It begins with the goals of the respective organizations. Free online admissions calculators are marketing vehicles for companies to sell you their products and services, such as private guidance counseling. They are designed to make students and their families believe that, with a little help, admissions to top universities are achievable. Our calculator is designed to bring home hard truths to students and families with unrealistic college dreams.

To date, the board of directors has primarily funded the establishment of this charitable organization, development of the model, and creation of the website. Fees derived from survey use have been reinvested into social media marketing campaigns. Transparency in Admissions has no employees and the board works without compensation. All fees go into getting the message out about our work and to capture more data to expand our services to other schools.

Transparency in Admissions offers the only online admissions calculator that employs actual data provided by Harvard University and analyzed by leading economists as an outgrowth of a recent lawsuit against Harvard. Other online calculators are more limited in the data they use, which are not as reflective of actual college admissions determinants.

In using the Harvard data, we felt obliged to apply the data to comparable schools, such as other Ivies, following similar admissions practices. To apply the data otherwise would have led to modeling leaps that would undermine the integrity of our work. In the future, we hope to capture additional data enabling the expansion of our work to many more prestigious universities.

More than 50% of admittees to Harvard and most of the remaining top 15 private universities fall into a preferred group. Depending on the school, preferred groups include legacy, children of staff, faculty, and large donors, recruited athletes, first in family to go to college, disadvantaged applicants, certain ethnicities, rural applicants, certain geographies, and nationally recognized intellectual achievement. Since these are targeted groups, they represent a small percentage of total applicants. This results in the overwhelming majority of applicants competing for less than 50% of the slots. This a 5% acceptance rate is closer to 1% for non-preferred applicants.

The Educational Industrial Complex has long led us to believe that GPA and test scores are the critical criterion to admissions success. This is not the case for the great majority of America’s top 15. GPA and test scores are used as thresholds to qualify applicants for consideration. Schools are not comparing one candidate’s GPA + test score against another candidate. That would be unwieldy.

Perfect scores and GPA don’t necessarily put you in the top academic rating. That is usually reserved for those who have some extraordinary intellectual achievement beyond grades and test scores, such as helping identify a DNA marker for a disease. Also, applicants falling into a preferred group have more latitude relative to academic performance than those who are not preferred. For example, a recruited athlete can demonstrate lower academic achievement and have a much greater chance of admission than other applicants.

Extracurricular activities can have a substantial impact. However, again, the top tier is limited to those whose activity has had huge impacts on a national or sector level. Think the young people who turned the tragic school massacre into a national student movement for gun control. The secondary category is reserved for class presidents, editors of school papers, or students leading organizations having regionally or locally recognized impacts.

Per the above, it is clear that applicants from non-preferred groups can generally do little to secure admissions to these top 15 universities. Non-preferred applicants who do make it in are often cherry picked for a particular attribute. It may be a particular school program needs more students so those applicants expressing interest in that program are moved to the front of the line. One may get selected because s/he plays an instrument that the school marching band needs.

Yes. We have a program where high schools can purchase surveys in bulk at steep discounts to the already inexpensive survey fees of $10 and $15 depending on the school package survey takers select. In addition, for high schools serving low-income students, we will provide survey access for free.