by source, but if you want to investigate their data further, you can find it . Generally, crime has been declining across all categories over the period surveyed. This includes violent crimes such as assault, and property crimes such as burglary and robbery. 

This does not mean all colleges are created equal, and some situations are worse than others. Generally, crimes on college campuses fall into two distinct categories, with different risk factors. 

Neighborhood Crimes

These often grab headlines, and are a major cause of concern. It is true that some colleges are in less savory neighborhoods; we’ve all heard of Yale and UChicago and how they need many campus police to help protect students from the neighborhood the schools are situated in. These are the crimes which vary most by college, and which you can best control for through college choice. 

On-Campus Crimes

These are crimes perpetrated by students themselves, from the drunken antics of overexcited sports fans to more serious crimes, up to and including sexual violence. The neighborhood around colleges matters less for these crimes, as the students themselves are the source of trouble. This does not mean that college students are all criminals, far from it, but there are bad actors in any population, and students themselves do make an impact on reported crimes. 

Ranking Campus Safety

How then should we rank campus safety? In this case, we are primarily evaluating the neighborhoods colleges are situated in, though crimes reported on campus factor in as well. Note, however, that high reports of on campus crime do not mean necessarily that more crime occurs there, but merely that a college may have a better and more supportive reporting infrastructure. 

Our grades for safety are based off of FBI . This is for the city surrounding the college, not just the college itself. The crime as percent of undergrad is the approximate proportion of undergraduate students at a university who are impacted by crime each year. 

So What Does This Mean?

The first thing to note is that the safety of a college’s environs doesn’t correlate much at all with how safe it is for students. Nor can we see much of a pattern in what kind of environs they are, and how safe it is for students on campus. College towns, big cities, and rural areas are all very different environments, but one is not inherently safer than another for college students.

In some ways, this is quite reassuring; even schools that are in less savory areas are still quite safe for their students to attend. It also shows how hard it is to draw conclusions about safety just from where a school is located. 

A final note is that the size and prestige of a school don’t correlate with safety much at all from what we’ve seen. A school with more resources may be able to invest more in safety, but this does not always pay dividends. Note also that some schools crack down on and criminalize behaviour that others punish. Harvard does not condone underage drinking of course, but they may turn a blind eye to it, while there are some schools which crack down much harder, and thus generate far more criminal incidents involving students.

What this data tells us more generally is that college is always going to be less than perfectly safe. Colleges invest a lot of money into security and policies to protect students, but the world is an imperfect and dangerous place, and for many students college is their first real taste of this phenomenon. 

Colleges give safety presentations to students during orientation, to let them know what supports and services are available, and preparing for the neighborhood around a college is part of the transition. This can be something of a culture shock, especially when students want to move out of on-campus housing. However, college is still in general a secure environment, and universities want students to feel safe during their four years on and around campus. 

Should This Impact Your College List?

Safety is a concern for parents and students alike, but whether or not safety concerns should impact where you decide to apply or attend is up to you. Safety is merely another factor to take into consideration when deciding which college and campus will fit you best, and best serve your needs. 

Students mature at different rates, and have differing abilities to handle themselves. Some graduate high school full of personal and situational awareness, and able to navigate the world around them with open eyes. Others may need a few more years to get the full measure of the world, and participate in it safely. 

There is no shame in being somewhat naive about the world as a high school graduate; indeed, it means your parents did a good job in raising you, and helped you avoid many of the struggles of life. It can make for a rough transition to college in some cases, especially when the college in question is rougher around the edges than the high school environment you are used to. 

In these cases, smaller and more suburban and rural colleges can be a better choice. College towns are not definitively safer than major cities, but their problems tend to be more self-contained within the student body itself, as the school and town are close to one and the same. This allows students to step outside the safe boundaries of their former environment, without straying too far from what they have known. 

Final Thoughts

Safety on campus is just one of many concerns parents have about sending their students off to college, and it’s one we find ourselves discussing regularly. We hope that this article has proven enlightening, showing that colleges are, on the whole, quite safe, and just how seriously they take the safety of their students. 

Of course, safety is just one factor among many to consider when researching and evaluating colleges. Doing this for a full college list can be quite difficult, especially with all the other demands students have on their time. If you are looking for help with this research, or with building the right college list for you, schedule a free consultation with us today. We have a long experience working with students to make their lives easier, and are always happy to hear from you. 

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We understand that this process can be difficult and annoying, even painful, and you may be tempted to take shortcuts, or even skip out on editing altogether. We understand the impulse, but we’re here to offer you a better way: a series of tips and strategies to make the editing process (relatively) easy and painless. It still requires work, but our goal is to make your life simpler, and the process easier to manage. Let’s jump right in!

Tip 1: Don’t Begin Editing Immediately

We can understand the impulse to finish writing an essay and then immediately set to editing it; you want to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible. There are two main flaws with this approach however: 

1. The longer you look at the same piece of writing, the more your eyes just glide over errors in it, your brain automatically correcting typos or awkward phrasing.
2. The longer you work on one thing in a sitting, the more you risk burn out, or cease to care about it at all.

