Did you get rejected by your dream school? If so, in this blog, I’m going to talk about six ways that you can still get the awesome education you’ve always wanted. Six plan Bs, and maybe some of them are plan Cs. If you’ve been rejected, here’s what you can do now.
Appeal Your Decision
The first thing that I’m going to tell you if you’ve been rejected by your dream school or dream schools—and this one’s a bit of a long shot—is that you can think about appealing your decision. Now, will this work at Harvard and Stanford? Probably not. You’re probably not going to appeal a decision at one of those places unless you’ve become the most famous activist in the world in the last two weeks or won a Nobel Prize or something else really amazing has happened. Appealing your decision is probably not going to help. There are already people on the waitlist. It’s probably not going to help if you were completely rejected. If you’ve been waitlisted, on the other hand, you can write a letter of continued interest, and you actually do have hope of getting in. And I have another video where you can check out that advice if you’ve been waitlisted, but assuming you’ve been rejected, an appeal letter—where can that actually work?
My number one place where I’ve seen appeal letters work the most is at in-state institutions in your own state. So let’s say you are in California and you got rejected by every school except Merced, where you didn’t even apply. They sent you a letter of congratulations anyway, but you don’t want to go there. You could write an appeal letter to Berkeley or UCLA and explain how you’re in-state, how awesome you are, how you really want to go to their school, and how you screwed up your initial application. Always admit to your faults. I’ve got plenty of advice also in my letter of continued interest video, where I go through those kinds of ideas. But at the end of the day, if you’re trying to make an appeal, state schools just have more space. So the probability that you can weasel your way into that class is much higher at a giant institution than at a place that’s smaller or private or something like that. Also, the upper-crust Ivys, they don’t care. They reject lots of people. I think state schools have a little bit more of a mission that they want to reach out and provide education for the really smart students in their state, and they want to support them. So, I feel like you just have a little bit of a better shot if you are going to appeal a decision.
Consider Transferring
Number two is to consider transferring. One of the fun facts about transferring is that some colleges and universities that are top-ranked—maybe not your top five or top ten, but some universities—have much higher rates of admission in most of the majors if you’re a transfer student than if you’re an undergrad. Case in point: the University of Southern California (USC), Berkeley, and UCLA in about 70% of the majors available probably have higher rates of admission if you’re a transfer than if if you’re an undergrad. So, lots of opportunities here. I know those are all California schools, but this is true across the country. There are other schools that have great admission rates for transfers or where I’ve seen transfers get in. Tulane University is one off the top of my head where I’ve also seen a good amount of transfers get in. You can check out our video that highlights the best bets for transfers, where I go through the data and crunch the data. And you can see that some schools are using transfer students as a way to fill their classes while still creating this elite cloud of glory by only admitting freshman applicants who have stellar scores and amazing GPAs. It’s a way they can kind of soften the blow but still fill their class and get all the money they need to pay for the classes. Transferring can be a good way to kind of level up your academic potential.
Consider Graduate School
My third tip is to consider graduate school. Whether you want to go to law school or whether you want to get a graduate degree in East Asian studies, if you really are dying to go to some university, oftentimes graduate programs have higher admission rates also than undergraduate programs. Or you can have an opportunity in your undergraduate years to increase your grades and your academic profile, and then you’re going to have more luck getting into a graduate program than you did as an undergraduate trying to get in from high school. I have a lot of international students, for example, who really want to go to MIT, which is nearly impossible. Their admin rate is something like 1.5% for internationals. But I think over 30% of students that are graduate students at MIT are international students. So they admit way more international students as graduate students than as undergrads. So, if you’re an international student and you want to go to MIT, graduate school is always what I talked to my students about because there is hope you can still go to MIT. You can still do awesome research there and work in their labs and all of that. You might have to get in as a graduate student, and that just has to do with financial aid and the way it works in the U.S., as well as how MIT has just prioritized US students who are undergraduates. But again, if you have a dream school, graduate school is a way to get there. And it might seem a far way away, but it’s one way that you can study at the place that you love or that you think you really want to go to.
Online Courses
The fourth way that you can enjoy the same kind of education that you were hoping to get is that increasingly many colleges and universities have been creating MOOCs (massive open online courses) or online access to their courses, sometimes even for free. Harvard, Stanford, and many of these top institutions are putting their lectures online. So if that’s the kind of learning that you want to do and you’re getting a degree somewhere else, it doesn’t mean that you can’t spend your weekends watching a class. That’s exactly what you wanted to do and the rarefied error level of intellectual stimulation. If you want to get that knowledge, it’s up to you to reach out and grab it, whether you have a degree that proves it or not. So I would also look into continuing education options as well as lectures and things that are available from these schools.
Cross Enrollments
Number five is cross-enrollments. So there’s this other thing that some colleges do where, for example, Wellesley allows students to take classes at MIT even if you’re a Wellesley student. The Claremont colleges have a consortium where you can take classes across all of the colleges. So if you go to Harvey Mudd, you can take classes at Pomona. So, if you are applying to colleges, one thing you can do is you can target schools where you might have access to your dream college. Like MIT, for example, even if you feel like you might not get in there if you apply straight away, that means you can try applying to Wellesley, and you could take some classes at MIT. And you can get the education that you’ve wanted all along. You can also just look up cross-enrollment overall, like if you go to a Cal State school. For example, you might be able to enroll in some UC courses or something like that. But it’s just another way that you can level up your education and get more opportunities to take more cool classes. Don’t just assume all you have is all you have. There are ways to learn in other places and from other colleges, and I recommend that you check it out.
Non-Traditional Admissions Programs
Finally, my sixth tip is there are also non-traditional admission programs. One that comes to mind offhand is Columbia, which has a school for general studies. Its admission rate is definitely higher than its general college program that most undergraduates funnel into. Yale has a program called the Eli Whitney Program, and it’s for non-traditional students. So, let’s say you didn’t get into any colleges you wanted to get into and you decide to join the military for a couple of years. When you get out, there are schools that support non-traditional students and also those that offer special programs for them. And so if that’s a path that you might be considering, get on the internet and check those out. I know Brown also supports non-traditional students potentially. And sometimes they’re formal programs, and sometimes it’s just that those schools will consider you. It’s something to check into since just because your path might be going in a different direction right now, it doesn’t mean you can’t come back and study at an amazing university in the future.
Opportunity is out there; you guys just have to find it. What I want to tell you is that if you want an educational opportunity, it is out for the taking, and it’s up to you to grab all of the opportunities that you have. Not every door will always be open to you, but there are ways to get the kind of information and learning that you want if that’s what you’re after. I hope you guys found this helpful!
