My offer to the community is that I can help improve chances of college admissions. I am not suggesting that the elite colleges are the best fits for everyone. What I am instead saying is that given I have some insight as to what the most selective colleges are looking for, helping guide students for less selective colleges is even easier.
Within the past two years, some of my recommendations have included that students apply early to Harvard, MIT, NYU, Northeastern, and UPenn. Those recommendations were made based upon the strengths and interest of each student and the fit for each student to that college. All were admitted.
On College Confidential, I am known as the go-to person for chancing students in STEM, and particularly in mathematics. Beyond what I post publicly, about 6-10 students very strong students each year send me PMs asking for more information. I give them detailed advice on how students similar to them have done and give recommendations on which reaches, matches, and safeties they should apply to. The only thing I ask in return is that they tell me where they were admitted afterwards, so I can calibrate my advice for the future.
Backing up a bit, Harvard's most recent admit rate is 3.4%, and for MIT it is 4.7%. But the thing is that almost no individual applicant has that chance of admission. It is either much higher or much lower. Both colleges have much higher admit rates for under-represented minority (URM) applicants. Harvard also has much higher admit rates for what are known as ALDC applicants, which stands for recruited Athletes, Legacy, Development (i.e. big donor families) and Children of Faculty. Among these MIT only provides an advantage for recruited athletes. Collectively, URM + ALDC are known as the major hooks to admission. If you are not hooked at Harvard, your admit rate is less than 2%. It is so low that most applicants applying early there are wasting an early application that could be better used elsewhere.
So why am I confidently able to tell some unhooked applicants they are likely to be admitted to Harvard or MIT, and usually be right about it? It's because my son won a major set of awards, and through him I had visibility into how well students with those awards do. There are a handful of STEM awards that are effectively "golden tickets" into the elite colleges, with award recipients getting into an average of three of the HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT) colleges. Beneath that, there are several awards that make admission to one of those likely. And beneath that, there are certain awards that make admission likely for the next tier of selective that use Early Decision (ED) rather than the Early Action used by the HYPSM colleges.