Our first tip is to let an essay sit and breathe for a short spell before returning to edit it. This doesn’t mean you can just forget it forever, but leaving a week between writing an essay and editing it for the first time lets you look at it with fresh eyes and perspective, and keeps the amount of time you spend working on it in short and manageable chunks. 

This does mean you will need to start your essays a reasonable amount of time before the deadline, but we recommend doing this for all of your college application work. College applications are very stressful, and trying to get them all done against the ticking clock doesn’t help reduce that pressure. The regular decision deadline is in January, but if you start the essays and editing now, your holidays will have much less stress for you. 

Tip 2: Edit By Order of Magnitude

There is no set term for what we mean by this, but the goal is simple: to never do any editing work you don’t have to do. This means your edits should start large, and then become small. If you’re going to remove a paragraph entirely and replace it with something else, then it’s not worth your time to stress over the grammar or phrasing in that paragraph. 

Here is our order of operations when we work with students to edit their essays: 

1. Conceptual edits. These change the core concept of the essay, or some piece of it, and require a large portion to need to be rewritten. For example, changing an anecdote about learning to drive to one about fishing with your grandfather. This generally involves recreating large portions of an essay, and so should always be done first. 
2. Structural edits. These change the overall layout of the essay, without changing the core topic. Conceptual edits rework the whole, these rework a single paragraph or section. For example, if you are writing about learning to fish, a structural edit may cut a paragraph of set up to add more room to talk about the values you learned from fishing.
3. Line edits. These are changes to individual sentences, where you look at how each contributes to the meaning of the paragraph. Only move to these once you are certain the overall shape of the essay is in place.
4. Grammar edits. These are the simplest edits, and should be done last. Missed commas, word choice, typos; fix these things only once you are done with major rewrites of the essay, so you aren’t faced with doing this again and again.

We know editing isn’t fun, and by approaching it in this way, you minimize the actual amount of editing you have to do. You do still have to go through every step, but working from the big edits down to the small ones streamlines the entire process, and won’t see you sweating over the same paragraph repeatedly. 

Tip 3: Phone a Friend

All of the writing you do on your college essays must be your own, but you are allowed (and encouraged) to get help during the editing process. You must be careful to preserve your voice, but asking others for help will let you catch things you may have missed, and make sure the values you are trying to portray actually come through when someone new reads your essay. 

There are plenty of options here, but these are the most common we see students take advantage of: 

• English teachers (or other teachers). Many schools assign a draft of the personal statement in English class, but even if they don’t, you can often ask your English teacher to do you a favor. This is extra work they don’t have to do, so ask politely, and make sure to thank them after. The better student you are in their class, the more likely they are to say yes, but this is one of the best ways to get advice on revising a college essay.
• School counselors. Depending on your high school, there may be one or more counselors whose sole job is to help students with college admissions. While they have a lot of students to attend to, they can usually do an editing pass on your essays. 
• Independent counselors. You can always hire an independent counseling company to help you with your essays; we’re quite good at that, for example. 
• Parents. Your parents may not always be stellar writers, but they can offer useful feedback, especially on whether your essay is doing a good job conveying the message you want it to.
• Friends. Getting together with a group of friends and trading your essays around to edit each others may not be the most exciting hangout activity, but can get you a bunch of extra eyes on your essay.

When asking others for editing help, you want to be sure that the voice and message of your essays is still uniquely your own. After all, colleges are looking to admit you, not your parents, not your teachers, and not your friends. Many students are uncomfortable with their voice, but this is exactly what colleges want from essays. Your writing should be as good as you make it, but it should be yours. 

Thus you should listen to suggestions and edits when asking others for editing help, and add them in when you can see how they will improve and strengthen your essay. For larger edits, editors shouldn’t suggest full rewrites, but different framings or concepts that may work better, such as removing unnecessary details, or diving deeper into the details of what you have done. 

A Note on AI Editing Help

You will notice that we did not include AI editing tools in the list of options for places to seek editing help. This is for two reasons. The first is that many colleges forbid the use of AI editing tools for anything except grammatical edits; you can use a spellchecker, basically, but nothing more than that.

This does work on the honor system, but colleges have been looking more closely at student essays for use of AI, and we suspect students who are obvious in their use of it will see their essays severely penalized. 

The other problem with AI editing is that, especially if it is proposing major structural or phrasing edits, is that it sands down the originality of your essay. What colleges want to see is your unique voice, and many AI edits remove that. The essay may be more polished, but it is also going to sound more alike to every other essay a student polished with AI help. When your goal in the admissions process is to stand out from a crowd of thousands, that is non-ideal, to say the least. 

You can use AI for a grammar and spelling check, but most writing programs have one of those built in already. In general, there isn’t much reason to use an AI tool when trying to edit an essay, especially when there are much better options available. 

