then you can take additional subjects. I'd rather have 10 AP courses with top grades than 20 with bad. This is because you need to show mastery in the subjects you take.
Although it is possible you are passionate about a subject you are bad at, the bottom line is, top universities have a lot of students to choose from. They don't need to choose you if you are passionate about economics but bad at it. They will alternatively pick the student who is passionate about economics and good at it. So the obvious piece of advice here is to try as hard as you can to get good grades in all the exams you take.
The exception to the quality first then quantity rule is the law of diminishing returns. There is a big difference between getting a 5 in AP BC Calculus and getting 100% and every question right. In this case, there is literally no university admissions benefit at all and getting a single point right above and beyond the threshold required to get a 5 in the AP. It would actually be extremely difficult to get the whole exam right. As a result, you should almost never be studying so much that you are seriously aiming for 100%. The effort required to go from 95% to 100% in most exams is more effort than the effort required to go from 0 to 90%. This effort is not worth it. Use it to take more subjects!
Make sure all your subjects are ideally in a single curriculum or at most two. For example, doing IB and then some A Levels and then AP spreads your work too thinly and makes you look relatively worse. Going super hard on a given curriculum is going to result in a more remarkable comparison for top universities. This means you need to choose your high school and your curriculum carefully so you don't find yourself switching schools in the middle.
Finally, and somewhat cheekily, if possible, do not tell all your classmates about all your additional subjects (admittedly this is difficult in some schools where APs/ honors classes are populated by the same group of ambitious students). The whole point of this strategy is to take way more subjects than anyone else applying for the same universities.
In high school, I discussed my strategy with my closest friend and it resulted in that friend taking almost double the subjects they normally would. You don't want to create competition inflation by broadcasting publicly you are taking so many extra subjects, and then your classmates respond by taking more themselves. This effectively cancels out the benefit of your additional work as you no longer shine as bright relative to them. With college admissions, the less you can do to panic your classmates into taking more subjects, more exams, and more activities the better—that only creates more work for you! (I want to add here, however, that some of the best friends I have made are the ones who have challenged me to do better. So on that note, if you have a friend who stands out above the crowd, think about how you can use their example as inspiration for reaching your own potential.)
My parting words on this strategy: if you start early, stagger your subjects over many years, enabling you to re-sit and remove pressure and, of course, take subjects you are genuinely interested in, you can dramatically improve your odds of getting into an elite school. This strategy was the most important driver for my getting into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Wharton, and all the content wasn't for nothing. The broad knowledge of science and humanities has continued to pay dividends for me on Wall Street, building my company, succeeding in my undergraduate and graduate studies, and making like-minded friends in the process.
Notes
1 1. Guide to AS and A-Level Results for England, 2020. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guide-to-as-and-a-level-results-for-england-2020
2 2. Stanford Undergraduate Admission. Selection Process. Updated March 19, 2021. https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/
3 3. Lee, Kai-Fu. AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2018.
4 4. Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.
5 5. Jaschik, Scott. Inside Education. Rejecting AP Courses. June 19, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/06/19/eight-private-high-schools-washington-area-are-dropping-out-ap-program
6 6. International Baccalaureate. 2021. https://www.ibo.org/
Chapter 3 Early Decision and the Dating Game
When it comes to love, you want to find the one person you care for so dearly, and connect with so completely, that you're ready to commit your entire life to that person. You want to be honorable, faithful, and sincere. With colleges, you need to be that kind of lover—just a lot more fickle.
US universities have invented a fairly complicated system of early admissions in order to try and unpack whether or not you actually like them. One of Crimson's partners is US News & World Report,1 the leading global ranking organization for US universities. An important criteria to the all-important rankings for US universities is the “yield rate,” which is the percentage of students who accept an offer from that university. Harvard, for example, has a yield rate that hovers about 81%. This means that for every 100 offers Harvard gives to students around the world, 81 offers are actually accepted. This is a crucial statistic to study alongside acceptance rates when researching a university because it shows how desirable the school actually is to the competitive kids who have been able to get in. (See Chapter 15 for more explanation!)
If you're a university like Brown, you are in a very complicated situation. You are a prestigious Ivy League school so life should be easy—but it's not. Brown wants to reject all unqualified students who are not sufficiently talented in the eyes of their admissions office to attend the school. At the same time, they need to admit students who are good enough to go to their school. The problem is, many of these qualified students have options. Almost all of these students would rather go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, or Columbia over Brown. This means that when Brown admits a student, they can't actually be sure that student is going to turn up come the fall.
Every time they admit a student who turns them down it is reflected in their ranking because this rejection diminishes their yield rate. As a result, Brown doesn't actually want to admit all qualified applicants who are strong enough to get in. Rather, they want to admit students who are qualified enough to get in but also who are willing to commit to their school.
This means that if they come across a truly exceptional Harvard-quality student who they are confident is going to get into one of the most competitive universities ranked higher than them, they may actually consider putting them on a waitlist rather than accepting them because they think it is highly unlikely the student would actually end up coming. It seems bizarre: Brown would decline a Harvard-quality student. Yet, the most sophisticated universities know this as fact.
This dynamic has led to the creation of the early decision application process. Prospective applicants can choose to apply early decision to a university (and with the Ivies you can only choose one), which means applying on roughly November 1 of your application year. If you apply early decision and you are accepted, you've committed to go to that university. This is a hard guarantee. No more applications