It’s no secret that admissions to Ivy League Plus schools are hyper-competitive. One of the most common reasons that students are denied admission from selective colleges has nothing to do with a weakness or deficiency, academic otherwise. “It’s simply that there are… thousands of other strong students applying in a given year,” says Yale Admissions Officer (AO) Mark Dunn. To be admitted to a place like Yale (or Princeton, MIT, Amherst) an applicant has to stand out among the pool of very strong applicants.
So the question remains: how can you stand out among other applicants?
Myths Busted: What Doesn’t Stand Out
Before we address that question, let’s take a look at what doesn’t work when trying to stand out.
Ask the regular high school student, teacher, or even (sometimes) high school counselor and they might tell you one of these oft-repeated myths about how to stand out.
- More is better (it’s not)
More AP classes, more activities, more recommendations, and more community service hours do NOT make you a stronger candidate.
“I read an application…where 54 PDFs of awards–going back to third grade–were included,” said AO Keith. “We want you to know that more isn’t always better.”
While ambitious students tend to be involved in many activities, AOs aren’t looking for a laundry list of achievements. Instead, they’re looking for a depth of commitment to one to two activities/causes and critical reflection on those experiences (articulated on compelling college essays and in stellar letters of recommendation).
- Maximize your GPA or standardized test scores (that’s not the right strategy)
College admissions officers don’t think that you’re a better scholar because your GPA is 0.04 more than the next highest-ranked peer. Nor are they impressed by a difference of 10 or 20 points on standardized exams. If you’re trying to maximize your GPA or test scores, you probably need to use your limited time more wisely.
“We aren’t necessarily trying to determine who is the smartest, who has the tiptop GPA,” says admissions officer Hannah. “That’s not really our job.”
While grades (and to a lesser extent test scores) are important, they’re just not going to move the needle in terms of admissions to elite colleges. As many as 80% of candidates applying to these schools are academically qualified (meaning they meet the minimum threshold to do well).
That means that to distinguish yourself from other applicants, you’ll need to find a different approach. Think about the opportunity cost of that additional hour of studying. What else could you be doing to explore your interests, develop skills, and/or increase your impact?
What Does Help You Stand Out?
So what stands out to an Ivy League Plus AO? Two factors are particularly important: fit and impact.
Fit: Good team player
AOs at elite colleges look for students who are a good “fit” for the school. What does that mean?
“A student who’s a good fit for Yale is someone who is interested in engaging with and learning from others. That’s a huge part of our undergraduate experience,” says AO Mark.
“Someone who plays well with others, …[is open] to sharing their own experiences,” and a baseline sense that “they’re collaborative, as opposed to competitive,” added AO Mark.
Angela Dunnham, Former Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth College, makes a similar point. “It’s not enough just to be smart at top schools. Students must also show that they’ll be good classmates and community builders.”
Impact
The second crucial factor, and the focus of the rest of this article, is impact.
“We get excited…when an applicant demonstrates that they are a high-impact member of their community,” emphasizes AO Hannah Mendlowitz.
“One of my favorite lines to read in a letter of recommendation is, wow, the student will really be missed after they graduate, or this student’s impact on the school or on the community will be felt for years and years and years after they leave.”
The admissions team at Stanford agrees: “In general, we want to understand the impact you have had at your job, in your family, in a club, in your school or in the larger community, and we want to learn of the impact that experience has had on you.
Key Takeaways
Yale, Dartmouth, and Stanford (and most elite schools practicing holistic admissions) are looking for students who are a good fit and have made an impact.
What does that mean for you?
Your goal should be to create meaningful, positive change in your immediate community and beyond. As you plan your activities and volunteering efforts, aim for depth and impact. This is what will help your application stand out.
How to Make a Positive Impact
But how can you ensure that your impact is both positive and meaningful on your community (and perhaps the larger society)?
The challenge lies, in part, in deciding what area to focus on. The standard advice is: just pick whatever you’re interested in or “passionate” about. Here’s why that isn’t such good advice:
- What you’re passionate about changes. When you’re a kid you’re passionate about ice cream. Does that mean that you should go into an ice cream taste-testing as a career? Probably not.
- People rarely discover their passions in a vacuum. You’re not passionate about hockey or rugby and then try to join a team; rather you go play the game, find that you’re good at it, and then become passionate about sport as you surround yourself with fellow athletes and sports enthusiasts. Meaningful choices emerge from experience and reflection, just some pre-existing passion.
