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The Admissions Trick

This past Thursday, the University Admissions Office announced this year’s admission rate has again dropped, down to 6.46% from last year’s 6.99%. To the students who just received their acceptances, this number affirms a sense of uniqueness among high school seniors. In the race toward Princeton’s hallowed gates, they came out on top.

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As I was congratulated by the orange tiger at the top of my admissions decision last year, I wondered if I, too, could become unique simply by being counted as a Princeton student. I imagined Princeton students as a collection of stars of all varieties, on the brink of incredible contributions to humankind. The class of 2019 is indeed remarkable, but my theory about their stardom was proven wrong, if only by the eccentric posts on the class’s Facebook page.

My naïve conception could be chalked up to the fact that no one from my high school, to my knowledge, had ever even applied to Princeton, and most of my ideas of what the University was like were based on the film “A Beautiful Mind.” When I arrived on campus, I was surprised to meet an impressively normal collection of people. Sure, some students may become prominent world leaders in the coming decades, but for the time being, everything — from the culture of drinking to the separate cliques of artists, athletes and physicists — is compatible with what I had known about typical American college life.

Princeton sells its admission process as a meritocracy, in which those who are most worthy are admitted. This notion of merit is the reason why telling someone you attend Princeton almost always prompts the proclamation “You must be so smart!” Given the numbers, shouldn’t the appropriate reaction be “You are so lucky”?

The sense of accomplishment experienced by those lucky enough to be admitted has a flip side — 27,409 students were rejected or waitlisted by Princeton this year, and some of them may be asking themselves if this is a reflection on their personhood, imagining some inherent difference between themselves and those admitted. Granted, not all applicants are worthy of admission. But the number of qualified applicants far surpasses the number of beds at Princeton. According to NJ.com, 12,297 students in this year’s applicant pool had a 4.0 grade point average. By some standards, being academically perfect is simply not enough.

To any disgruntled high school seniors reading this, wondering where they took a wrong turn: you have not — perhaps your “slot” was already taken. In a game of balances, Princeton can only take so many harp players, debate champions or figure skaters. This can be seen as unavoidable collateral damage in the admissions process, but Princeton does nothing to send an alternate message. Year after year, an increasing number of applications are solicited, leading the admission rate to drop further and further. The University then parades this number in press releases and on its website as a token of its excellence.

The level of sensationalism surrounding college admissions was illustrated in a column that recently appeared in the New York Times, jokingly reporting that Stanford’s admission rate had dropped to zero percent, thus assuring that “no other school can match [Stanford’s] desirability in the near future.” The link between a low admission rate and the desirability of a school is flawed and misleading, masking the intricacies of a school and distracting from the true reasons of wanting to attend one institution over another.

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When I chose to apply to Princeton, it was mostly because of the remarkable list of novelists on its creative writing faculty. However, the miniscule admission rate also played into my decision, thinking that by procuring the thick envelope, I could somehow enter the ranks of those who are inherently “more,” whether it be smart, successful or driven. Only after arriving on Princeton’s campus did I realize how misguided I had been. Nothing about the act of being accepted had made me a better individual. It would be the opportunity to take classes with the writers I had admired from afar that would make me truly better.

There is little chance that Princeton’s admission rate will increase any time soon. More students will try their luck next year, hoping to be among the lucky ones, but the students considering Princeton, those admitted and those rejected, should not look to its admission rate as a measure of its desirability or the superiority of its students. Perhaps the press release on the admission of the class of 2021 should not begin with a percentage, but rather a statement testifying to the complexity and unavoidably arbitrary nature of the process.

Iris Samuels is a freshman from Zichron Yakov, Israel. She can be reached at isamuels@princeton.edu.

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