Making It into a Top College: 10 Steps to Gaining Admission to Selective Colleges and Universities (

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5 ways to increase your chances of getting into top colleges

Sign up or log in to manage your notifications. These are colleges like Harvard , Yale , MIT , and Stanford , which grace the college lists of many driven, competitive high school seniors across the world. The truth is that there is no formula that will guarantee you admission to top colleges with low acceptance rates. But there are several things you can do to maximize your chances and ensure that you send in the best application possible.

Grades matter on any college application , but especially for highly-selective top colleges.

Students often get caught up trying to balance five extracurricular activities, perform well on standardized tests, get excellent letters of recommendations , and ace interviews, all at the same time. While these are all extremely important, none of it matters if you lose focus on your grades.

In the same way, your grades have to serve as your foundation for everything else on your application. In addition to focusing on your grades, you still need to find ways to spend your time outside of classwork and homework effectively. Spending twenty hours a week preparing for a single standardized test like the ACT or SAT is probably not a good use of your time.

Your grades come first, then rank your extracurricular activities in terms of time commitment. Write a unique supplemental essay for each college and make sure your writing sounds like you , not anyone else.

Put your heart into it. Give yourself plenty of time to compose your supplemental essays — before summer and fall applications take over your entire life. Believe me, it will pay off. Another way to stand out from the crowd is to make sure the admissions office knows about you before your application arrives. Email your admissions officer directly with a specific question, making sure to introduce yourself.

Attend information sessions and go on a campus tour. How do colleges weigh it all? Applicants are then given a score for each category compared to that standard. For example, a student can get a score of one if her test scores are below the established benchmark, a two if her scores meet the benchmark, or a three if they are higher than the benchmark.

Different schools use different rubrics and evaluation strategies, but this is the general approach many colleges take. The practice is more nuanced than that, and can actually benefit students who need a significant amount of financial aid.

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The lesson to take away is that for some students on the cusp of meeting admissions standards at a given school, not applying for financial aid can help. For the past few years, the importance of class rank in the college admissions process has been steadily declining.

1. Many colleges follow a rubric when evaluating applications.

According to the NACAC State of College Admission survey, only 15 percent of colleges rated class rank as of considerable importance most called it moderately important. This is a steep decline from 10 years ago, when 31 percent of colleges rated it as considerably important. High schools are not standardized enough to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Students should focus less on where they rank relative to their classmates and more on studying for the most demanding classes their high school offers — ideally, AP and college prep courses. The same NACAC document states that achieving and maintaining good grades in challenging classes is the most important factor colleges consider.

Managing enrollment is a big part of the college admissions process. Colleges want a high yield , or percentage of admitted students who enroll.

2. Your ability to pay tuition can affect admissions decisions.

And admitting students who show a deep interest in the institution is one way to manage that. These requirements often prioritize special groups of applicants, like legacy students, development cases students from wealthy families likely to make large donations , student-athletes , and more.

In fact, it may even hurt your chances of acceptance. Admissions officers are busy; each person in the office may read thousands of applications in a given cycle. Creating extra work for them will only set these professionals back in their timeline. Last year more than 42, students applied to Stanford University , which had a 5 percent admission rate for the class of In fact, most top-tier institutions would be able to fill a second, and maybe even a third, class with applicants who are just as qualified, diverse, and well-rounded as those students they accepted.

When building a diverse class, some people assume race is the only benchmark used to gauge diversity.

Gender is an important consideration in meeting diversity targets, as more girls are applying to college than boys. However, in certain male-dominated majors, colleges will seek to correct the gender imbalance by trying to admit more females who express an interest in these fields. Another marker of diversity, beyond hometown, is home country.

Diversity can also include simple attributes that make a student stand out.

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