Tip 4: Know When to Stop

You will need to do more than one editing pass, but there is a time when editing ends and you must submit. The real trick is knowing when an essay is good enough; the prose polished, the transitions fluid. This can be hard to judge on your own; there is a temptation to stop too early to avoid extra work, or to keep going past the point of madness in a quest for perfection. 

There is no singular rule for how many rounds of edits an essay needs before it is done. Once you can show it to someone else, and they come away with the message you want them to get from the essay, and you’ve worked the phrasing and structure as well as you can manage, we advise ending the editing process. 

We wish we had a more set rule we could use, but each essay is unique, as is the voice of each student. We use our expertise to judge when an essay has reached its final form and is ready to submit, but this is something we have gained through long years of practice in the business of writing essays. You can and should ask your high school teachers or counselors for advice on your own essays. 

Final Thoughts

College essays are always going to be stressful to write. They are very important and completely unlike any essays you’ve been asked to write before, and this confluence of factors inevitably leads to stress in how to manage them. We hope that this article has helped you understand one facet of approaching these essays, and given you strategies to approach them that will let you keep your own stress levels down somewhere reasonable. 

College admissions is often a terrible time for students, but it doesn’t have to be. Like with all confusing and difficult tasks, it is easier with a guide, and expert who can help you past pitfalls and show you a sure path towards your goals. That’s where �ԹϹ��� can help. If you’re looking for guidance on writing your own essays, or advice on strategies to apply to top colleges, then schedule a free consultation with us today, we’re always happy to speak with you.

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This is only heightened in the age of artificial intelligence, with countless services and applications promising to help you create the perfect applications without effort, all while colleges grow increasingly strict about not wanting any applicants to use AI in their submissions. In this article, we’re going to break down AI policies at top colleges, and explain what admissions officers actually want to see from your application. 

What are AI Policies for Admission to Top Colleges?

Every college sets their own policy; these are developed independently, but these colleges are able to see what their fellows do, and they do exist in the same environment, with many of the same perspectives and concerns. Thus, these policies often have quite a bit in common. We aren’t going to be able to list out every college’s policy, but here’s a chart featuring the policies of top schools in the US for use of AI in admissions: 

What we can see here is that most schools have policies, and these policies generally ban the use of AI in any substantial way. There are some differences; some schools may be okay with the use of AI in brainstorming while others are not, but no schools with AI policies are okay with students using AI tools to write their essays, in whole or in part. 

That some schools do not have written AI policies does not mean those schools are okay with you using AI to write their essays either. rules do not apply in this situation. We are not sure why some schools have not yet created written policies on the use of AI, but those that do have a remarkable consensus: admissions officers don’t want to see it in your essays. 

What Admissions Officers Really Want, and Why AI Can’t Do That

Admissions officers want to understand who you are as a person and student. The reason they ask for all those supplemental essays is to better understand who you are. It may surprise you, but they aren’t just trying to stress you out and give you more work to do; they really do care about your answers to these questions, and they read them carefully to gain insights into the kind of person you are, and how you think about the world. 

Coming at it from this perspective, it makes much more sense why admissions officers don’t appreciate the use of AI in essays. AI tools can create polished writing, but they do not understand nor speak for you. They don’t know your wants or passions, they have no sense of your inner life or desires, and they cannot impart who you are or what really matters to you. 

In addition to this, AI writing is often quite bland. It has a degree of polish, but it is all glitter and no substance, as satisfying as a meal of painted cardboard. When admissions officers have to read thousands or tens of thousands of essays each season, they can become quite tired of this boring sameness. If you cannot find it worth doing to write an essay, admissions officers may question how much you really care about their school.

What This Means for Your Applications

We always advise students to avoid using AI in their applications, and reading what colleges think about the use of generative AI helps show why. While not every school has an official policy on the use of AI, from conversations with admissions officers, and what they’ve expressed in webinars and Q&A sessions, none of them enjoy reading AI generated essays. 

The easy takeaway for your applications then is that you probably shouldn’t use AI, not for drafting or editing your essays, not for activities lists, not for ideas on application strategy. This seems self-evident, but is also quite difficult for many students to implement, since these tools are becoming so pervasive. 

To help you implement this in your own essay writing, here are places where students often seek to rely on AI (which colleges specifically dislike when they see), and how you can approach them instead:

Brainstorming

Picking an essay topic is hard, one we spend a lot of time working on with students. It is tempting to ask AI for help, but the issue is that if every student asks AI, it will generate the same or similar responses for all students, thus leading to your essay being quite similar to those written by other applicants. 

Instead, when you are looking at essay topics, you should make lists of your activities and passions, and then a list of your core values. Draw connections between these, and look for unusual connections. Maybe football taught you discipline and teamwork, or maybe it taught you creativity or gave you a respect for environmentalism. How? That’s a good question, and answering it makes for an interesting essay.

Essay Writing

This is the core thing every college with an AI policy bans, and which even colleges without an explicit AI policy forbid through anti-plagiarism rules. There is no easy work around for this, you actually have to sit down and write the essays for yourself. This can be hard, but that’s rather the point. 

