Supplemental Applications for Top Colleges

Getting good grades and doing well on the SAT was all I was told when I wanted to apply to college. I laughed when I heard that some schools required an essay. I avoided honors English classes my whole high school career; I knew words good. I also didn’t want to put any effort into my application.

You cannot have this mindset if you want to get into a top-tier university. You need to understand you will be expected to answer essays for each university. You may be able to reuse your answers from some prompts, but a copy-and-paste mistake will ruin your admission chances.

Also, ensure you have teachers willing to vouch for how revolutionary you are. And that counselor of yours that you have no relationship with? Because you are one of 500 kids? You need them to write you a recommendation about how you took courses the school hadn’t even considered having until you arrived.

Generally, the lower the acceptance rate, the more supplement data a university will require.

As usual, the University of California is its own beast. They do not require any letters of recommendation but do require four 350-word essays. UCLA and UC-Berkeley are the only American schools with acceptance rates under 20% that do not require letters of recommendation.

Georgia Tech (20%) is the only non-UC school with an acceptance rate of less than 28% that does not require a letter of recommendation. However, they also accept the most optional letters at four. If you can get your hands on one, you should submit it.

You have to go to the 59th ranked, my alma mater, The University of Illinois (UIUC), to find a school that does not require or even accepts optional letters of recommendation. Most public institutions follow this trend.

But at least once you have letters of recommendation, they can be reused. Short essays only sometimes allow for a simple copy and paste.

Some schools require you to submit examples of your written work. Some require 100-word responses, while others require 350-word. You must answer one of the seven Common App prompts for most non-California schools in the United States. Take that into consideration when looking at the summary table below.

Rank	University	Essays	Letters
1	Harvard University	5	2
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	5	2
3	Stanford University	3	2
4	University of Oxford	1	1
5	University of Cambridge	1	1
6	California Institute of Technology	3-6	2
7	Columbia University	5	2
9	University of Chicago	2	2
10	Princeton University	6	2
11	Yale University	8	2
12	University of Pennsylvania	3	2
13	Johns Hopkins University	1	2-3
14	University of California – Berkeley	4	0
17	Cornell University	2	2
18	University of Michigan – Ann Arbor	2	1
20	Northwestern University	2-3	2
22	University of California – Los Angeles	4	0
23	University of Toronto	0-4	0
24	New York University	1	1
25	University of Washington	3	0
26	University of Edinburgh	1	0-2
27	Duke University	1-3	3
30	University of California – San Diego	4	0
34	McGill University	?	?
37	Washington University in St. Louis	1	1
38	University of British Columbia	Y	2
43	University of Texas – Austin	3-4	0-2
44	Carnegie Mellon University	3	2
45	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	2	1
48	Brown University	6+	2
50	University of Wisconsin	2	1
53	University of Southern California	10	1
58	Georgia Institute of Technology	1	0-4
59	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	2-3	0
64	University of California – Davis	4	0
68	University of Minnesota Twin Cities	0-2	0
69	Vanderbilt University	1	3
72	Boston University	1	2
79	Emory University	2	2
80	The Ohio State University	1	0
84	University of California – Santa Barbara	4	0
85	University of Maryland – College Park	6	2
87	University of Pittsburgh	0-1	0
95	Penn State	0-1	0
103	University of Florida	0	0
110	Dartmouth College	3	3
112	University of Rochester	1	2
116	Rice University	3	3
118	Michigan State University	1	0
121	Case Western Reserve University	0-2	3