Following your interests blindly may lead you to stumble into areas that are already saturated, where your efforts won’t have much of an impact, or where real progress is unlikely even over a lifetime of work. You’re likely to become frustrated and contribute little. Is there a better way to decide how to maximize your impact for the greater good?
“…if you choose a charity to get involved in without looking at the evidence, you’ll most likely have no impact at all.”
As it turns out, there is an evidenced-backed approach that can help you evaluate potential paths so it aligns not just with what’s exciting you at the moment, but will offer lasting fulfillment and social benefit. It’s 80,000 Hours’s framework for choosing an area to focus on.
The 80,000 Framework: Preliminary Comments
Why 80,000 Hours? Because that’s the number of hours you’ll have in your career (40 years x 50 weeks x 40 hours = 80,000 hours). Since that’s such a big chunk of your life, your choice of career is probably the best opportunity you’ll have to make a positive impact. While you can certainly make a difference outside of your career through things like charitable giving and volunteer work, according to the research choosing the right career path can make you 100 times more effective (as an agent of social change). It’s probably the number one driver of your impact.
If you’re still in high school or college, you have an advantage in applying the framework. You still have a few years before you find yourself in the workforce. That means you can use the framework to think strategically about what major you might want to study and what activities you should focus on while still in school.
Stated differently, the framework can help you gain a clearer sense of how to take your interest and skills to make a meaningful impact this year, of your years of schooling, and over the long term.
Is it worth doing this kind of reflection? Think of it this way: if you take 5 to 10 minutes to decide on where you might have a 1-2h dinner, you’re saying that that prep time is worth it. How much time should you spend thinking about and prepping for your entire career? Many months to a few years is a reasonable amount of time.
OK, I’m Convinced! Tell Me About The Framework Already
Career advice in one line: “to have a fulfilling career, build useful skills and use them to tackle pressing global problems.”
—80,000 Hours
According to the framework, an issue that you choose to work on should have a combination of three characteristics:
- Big in scale. A problem being in scale would impact a large number of people, have an outsized effect on people affected, and/or yield long-run benefits if the problem were solved. For e.g., climate change or educational inequality are problems big in scale.
- Neglected. A neglected problem affects groups far away from us, non-human animals, or future generations. Few people are working on the problem and therefore there are opportunities to make progress with relatively little effort. For e.g., animal welfare or mental health and low-income countries tend to be neglected problems.
- Solvable. An issue is solvable if there is lots of evidence (studies) that there are promising ways to make progress. For e.g., access to clean water and child vaccinations are relatively easy problems to solve.
Another factor to consider is personal fit. To what extent are you motivated to work on the problem? And do you have the relevant skills and expertise? If not, are you willing to do what it takes to develop this expertise?
Applying the Framework: Making a Positive Impact
You can use this framework to think about broad problem areas (climate change vs threat of AI) or to compare specific areas within a larger area (criminal justice or redlining within racial disparities).
Let’s pick one issue and try to apply the framework.
Let’s start by asking: what are the options? It turns out that when you start thinking about the problems and issues, there are so many that it threatens to become overwhelming.
- Climate change
- War, violence, and domestic abuse
- Hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity
- Poverty/inequality
- Infectious diseases and pandemics
- Gender discrimination/inequality
- Racial/ethnic discrimination and oppression
- Educational inequality
- Access to clean water and sanitation
- Homelessness, housing insecurity
And the list goes on and on. Here’s 80000 Hour’s list of the world’s most pressing problems and how to build capacities to solve them.
Let’s choose the issue to analyze based on your current interests. Say that you are interested in studying medicine (a very popular choice, about 20% of undergraduates according to one estimate).
First criterion: Is it big in scale? A problem has a greater scale:
You look around your community and realize that substance abuse, in particular nicotine use, among young people is a big issue. What tells you it’s a big issue? Numbers. Numbers of people affected: you estimate that 1 out of 5 of the youths in your social circles either smoke e-cigarettes or some kind of nicotine product. A quick search on the internet reveals that the CDC reports that in 2023 “about 1 of every 8 high school students (12.6%) reported current use of a tobacco product.” Also, the numbers in terms of benefits in solving the problem. The associated lifetime medical costs with smoking are enormous. Insurance companies often use smoking as the key indicator of bad risks. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that also 6 million people worldwide die due to smoking cigarettes each year. So you’ve met the first criteria: it’s big in scope, both in terms of the number of people affected and the financial/social benefits of solving the problem.