The best trick is that an essay does not have to be perfect to start with. A first draft is almost always bad, and that’s okay. Create an outline, write it out, and see where you stand. It won’t be perfect, you won’t have showcased your ideas fully, and that’s okay. The only way to become better at writing is to do it, there are sadly no shortcuts to this, but the experience of doing it will help with future writing projects.

Editing Your Essays

Colleges are generally okay with using AI for baseline edits, but these are the same edits proposed by any good spell-checker. The issue with major AI edits, rephrasing and restructuring and rewording, is that it removes you from what is supposed to be your essay. The traces of personality and individuality are what flavor these essays, what makes them interesting and worth reading. 

Instead, we advise asking a third party to look over your essay and give feedback. Your
English teacher, your counselor, your peers, your parents, all can give you advice on how to improve your essay, without overwriting what makes it really yours. Just remember that these people shouldn’t write your essay for you; the whole of it must be your own. 

Final Thoughts

Technology changes, and so does college admissions, but what colleges have been looking for from students has been remarkably consistent over the past decade or so. The individual details change; the standards they have, the kinds of projects which impress them best, but what they want are bright and passionate students, ones who love learning for its own sake, and who will contribute meaningfully to the campus community if they are accepted.

We hope that this article has given you useful insight into how admissions officers approach applications, and why they don’t like seeing students use AI. If you want help crafting your own essays with the help of experts, and creating the best work that you are capable of, then �ԹϹ��� can help. Our mentors are masters of the admissions process, and are highly skilled at helping students show off their best traits to admissions officers. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you on your admissions journey.

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You can see an example of this kind of list from , one of the most-cited college ranking organizations. This is just another ranking amongst dozens they offer, but is quite relevant to many students, and sees some colleges ranked quite highly that otherwise do not on these lists. In this article, we’re going to look at what social mobility rankings mean, how they’re calculated, and whether or not this should impact where you apply to college.

What is a Social Mobility Ranking?

We’re going to begin by defining social mobility in terms of college education. This is the function where a college takes in a student of a low socio-economic background, and thanks to the education and opportunities they receive at the college, they are able to enter a higher socio-economic tier. This doesn’t mean that everyone who attends the college immediately becomes a millionaire; these are aggregated scores, looking at the whole population of students. 

Thus these rankings are calculated by looking at where students are when they come in, and comparing it to how they fare after graduation. US News conveniently publishes their behind their college rankings, allowing us to look at this in more detail.

Note that this ranking specifically looks at how students improve due to attending a college. If a college attracts a significant portion of students who are already from a high socio-economic background, then it doesn’t get any points if they remain such after they graduate. This can cause many top colleges to have lower ranks in this category; while top colleges do seek to serve all students, many of them have a high population of students from . 

These rankings are also major and field of study blind. There are separate investigations which look at how well certain majors at a university prepare students for a career (And how well those careers pay), but that isn’t covered by social mobility rankings. The expectation for these rankings is that regardless of what a student majors in, the university should give them the resources and connections needed to see success. 

Finally, as with all college rankings, these should be taken with a major grain of salt. Rankings do not, and cannot, capture every nuance of what a college offers, nor do they offer advice specific to your situation. They may give you a place to begin looking, but they can only ever be a starting point for more in-depth investigations. 

What Are the Best Colleges for Social Mobility?

The top ranked universities for social mobility vary by who’s doing the ranking, so here’s the list from US News as a starting point. You can see their full list , but here are their top five schools for social mobility in 2027: 

1. Florida International University
2. UC Riverside
3. Oakland City University
4. UC Merced
5. Rutgers University

None of these are bad schools, and you can get a great education at most of them. They are not, however, synonymous with excellence; none of them are in the top fifty, and the highest rated overall (Again by US News) is UC Merced at 69th. We’ve criticized college rankings plenty, but why is there such a gap between what schools rank well overall and which rank highly for social mobility.

To drive this point home, here are some of the top ranked colleges, and where they list on this social mobility ranking: 

• MIT: #81 Social Mobility (#1 Overall)
• Princeton: #40 Social Mobility (#2 Overall)
• Harvard: #68 Social Mobility (#3 Overall)
• Yale: #68 Social Mobility (#4 Overall)
• Caltech: #123 Social Mobility (#5 Overall)
  

So what gives? Are these top schools actually terrible at helping students from less-advantaged backgrounds gain success? Not quite; the disconnect stems from how social mobility rankings are calculated. 

These rankings are looking at how good the university is overall at helping students advance their social standing, and this is based on the percentage of students who attend who do so. A plurality of students entering Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, or indeed most top-rated colleges already come from well-off backgrounds. Not all students, certainly, but a significant and high percentage of them. 

Thus these rankings always rate top universities quite low. They simply do not help many students from less well-off backgrounds advance than some of their peers, either in terms of strict numbers, or as a percentage of attendees. 

Social Mobility vs Return on Investment

An alternate, and perhaps more useful metric to use when evaluating these colleges is return on investment. Top colleges are expensive (though often not as much as they appear), and so a better thing for many students to look at is what return on investment they’ll get from attending a particular school. 

