Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all

> Here’s the thing– Harvard is insanely competitive. The admittance rate for the class of 2025 was 3.43%, the lowest rate in the school’s history, in a year that saw an unprecedented surge in applications. But as more and more comes to light about Harvard’s admissions process, it’s clear that the school’s competitiveness is not just based on academic strength or great test scores, but also whether or not your parents or grandparents have donated significantly to the school...Take the 2019 college admissions scandal for example. It’s been almost three years since the fiasco in which dozens of wealthy people attempted to pay their children’s way into legacy institutions such as Stanford and Yale. These parents paid thousands of dollars to get people to take tests for their children, bribe test administrators and bribe college coaches to identify their children as great athletes. Fifty people were ultimately charged in the scandal, including celebrities like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

This is one of those self-refuting articles. Nothing in this disproves what we already know about, say, average SAT scores: it jumps from not being admitted at a razors-edge purely on numbers to pretending those numbers are not still extremely, extremely high and the admitees meritorious. And this is no surprise. Obviously, if Harvard is that extremely selective, they can perfectly well afford to pick some legacy students with a 1590 SAT and a dozen extracurriculars instead of the nerd with a 1600 SAT and 13 extracurriculars, and we will continue to see what we see. And equally obviously, if they were admitting tons of dumb students because they weren't selective, parents wouldn't need to do crimes to smuggle their kids in via this supposedly non-meritorious route.

At the end of the day the real admission rate if you aren't ALDC or a minority is 1%. Probably lower, because many of those will be bribes. Do not fucking think for a second that a double digit percentage of those students didn't get in with bribes. I personally applied at 21 to stanford harvard yale and princeton twice and got rejected, always. that's despite raising $500k for a moonshot company and having a 1500 sat. but I might just be salty. in the end I attended a few semesters at Stanford anyway, with professors' blessings.

2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254468