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Notes -
I feel like people underestimate how small Ivy League universities are compared to how many people are out there with high standardized test scores.
Here are the seven Ivy League universities with their 2023 incoming class undergraduate numbers (plus MIT for fun):
Harvard: 1966
Yale: 1554
Princeton: 1782
Columbia: 1464
Cornell: 3218
Brown: 1730
University of Pennsylvania: 2420
Dartmouth: 1209
MIT: 1092
That's 16k total student admitted across all those universities. According to the college board, 1.9 million students in the class of 2023 had taken the SAT. That means there are 19k students with scores in the top 1% on the SAT. Getting a score above 1400 puts you in the 93rd percentile according to the college board's statistics for 2023, so 133k people. Even if Ivy League universities admitted students solely on SAT test score this guy would be nowhere close. Indeed, you could staff every incoming Ivy League class (and then some) with students who had a score in top 1%.
This is why it's been expanded to the top-20 or the Ivy+ . These are schools that confer almost similar career prospects and prestige as top schools (in some cases, like University of Chicago for economics are better). Ivy League admissions has not kept up with population growth either.
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