Indian student just completed 12th grade. Need advice from beginners level on what i could do to get in ivy colleges?

Answered

Thanks for your question. This is a very common question among International Students.

Unfortunately, you have a low chance to be considered for an Ivy League college. Besides your low grades, and your lack of ECs, I can also deduce that you probably do not have a high ACT or SAT test score (or perhaps didn't have the opportunity to take either of these tests).

One of the biggest misconceptions that most American and International students have when they start the college application process is to think they are Ivy material or that if they just tweak their narrative a little bit, they are going to get in. This is a huge problem because there are so few available spots available. Each year there are about 6 million unique common application users for about 900 schools (that is only about 20% of the 4300 4 year degree colleges in the US). If you add up how many seats are available at 8 Ivys, they only add up to 15,000. So that's only 0.25%. It's much lower than the average admit rate because the pool of HS students applying to Ivys is self-selecting meaning most HS have a reasonable idea of whether they are Ivy material or not before they apply. Therefore, of the 400000+ plus applicants who apply, most of them are excellent students, perhaps 25% of them don't know what they're doing and just "taking their shot" and wasting $85 like an expensive lottery ticket because according to some calculator on the internet, they still have a 3% chance to get in. (If you are doing the math in your head, you will know that 15,000 is not 5.26% of 400,000 but less. The accepted pool is a little over 20,000 but since many of the same applicants have received 2 or more offers from Ivys, they can not all attend. So the 15000 seat figure is the matriculated number because the yield rate (matriculated/accepted) is around 73% overall.

I'm not trying to discourage you from applying to US colleges, but Ivy leagues are not for everyone. Honestly, if your goal is to get an excellent education in the US, there are literally hundreds of colleges that will equally prepare you academically. While the admit rates of Ivys are going to down in general, that is not necessarily true in the rest of America. I'm attaching this Pew Research article for you to read that clearly shows that most US colleges admit more than 50% of those that apply.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-of-u-s-colleges-admit-most-students-who-apply/

Therefore I think you should re-focus your college goals on trying to find the best college that is the best fit for you as a student, a place where you can mature as an adult and challenge yourself and thrive. There is no reason to wish for attending an elite college like Harvard or MIT if you can't keep up. That's like getting an automatic qualifying spot in the Olympics in the 10,000 M Track and Field final. You can stand on the starting line and run for your life when the starting gun goes off, but you'll only be able to maybe keep up 1 lap out of a 25 lap race and drop out.

Some of the admits at Ivy's are just naturally gifted intellectually. But most of them have been working incredibly hard since kindergarten. If you look at a sampling of admits, they don't just have straight As for the last year of high school, they have 13 years of report cards with straight As. And their parents have incorporated team sports, club sports, personal trainers, personal tutors, online courses, summer college programs, internships, music lessons, voice coaches. etc etc for 13 years as well. While all the Ivys reserve a portion of admits to BIPOC, Low income, marginalized yet talented applicants, the majority are paying most of the tuition, room, and board. Mixed into the available 15000, are recruited athletes, legacies (sons/daughters of alumni), development candidates (just super-rich people), employee kids (sons/daughters of professors), VIPs like movie stars, dean's list (special favors). After all, they are private institutions like private dining or golf clubs, they can pick who they want. So maybe there are really only 10,000-11,000 seats after you do all the accounting of who gets in, and who doesn't.

I wrote this very long post for the benefit of other students as well. Everyone should be focusing on trying to get the best education possible that is the best fit for them. This may not be the answer that you wish to hear, so I apologize for that. I could tell you to take your high school over but that's poor advice because why put yourself through that just to get into a few schools. Like I said before, if your goal is to get educated, you can do that literally anywhere. And while graduating from an Ivy is impressive, it's not impressive if you are not a kind human being.

Good luck.