Every spring, I find myself having some version of the same conversation.
A family walks me through their child’s profile — strong grades, a demanding course load, a handful of activities they’ve stayed committed to — and then we get to the question that’s harder to answer than it should be: what is actually going to make this stand out?
For a long time, the answer was fairly straightforward. If a student did well in school, stayed engaged outside the classroom and could reflect on those experiences in a thoughtful way, that was usually enough to be in the mix at highly selective colleges.
Today, that’s no longer the case.
It’s not that students are doing less. If anything, they’re actually doing more. More advanced classes, more activities, more effort put into shaping how everything fits together. And applications today are cleaner, more structured, more put together than they used to be.
From the admissions side, that creates a different kind of challenge.
When everything reads well, it becomes harder to tell what really reflects the student and what reflects the process around them. You’ll see applications that check every box, but when you step back, it’s not always clear what the student has done beyond what was expected.
That’s where the distinction tends to show up.
Not in how many things a student lists, but in whether there’s something behind it that feels real. A project that went somewhere beyond a class requirement. A piece of work that exists outside of school. Something the student built, wrote or pursued on their own, even if it’s small or still developing.
These aren’t always the most polished parts of an application. But they carry weight because they’re harder to replicate.
You see it most clearly when comparing students with similar interests. Two applicants might both present as strong in the same area. One has taken the right classes and joined the right activities. The other has spent time creating something — not necessarily impressive at first glance, but real in the sense that it exists because they made it happen.
On paper, both are strong. In practice, they read very differently.
What’s changed isn’t the definition of a strong student. It’s how difficult it has become to stand out once that bar is met.
In a file full of well-presented applications, the ones that stay with you usually have something you can point to.
Something that didn’t have to exist, but does.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