US News and others often rank Return on Investment using terms like “Best Value Schools”, the colleges that give you the best value for your dollar. For many top universities, this is a far better measure of how well they will do at helping you advance your condition than their ranking on social mobility.

Most top colleges do a better job at helping any individual student from a low socio-economic background enter a higher one than schools which may have a much higher social mobility ranking. While top colleges are better at serving individual students, the schools that rank highly do a better job at improving the lot of larger numbers of students. 

What Does This Mean for You?

The first and most important thing to be aware of when considering a college’s potential impact on your future is that attending and graduating from an accredited college, regardless of degree, has a significant positive impact on your future earnings. This does not mean that all degrees are equal, but college itself, the credentials it gives you and the doors it opens, is often the most important part. 

What you should be looking for, if you are concerned about your future prospects, are schools that will best support your opportunities, and set you up for success. These are the factors we look at with students, especially those who are most concerned with social mobility. 

Overall Cost

The most important factor to consider is the overall cost of a university. Note that this isn’t the same as their listed tuition, especially for top schools; this is how much you end up paying after financial aid, but while including things like housing and supplies. The less you spend on college, and the less debt you have when you graduate, the more of a leg up you have afterwards. 

This metric generally makes top colleges more appealing. While they have much higher tuition costs, they also have far more generous need based aid, and often cover non-tuition costs with this aid. This will depend on you and your situation; we advise using tuition calculators to get estimates of how much each college will really cost you. 

Networking and Connections

There is a very old cliche about who you know being more important than what you know. This isn’t entirely true; you do need some baseline qualifications to get any job. Many jobs, however, are easier to get with connections, and when choosing between two candidates, one with a networked “in” most often lands on top.

You can do networking at all colleges, but top ranked colleges often have more (and more prestigious) industry contacts, alumni networks with more connections, and more opportunities for students to find internships and job placements through campus. When it comes to finding a job after graduation, these connections can help as much if not more than the degree you hold. 

Final Thoughts

Colleges are one of the best ways to improve your future prospects, to open up new career pathways, and to expand your options. We hope that this article has helped you understand how a college can boost your own prospects, and why social mobility rankings may not be the best measure to use. 

These are an important measure, and top colleges certainly could do more to help an increased number of students, but as the metrics exist now, social mobility tells you more about a college’s impacts societally than on an individual basis. As always, however, which college is right for you is a fully individual determination, for each student and situation is different. 

If you are looking for advice specific to your situation, or want help finding the college which will give you the best return on your investment, �ԹϹ��� is here for you. Our mentors are skilled at every aspect of the admissions process, and specializing in assisting students in finding the universities which best align with their goals and needs. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more; we’re always happy to hear from you. 

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What Are Columbia’s New Questions for International Students

Based on reporting by Columbia’s , we have a good look inside the process at Columbia. While college officials are not always willing to answer our calls or questions, they tend to be much more available to students at their schools, and student newspapers often do excellent reporting work. 

What specifically happened is that Columbia reached a settlement with the Department of Justice; like with many legal settlements, this had many separate components. One of these was to launch a comprehensive review of their admissions process for international students, and ask them why they want to study in the US. In order to comply with this, Columbia has now completed their review, and added this question to all applications for international students. 

Students have fifty words to respond to this prompt. It isn’t an essay response like Columbia’s other questions, but still must be answered carefully and deliberately. Here is the exact phrasing of the question: 

• Students can pursue a vast array of educational options all over the world. Given these choices, please share why you are interested in continuing your education at a university in the United States. 

Interestingly, while only international students were included in the deal, domestic applicants to Columbia are also asked to answer this question; we’ll cover how you should answer it later in this article. 

We are a bit late to the party noticing this, but Columbia has avoided publicizing it. It wasn’t listed on their collection of , nor does it show up on the page for .

At root for this new question is a mandate that Columbia reduce its financial dependence on international students. Columbia is the Ivy League school with the highest international student population by percentage; many of these are graduate students rather than undergrads, but it is likely why they are the ones dealing with this currently. The mandate to reduce financial reliance on international students is unfunded, but Columbia does appear to be trying to follow it. 

How to Answer Columbia’s International Student Question

If you are an international student, this is likely something you have already had to think about. This question exactly parallels one asked in visa interviews, and is something you should be able to speak to. This does raise the question of why it’s important you be asked this question twice, but we’ll explore that later. 

When answering this question, you want to be able to point to tangible benefits studying in the US will give you that you can’t get at home, but which don’t point to a deeper desire to emigrate to the US (even if that is among your goals). You don’t have to elaborate; with only fifty words to respond they aren’t really expecting you to. 

Your answer should highlight what about US colleges and the college experience specifically will be beneficial for you. There are many possible answers to give; for Colubia especially highlighting the liberal arts learning experience is always viable, since most other university systems globally do not take this approach. 

