Yall know BYU rumors?Answered
There are 20 million rumors about how certain things affect admission to BYU. And weird stories. Students who have all the extracurricular activities, valedictorian, and still don't get in.
I toured BYU over the summer and the person giving us the tour said he got a 26 on the ACT and got in, meanwhile his friend got a 34 and was student body president, and didn't get in. All of my cousins have much worse grades than me, no extracurricular, yet they get in.
I know religious stuff is important for this school, but all of the people it was weird for were members and I don't imagine it was super hard for them in that sense.
Needless to say, this in particular makes me super stressed about what I should do to try to get admitted. I don't really know what to do with it.
I want to know what rumors y'all have heard and any advice to getting into this particular college.
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2 answers
Hi @AllisonJohanson,
Thanks for the question.
Have you ever heard of Tufts Syndrome? So this is an admissions practice where highly or over-qualified applicants are deliberately wait-listed or flat-out rejected by the college because they believe that these students will likely be admitted to more prestigious colleges than their own. Tufts is a great school for me. At least a top 25 college like Notre Dame or UVA. But for many who really want to get into an Ivy or an Elite like Duke, UChicago, Stanford, Tufts is a target. So Tufts gets a lot of perfect stats applicants and just rejects or waitlists them to protect their yield rate, which is lower than the Ivies. If they let in every qualified applicant, then their yield rate would drop from like 55% to 45% or 40%. That doesn't look good for college rankings because yield rates are the implied demand for the school and a proxy for prestige. (Yield rate = # of matriculated admits / # of accepted students )
In the case of BYU, BYU has incredible prestige for other reasons other than Ivies. Within the LDS community, BYU is a great networking place that epitomizes the values and culture of the LDS community. Therefore, if you live around Utah and plan to stick around other LDS communities, BYU is sort of the Ivy of the LDS community. And that community supports itself. So one of the big draws is the cost of attendance as well. The middle 50% SAT/ACT scores are much lower for BYU than ivies 1230/1420 and 26/32. So if you apply to BYU with a 1500 or 34, I think adcomm. there feels like you are really shopping to go to a better school and just have BYU as a safety or backup school. Since they can brag about their 80% yield rate and it serves them well, I don't think they want it lowered just to accept more qualified students. If you want to keep your yield up, you don't admit the over-qualified candidate, you admit the borderline one that really shows demonstrated interest. Why? Because you know they'd matriculate and feel that was their dream school.
I would not worry too much about BYU unless you were really overqualified compared to other applicants.
Good luck.
I think you will be ok, I've never heard any weird things like that. There were probably other things that influenced the people who look good on paper not getting in. It's possible the friend with a 34 ACT didn't ever go to seminary in which case he would not have gotten in. If that is where you want to go make sure you go so seminary and just have decent grades, it shouldn't be too hard to get in.
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