Daniel Lim reads resumes of prospective college students with the enthusiasm of a color commentator at an NFL game. On his popular TikTok channel, the Duke University senior highlights the seemingly endless number of high-achieving students who fail to gain acceptance to selective colleges or, more often, who win some offers and lose others.
“This student with a near-perfect SAT score was rejected by every single Ivy League school he applied to,” he says in a recent video, in a tone of disbelief. “Let’s look at his request and see what happened.”
It turns out that this anonymous student Lim describes, with an SAT score of 1570, state and regional gymnastics championship trophies, concert band experience since fourth grade, and membership in honor societies, says he was rejected from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford. , MIT, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan. The student says he attended Penn State University and the University of Maryland.
Lim, who has more than 200,000 followers, says nearly 2,000 high school students have sent him their college applications (along with the list of schools they applied to and the results of their attempts) for him to share and play on his videos.
he is part of a genre of social networks Trying to understand who gets into which selective college (and why) at a time when getting a “Yes” at a selective college is more difficult than ever.
Statistics show that it really is harder to get into college these days, if you’re trying to get into a selective college. If you look at the top 100 universities and the top 50 liberal arts colleges, the average SAT score needed to get in has increased significantly since about 35 years ago, according to an analysis A couple of years ago at Education Next.
College counselors work to emphasize that finding the right college should be about discovering the right fit, and the fact is that most American colleges, especially community colleges, admit the majority of students who apply. But regardless, many students and families perceive selective colleges as the ticket to more opportunities. And in an era of rising college costs, students are scrambling to get into flagship state universities that offer high-quality offerings at a fraction of the cost of private colleges, or to land at Ivy League schools with large endowments they can afford. offer more. generous financial aid than other institutions.
So the process has a lot at stake. And yet, it can seem like a game.
And the rules of that game continue to change.
The pandemic led more universities to make SAT scores optional, putting more emphasis on so-called “holistic” reviews of candidates. And admissions officers say there are widespread misconceptions about how that process works.
“A lot of people think that if a school has a 5 percent admissions rate, you have a 1 in 20 chance of getting in, which is not what you are,” says Nathan Mathabane, associate director of college counseling at Woodside Priory School, in California and former admissions officer at Princeton University. “Some students will have an 80 or 90 percent chance of getting in and many students will have a 0 percent chance of getting in.”
And a landmark ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer that struck down consideration of race in college admissions has thrown even more uncertainty into the process, as even colleges themselves seek to quickly change their processes to comply with the law.
So students are turning to TikTok and other social media platforms to fill the information gap about whether, why, and how they have a chance to land a spot at a selective college.
Another example Mathabane points to is a Reddit channel called “opportunity for me,” where applicants post their credentials and ask the Internet to predict what their chances are of getting into the college they think works best for them. And some of the comments end up being unpleasant or full of misinformation about the process.
“I think it’s super toxic,” Mathabane says of the site. “I don’t think there’s anything you’re going to get from these sites that’s going to improve your college search, period, and it’ll probably just make you more stressed.”
But Lim maintains that his videos, which he also posts on YouTube and Instagram, can help students feel less alone in a stressful process. And she says she can relate, despite the stress of her own college search.
For this week’s EdSurge podcast, we talk to Lim about what he’s learned from watching so many college applications and the reactions to his videos, and we hear from Mathabane about how admissions is changing.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.