Interestingly, domestic students must also answer this question. This is likely to be easier for you, but you should still emphasize what’s particular about education in the US that appeals to you, from opportunities presented by the colleges themselves to simply wanting to stay a bit closer to home. 

What This Question Means for International Applicants

There has been an increase in uncertainty for international applicants to US colleges, with delays in visa processing, an increase in rejections, and the occasional ban on visas for students from entire countries. This question, while small, feels like part of a much larger pattern designed to discourage international applicants from attending US colleges. 

As this question has just been introduced by Columbia, we do not yet know how it will impact their admissions decisions, or if it will impact them at all. Indeed, this looks a lot like Columbia is checking a box that they have to, rather than eagerly implementing a new policy they stand behind. 

In terms of specific impacts for students applying to Columbia, we anticipate this having few effects. There may be a slight curtail in the number of applicants, but we don’t anticipate Columbia rejecting students over this question. So long as you give a reasonable and considered answer, it’s just another piece of paperwork to fill out while applying. 

The Broader Implications of this Question

A more interesting, and more concerning aspect of this question is that its inclusion in applications was part of Columbia’s deal with the federal government in the first place. This implies a continued federal interest in international applicants, and a desire to reduce or restrict the number of applicants attending US universities. This becomes all the more explicit with the mandate that Columbia reduce its financial reliance on international students. 

This is very off putting for many international students, which may be part of the intent. It is uncertain whether or not these questions will spread to other colleges, but we would not be surprised if these kinds of deals are repeated, especially as the federal government continues issuing investigations into top universities. 

What This Question Means for You

Where you choose to attend college is a highly personal choice, and a very important and weighty decision for many students. Policies like this, questions like this, can make international students feel particularly called out; as if they exist in a different class from all other students. One that, by all appearances, must justify their very existence. 

This isn’t a good feeling, and we can fully understand if this makes you wish to reconsider applying to Columbia or other colleges which ask questions like this. Columbia does still actively recruit and seek out international students and talent; they were not the originators of this policy, but they did agree to implement it, and they are asking the question on their application.

If you are applying to US universities as an international student, you have likely already thought long and hard about why you want to attend college in the US. Indeed, you’ll have to answer this same question again when you do a visa interview. We can understand if it turns you off a particular university, but a great many colleges in the US highly value international students.

This is part of why we encourage students to do a lot of research on colleges when building their college list. A university’s culture and values can have a major impact on your time and experience there, for both good and ill. Asking a question like this doesn’t necessarily mean a school won’t be a good fit for you culturally, but it is still worth being aware of, and taking into consideration.

Final Thoughts

Applying to US colleges is always harder for international students; while most colleges don’t have official quotas, they do always admit more domestic students, and have higher barriers of entry for international applicants. On top of that, application requirements are not geared towards international students; everything from the SATs to English proficiency is another thing to keep track of, another box to check. This question is another thing on the pile, just one more piece to keep track of and paperwork to deal with for international students. 

If you are looking for help finding the right US universities to welcome you as an international student, or guidance navigating an often overly-complex application process, then �ԹϹ��� can help. Our mentors are experts in every aspect of college applications, and we love helping students from all over the globe find the right college to support their needs. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more about how we can help you.

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This case study is paywalled, as is so often the case with academic research, making casual perusal difficult. To that end, we’ve gained access, and will share with you the wisdom and insight contained within. In this article, we;ll go over the insights this case study provides on Northeastern, and then we’ll see how it has shaped what the school offers students. We’ll look at what this may mean for colleges as a whole, and what it means for you as you look at colleges. Let’s jump right in!

What Does Harvard Business School Say �ԹϹ��� Northeastern?

It’s probably best to begin by determining what Harvard actually says about Northeastern in their case study. The focus is not on how Northeastern shot up the rankings; this is already well understood and has been often discussed. Instead, it looks at how Northeastern has managed to expand, both in terms of program offerings and adding branch campuses, and at how they have made several distinctive programs that responded to the desires of students and parents. 

In short, the case study looks at Northeastern as if it’s a company, seeing how it responds to a changing market, and pointing out that it has managed to do so better than many of its contemporary colleges. Now, Northeastern isn’t a business. Like every legitimate college, it is a nonprofit, and runs as one, but much of the logic that applies to business decisions can be used to understand its successes. 

The key to everything that happened is Northeastern’s president, Joseph Aoun. For any large institution, leadership is key, but Aoun has combined a clear vision with a very long tenure. Indeed, he’s been heading Northeastern since 2006; he did not start their quest to rise through the rankings, but he has overseen a significant part of their journey. 

In doing so, he has sought to leverage Northeastern’s strengths, and to identify gaps and inefficiencies in how colleges work, along with various loopholes. There has been luck involved, but a lot of hard work too. The first major benefit came during the 2008 recession. Northeastern and other colleges took endowment hits, but Northeastern, then and now, is mainly funded by tuition dollars, with a comparatively small endowment. 

This meant that they took less of a hit, relatively speaking, than many peers, and used this as a time to expand instead of contracting. This was a risk, but it allowed them to add faculty and build their coop program at a time when few other universities were hiring, allowing them to bring on a lot of talent. 

