An Accounting Problem with Admissions

[etoposido]

Suppose my target is top ten universities (this is not a hard assumption) and let’s suppose they offer admission to 20 people in average…..so it would mean that there must be two hundred people with a better profile than mine to be unavoidable rejected by a top ten University???? Is that correct???

[tm_guru]

Each of the top ten make 50-60 offers of admission. There is a lot of duplication though, i.e. someone who gets into MIT may have 5 or 6 top10 admits to contend with.

It is fair to say, that the sum of all the incoming classes in the 'top10' schools is about 200-250 students. Meaning that unless you are amongst those few elite students that the top10 is going to be out of reach.

Those 200 students have most or all of the following;

Straight A's in the required math, Intermediate Micro and Econometrics
GRE scores of 790+Q, 600+V, 5.5+AWA
A 3.9+ GPA
2+ years of RA and 1+ year of TA experience
An honors thesis.
Strong personal letter of reference's from well-known economists.
A killer statement of purpose.

Also known as the Jesus profile, or, see member 'Antichron'.

[claphands]

Plenty of top 10s offer admission to the same people.

[etoposido]

tm_guru what you said is completely right, they make offers to 50-60 people and perhaps there are a lot of duplication in those, but the point is that entering class is almost always 20 in average...and I've heard some universities make additional offers to people they hadn't considered or rejected at the very beginning so those profiles wouldn't need to look exactly like the Jesus Profile

[tm_guru]

Originally Posted by etoposido

tm_guru what you said is completely right, they make offers to 50-60 people and perhaps there are a lot of duplication in those, but the point is that entering class is almost always 20 in average...and I've heard some universities make additional offers to people they hadn't considered or rejected at the very beginning

Sure, but very few, usually those who earn prestigious awards.

There are far more than 200 people with a profile close to what I describe above.

Personaly I fit most of the criteria but i'm not applying to any top10-15's after a bad experience last year. My letter of reference writer's advised me strongly to aim high, but I got rejected everywhere.

[walt526]

P(A or B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A and B)...