College Admissions Trade Secrets A Top Private College Counselor Reveals the Secrets, Lies, and Tricks of the College Admissions Process

True or False: Princeton's Director of Admissions hacked into Yale's secured admissions website to find out who Yale had accepted and rejected. Boston College's average SAT score is up to 1370 and Boston University's average SAT score is up to 1320. Carnegie Mellon offers spots on a priority wait-list to students who send in cash and most of these students get admitted. Well, it's all true. An FBI investigation traced Yale's hacked website back to the computer of Princeton's Director of Admissions, Stephen LeMenager. Boston College's average SAT score is the same as Cornell's and close to Penn's (both Ivies). Carnegie Mellon does have a "priority" wait-list-it costs $400 to be on it and the admissions rate is 95%. Welcome to the circus. Dazed and Confused. Students see the college list published by their high school's guidance department listing every acceptance and rejection from the prior year. Next to each entry is a GPA, a SAT score and the number of AP classes taken. The list is usually ordered from highest to lowest GPA. The first entry: 4.19 (unweighted), 1430 SAT, 7 AP classes, Princeton-rejected, Yale-rejected, Harvard-rejected, Stanford-rejected, Columbia-rejected, Vassar-accepted. Ouch. Scan down the list looking for Yale. Did anyone get into Yale last year? Down at the ninth entry: 3.93, 1450 SAT, 6 AP classes, Brown-accepted, Yale-accepted, Georgetown-accepted. Okay, anyone else? Scan down to the twenty-second entry: 3.88, 1560 SAT, 7 AP classes, Yale-accepted, Duke-accepted, William and Mary-rejected. This doesn't make any sense, thinks the student. Many of the students with the best grades didn't get into any top colleges and still others were rejected at colleges ranked lower than the colleges to which they were accepted. Welcome to the world of college admissions. Ever wondered what a private counselor tells an Upper East Side family for $10,000? The secrets are in CollegeAllen, Andrew is the author of 'College Admissions Trade Secrets A Top Private College Counselor Reveals the Secrets, Lies, and Tricks of the College Admissions Process' with ISBN 9780595198979 and ISBN 059519897X.