Their investment in the coop program was also a risk, but has paid off as more students and parents look for career experience. It is very expensive to run for Northeastern, and is once again paid for through tuition. They try to find multiple possible opportunities per student, something they are able to do through the long effort and investment they have put in. The high cost to start up and run the program is what has stopped other colleges from emulating it, in spite of the upsides it offers. 

They followed a similar approach when it came to expanding campuses. In 2020, with many colleges struggling from the pandemic, they turned to their saved funds and invested in merging with and taking on schools that were struggling. These were chosen for their locations, giving Northeastern a foothold in new cities, and new markets. 

Northeastern, like many universities, makes a significant portion of tuition revenue from graduate students, specifically master’s degree students. They sought out colleges and campuses in cities with a lower percentage of graduate degree holders to merge with, and this paid off, helping them greatly expand the enrollment in their graduate programs over time. 

The addition of other campuses also helped with undergraduate enrollment stats. US News only counts incoming students to their main campus, so Northeastern uses admissions to other campuses to let in students who they are less certain about, then rotates them through their main campus. This lets them keep the main campus at full capacity while students are taking part in the coop program, while also letting them keep their admissions stats competitive. 

The Lessons Of Northeastern for Other Colleges

The study is not meant to be, and isn’t, prescriptive. It does not use Northeastern as a model for what other colleges need to do, but instead simply tries to divine why Northeastern has succeeded so well in what it has chosen to do. In many ways, what Northeastern is doing is exactly what every other college is also setting out to do, to reach more students, bring in more grant money, and expand their offerings in meaningful ways. Northeastern has just managed to do so more effectively than most other schools. 

We may see other schools trying to emulate Northeastern’s success however. Likely not from the most elite and competitive colleges (though they may copy aspects of it), but from other schools which exist in similar situations. Several institutions have already tried to copy its success in gaming the rankings, and while that has not always worked, we would not be surprised to see the same thing happen here. 

The big things we expect to see are an increase in coop and internship programs, and more partnerships and mergers between colleges. Each of these meets a different need, but both have contributed to Northeastern’s success, and are theoretically replicable. 

Coops and internships are increasingly valued by students and parents. As job markets grow more competitive, there is more of an emphasis on getting a college degree specifically to get a great job at the end of it. These programs take a long time to build up, we anticipate seeing these the most in honors programs and other subunits of a college, places with fewer students to find partners for, and that already have more advanced offerings.

Colleges are in many cases facing funding shortages, especially smaller liberal arts colleges. It is exactly this situation which Northeastern took advantage of to merge with other colleges previously to add secondary campuses, and other universities which are more financially stable may take the same approach. This isn’t a guarantee, but it does make economic sense; the larger college gets a whole new campus, already full of buildings, professors, and students, and the school which is absorbed gets to keep existing, at least in some respect.

What This Means For You

This is all a bit abstract for students; after all, you aren’t running a university, but trying to apply to them. This does matter a bit, as it lets us see into the minds of the people who run universities, the ones who set policies and who have the final say in what kinds of students these schools seek to admit. 

Top universities do enjoy admitting and supporting great students, but they also gain a great deal from rejecting students. It is always more impressive to be exclusive, to be the one who is chased. This is a significant way Northeastern has gamed the system and found success, by juicing both their application and yield numbers far above where they began, and many schools are looking to follow in their footsteps. 

That said, Northeastern is also a pioneer of alternate enrollment plans, especially through their non-core campuses. They often admit students to one of theri secondary campuses but not to their main one, this lets them pad out their stats, because students not admitted to the main Boston campus are not counted in the same way.

If other schools follow in their path, we could see a rise in this behaviour, alternative ways for students to attend a great school. Maybe not at a campus that matches the ones on the brochures, but possibly through an experience that will suit them better. Having more options, and more flexibility, is almost always good for students.

If you are looking for career guidance and support, we also recommend keeping a lookout for internship and coop programs at colleges. It remains to be seen if other schools will invest as heavily in these as Northeastern has, but seeing the success that Northeastern pioneered with them, we anticipate seeing other schools roll out programs of their own. 

Final Thoughts

Universities are not businesses, not exactly, but they have many of the same inputs, and experience many of the same stresses. While they do not have a profit motive, they must still keep the lights on, and many do constantly seek to take in more than they spend, to build up their endowments and prepare for a rainy day. We hope that this article has given you some insight into how universities operate, and how they view the world.

Applying to college is hard in large part because universities make it needlessly opaque. By better understanding what universities want, how they work, it can become less daunting. If you are looking for a guide, a mentor who understands what universities are looking for in an applicant (and how to give it to them), then �ԹϹ��� can help. Our mentors are masters of the application process, and helping you tell your story to admissions officers. Schedule a free consultation today to learn more, we’re always happy to hear from you.

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This is only heightened in the age of artificial intelligence, with countless services and applications promising to help you create the perfect applications without effort, all while colleges grow increasingly strict about not wanting any applicants to use AI in their submissions. In this article, we’re going to break down AI policies at top colleges, and explain what admissions officers actually want to see from your application. 

