4 Ways Harvard Applicants Get an Edge

Harvard’s witnesses said it was important to preserve the legacy advantage because it encourages alumni to give their time, expertise and money to the university.

Students from ‘sparse country’

Every year, Harvard sends out thousands of recruitment letters inviting high school juniors to apply, based in part on their P.S.A.T. scores. Students who take Harvard up on the invitation are about twice as likely as other applicants to be admitted.

Excerpts from a discussion guide given to admissions officers on how to evaluate applicants. The guide included profiles of real students (with their names changed for privacy).

In “sparse country” — 20 largely rural states where relatively few apply to Harvard — the university drops the P.S.A.T. score cutoff for white students to qualify for an invitation. In 2013, white applicants with P.S.A.T. scores of 1310 were invited to apply from sparse country, compared with 1350 for white and Asian-American women and 1380 for white and Asian-American men outside of sparse country. Black, Hispanic, Native American or other minority students needed an 1100 or better to be invited to apply, regardless of location.

Effervescent (or reflective) applicants
Admissions officers are urged to look for applicants with “unusually appealing personal qualities,” which could include “effervescence, charity, maturity and strength of character.”
Outgoing students seemed to benefit most, according to court documents and testimony.
But new guidelines issued days before the trial began last month caution officers that character traits “not always synonymous with extroversion” should be valued, and that applicants who seem to be “particularly reflective, insightful and/or dedicated” should receive high personal ratings as well.
At trial, Harvard did not dispute that Asian-American applicants received, on average, lower personal ratings than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs said this was evidence of Harvard’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans as industrious but dull. Harvard said it was not the result of discrimination; rather, it was partly because of weaker support from high school teachers and guidance counselors.
“We do not endorse, we abhor stereotypical comments,” the dean of the Harvard admissions office, William Fitzsimmons, testified.
Those with a compelling life story, who have overcome obstacles

Court documents, including guidelines issued to admissions officers, repeatedly showed clear advantages given to poor students and those from disadvantaged circumstances. But stories of besting challenges of other kinds also gave applicants an edge.
In his application, Thang Diep, a Harvard senior who came from Vietnam as a child, talked about being bullied for his accented English, and how affirming it was when a Harvard professor was the first teacher to pronounce his name correctly.
Sarah Cole appeared in court to testify that as a black student from Kansas City, Mo., she had worked hard to get a scholarship to a prestigious private college-prep school, but suffered socially for it. She said white teachers told her she was not smart enough to excel, and customers at her job laughed at her for wearing a Stanford T-shirt. She graduated from Harvard College in 2016, and is now a public school teacher.

Mr. Fitzsimmons, the admissions dean, said that a candidate’s race was given weight only if it was reflective of life experience, such as “the fact that they had overcome and surmounted these kinds of obstacles.”
And Mr. Fitzsimmons, whose parents had run a gas station, spoke of how he had applied to Harvard, hoping to be the first person in his family to go to college. He got in.