Second criterion, is it a neglected issue? Ask yourself:
Let’s take this one step at a time. “Does the problem affect neglected groups?” Perhaps if we focus on the impact on vulnerable populations like low-income groups or areas with less strict tobacco regulations,. It doesn’t directly affect non-human animals or future generations in the same way climate change or emerging technologies might. However, the economic and health system burdens do have indirect effects on future resources. So, to a degree, it affects neglected groups or rather we can consider groups that are not the direct targeting. “Do few people know about the problem?” The harmful effects of smoking/ nicotine addiction are widely known. There are many anti-smoking campaigns, especially in Korea and other smoking-prone areas (Kim, Park). California recently launched a big anti-smoking campaign, but there’s nothing like a large-scale effort for opiates. There are also smoking bans in public spaces, restrictions on advertising, and medical advisories about the risks of tobacco use printed right on the box. Overall, you decide, there’s a high level of awareness and therefore this isn’t a neglected issue.
Third criteria: How solvable is it? Ask yourself:
Again, let’s take it one at a time. “Is there rigorous evidence for solutions?” Yes, many evidence-backed solutions show small, incremental improvements in helping people quit smoking. These include nicotine patches, gums, behavioral therapy, and even prescription medications (drugs like Wellbutrin). What’s the potential for making a massive impact? Since the problem is so massive, even a relatively small impact can improve the quality of life for a large number of people. It seems like the contribution might be related to testing promising new strategies for smoking/nicotine treatments. For example, a smartphone app that helps you quit smoking would make for a promising although unproven approach. Something like that could become the focus of a project.
Given that analysis using the framework for choosing a social problem to work on, a project focused on the cessation of nicotine/tobacco use among young people could have a big impact. It’s big in scale: nicotine addiction among young people is widespread and the benefits from solving the problem would be far-reaching both in terms of the number of people helped and the amount of healthcare cost reduction. It’s not a neglected area, but a targeted strategy on, say, young people in Taiwan might represent a gap in corner efforts. It’s solvable, at least to a degree: there are good evidence-based solutions and the project could contribute to that by testing a program specifically designed for young people like a smartphone app.
Final Thoughts
How can you stand out and improve your chances of admission to Ivy League and other selective colleges? By being a good team player and having a high impact. Maximizing your impact requires you to think strategically about where to focus your efforts.
It’s time to move beyond the conventional wisdom of looking only to your passions. The 80,000 Hours framework offers a practical way to increase your impact, through your current activities. You’ve seen the criteria of the framework—scale, neglect, and solvability—and an example of how to apply it to a tangible issue—nicotine addiction among young people. Now it’s up to you to take action by applying this powerful tool to thoughtfully analyze an issue you’re concerned about and ensure your efforts have the most meaningful impact. By doing so, you’ll enhance your college application and also contribute positively to your community and society.
References
Butterly, Joel. “7 Admission Officers Share the Things They Never Tell Applicants,” Business Insider, Feb 8, 2018.
CDC, Smoking And Tobacco Use Youth Data.
Kim, Dan Bi et al. Association between anti-smoking campaign types and smoking cessation attempts.
Kurtzman, Laura. “California’s Anti-Smoking Push Spurs Big Savings on Health Costs,” UCSF, March 16, 2023.
MacAskill, W. What We Owe The Future: A Million-Year View. London: Oneworld Publications, 2022.Todd, Benjamin. “Want to do good? Here’s how to choose an area to focus on.” 80,000 Hours, last updated May 2023, first published April 2016.
Moon, Kat. “4 Reasons Following Your Passion Is Overrated (Plus, What You Should Really Follow to Be Happy),” themuse.com, 6/19/2020.
Todd, Benjamin. “Want to do good? Here’s how to choose an area to focus on.” 80,000 Hours, last updated May 2023, first published April 2016.
Stanford Undergraduate Admission, “Admission Overview: Holistic Admissions,” Stanford University. Yale, “Episode 13: What Stands Out,” Inside the Yale Admissions Office Podcast.
Yale, “Episode 13: What Stands Out,” Inside the Yale Admissions Office Podcast.