What are AI Policies for Admission to Top Colleges?

Every college sets their own policy; these are developed independently, but these colleges are able to see what their fellows do, and they do exist in the same environment, with many of the same perspectives and concerns. Thus, these policies often have quite a bit in common. We aren’t going to be able to list out every college’s policy, but here’s a chart featuring the policies of top schools in the US for use of AI in admissions: 

What we can see here is that most schools have policies, and these policies generally ban the use of AI in any substantial way. There are some differences; some schools may be okay with the use of AI in brainstorming while others are not, but no schools with AI policies are okay with students using AI tools to write their essays, in whole or in part. 

That some schools do not have written AI policies does not mean those schools are okay with you using AI to write their essays either. rules do not apply in this situation. We are not sure why some schools have not yet created written policies on the use of AI, but those that do have a remarkable consensus: admissions officers don’t want to see it in your essays. 

What Admissions Officers Really Want, and Why AI Can’t Do That

Admissions officers want to understand who you are as a person and student. The reason they ask for all those supplemental essays is to better understand who you are. It may surprise you, but they aren’t just trying to stress you out and give you more work to do; they really do care about your answers to these questions, and they read them carefully to gain insights into the kind of person you are, and how you think about the world. 

Coming at it from this perspective, it makes much more sense why admissions officers don’t appreciate the use of AI in essays. AI tools can create polished writing, but they do not understand nor speak for you. They don’t know your wants or passions, they have no sense of your inner life or desires, and they cannot impart who you are or what really matters to you. 

In addition to this, AI writing is often quite bland. It has a degree of polish, but it is all glitter and no substance, as satisfying as a meal of painted cardboard. When admissions officers have to read thousands or tens of thousands of essays each season, they can become quite tired of this boring sameness. If you cannot find it worth doing to write an essay, admissions officers may question how much you really care about their school.

What This Means for Your Applications

We always advise students to avoid using AI in their applications, and reading what colleges think about the use of generative AI helps show why. While not every school has an official policy on the use of AI, from conversations with admissions officers, and what they’ve expressed in webinars and Q&A sessions, none of them enjoy reading AI generated essays. 

The easy takeaway for your applications then is that you probably shouldn’t use AI, not for drafting or editing your essays, not for activities lists, not for ideas on application strategy. This seems self-evident, but is also quite difficult for many students to implement, since these tools are becoming so pervasive. 

To help you implement this in your own essay writing, here are places where students often seek to rely on AI (which colleges specifically dislike when they see), and how you can approach them instead:

Brainstorming

Picking an essay topic is hard, one we spend a lot of time working on with students. It is tempting to ask AI for help, but the issue is that if every student asks AI, it will generate the same or similar responses for all students, thus leading to your essay being quite similar to those written by other applicants. 

Instead, when you are looking at essay topics, you should make lists of your activities and passions, and then a list of your core values. Draw connections between these, and look for unusual connections. Maybe football taught you discipline and teamwork, or maybe it taught you creativity or gave you a respect for environmentalism. How? That’s a good question, and answering it makes for an interesting essay.

Essay Writing

This is the core thing every college with an AI policy bans, and which even colleges without an explicit AI policy forbid through anti-plagiarism rules. There is no easy work around for this, you actually have to sit down and write the essays for yourself. This can be hard, but that’s rather the point. 

The best trick is that an essay does not have to be perfect to start with. A first draft is almost always bad, and that’s okay. Create an outline, write it out, and see where you stand. It won’t be perfect, you won’t have showcased your ideas fully, and that’s okay. The only way to become better at writing is to do it, there are sadly no shortcuts to this, but the experience of doing it will help with future writing projects.

Editing Your Essays

Colleges are generally okay with using AI for baseline edits, but these are the same edits proposed by any good spell-checker. The issue with major AI edits, rephrasing and restructuring and rewording, is that it removes you from what is supposed to be your essay. The traces of personality and individuality are what flavor these essays, what makes them interesting and worth reading. 

Instead, we advise asking a third party to look over your essay and give feedback. Your
English teacher, your counselor, your peers, your parents, all can give you advice on how to improve your essay, without overwriting what makes it really yours. Just remember that these people shouldn’t write your essay for you; the whole of it must be your own. 

Final Thoughts

Technology changes, and so does college admissions, but what colleges have been looking for from students has been remarkably consistent over the past decade or so. The individual details change; the standards they have, the kinds of projects which impress them best, but what they want are bright and passionate students, ones who love learning for its own sake, and who will contribute meaningfully to the campus community if they are accepted.

We hope that this article has given you useful insight into how admissions officers approach applications, and why they don’t like seeing students use AI. If you want help crafting your own essays with the help of experts, and creating the best work that you are capable of, then �ԹϹ��� can help. Our mentors are masters of the admissions process, and are highly skilled at helping students show off their best traits to admissions officers. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help you on your admissions journey.

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