You are rejected from a school with a 25% acceptance rate and then accepted at a school with a 6% acceptance rate. Three notifications come in . . . rejection, rejection, waitlist. Then an acceptance from a school you forgot you applied to. What is happening? Are admissions decisions random?
The short answer is no. Most admissions offices work carefully and systematically to assemble incoming classes. Their decisions might seem random to you, but they are not capricious from the perspective of the college.
Typecasts
Colleges are looking to create classes of students with a range of academic and extracurricular interests. They don’t want all athletes or all trombone players. They need to field their sports teams, fill their performance groups, and enroll students who will engage in an array of activities on campus. Think of extracurriculars as “buckets” of different sizes for different types of students. No single bucket should overflow. So, if you are a champion debater, and the debate bucket is already full, you may go onto the waitlist, despite your exceptional credentials. Same goes for areas of academic interest. A college can’t thrive if their incoming students are all historians or all mathematicians. They are looking for balanced classes.
Institutional Priorities
Colleges are growth organizations with changing priorities. If a school has just spent 50 million dollars to open an environmental science center, you’d better believe they are looking for star environmental science students to shine brightly on their list of accepted students. Often, information on a school’s new buildings, initiatives, or “strategic plans” can be found on their websites. Why not investigate?
Independent Variables
It’s tempting to think an acceptance to a top-tier school means more will follow. And many students get super stressed when they are rejected from their first-choice school, say an Ivy League school in the early decision round. Remember: the decisions are independent variables, meaning one outcome does not impact another. A rejection from Brown, followed by a rejection from Duke, followed by a rejection from Williams does NOT have any impact on the decisions that will come from Amherst (acceptance!) or Columbia (acceptance!) or the University of Michigan (acceptance!). The schools are not talking to each other and deciding who is worthy and who is not.
The Coin Flip Fallacy
Have you heard of the gambler’s fallacy? It’s the erroneous belief that a random event is less or more likely to happen based on the results of a previous series of events. Each time you flip a coin, the odds of getting heads is equal to the odds of getting tails, even if you previously flipped sixteen tails in a row. So hang in there! Assuming you meet the criteria for the schools to which you have applied, the results (from your perspective) may feel as random as flipping a coin. Nobody gets heads or tails every single time.
