If you received a rejection from Princeton in the Single-Choice Early Action round, this wasn’t how you wanted it to go. You should have gotten a deferral, at minimum, no? Princeton receives over 40,000 applications each year, and has admitted less than 5% in recent years. The fact that 75% of admitted first-years choose to go to Princeton is an immensely impressive yield rate. This is, notably, without locking in a high percentage of admitted students through Early Decision.
Instead of offering Early Decision as a route to an expedited commitment for the student (and boosted yield rate for the school), Princeton offers students Single-Choice Early Action. This path still gets students in on a faster timeline, but doesn’t come with the perks ED typically offers — like a boosted rate of acceptance, and Early Action back-ups if you choose to pair EA applications with your ED submission. As you’ve experienced, Single-Choice Early Action requires the single-minded commitment to Princeton, but Princeton doesn’t really offer you much in return. You wouldn’t have had to go if you had gotten in, but you also didn’t get to apply EA anywhere else.
As a result, you’re now staring down the calendar towards Regularly Decision (and ED II!) deadlines without any acceptances in your pocket. That’s a scary place to be. We’re here to help.
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These are the four steps you must be taking now to turn a disappointing decision from Princeton into an enthusiastic acceptance to a dream school.
Step One: Take a Break
The first thing you need to do is to mourn what could have been. Applying S-C EA is a big commitment, and a big risk. You took it knowing the possible outcomes, but certainly assuming that you wouldn’t end up here. Now you need to give yourself a day or two to feel all the natural feelings that a rejection drums up. You can be disappointed and frustrated. You can eat a big bowl of ice cream and watch a movie on the couch. Then, it’s time to get back into gear.
Step Two: Strategize
Princeton does not release their official statistics on how many Single-Choice Early Action applicants are deferred each year, but it’s commonly understood that a large percentage of S-C EA applicants are deferred with some reporting estimates over 60%. Being rejected S-C EA, then, was a much less likely outcome than a deferral. Given that you received a rejection, this tells us a few things.
First, something about your scores and grades didn’t match up with what Princeton is looking for. In the most recent report from Princeton, incoming first years averaged an SAT or 1530+ or an ACT of 35+. Nearly 70% of all admitted first years has a GPA of 4.0 unweighted. If your grades and scores did not meet or surpass that bar, it doesn’t surprise us that you were not accepted by Princeton in the early application round.
However, if your grades were at — or even in spitting distance — of those numbers, you need to look deeper to see why you were rejected instead of deferred. Typically, we can find the answer in your essays.
We haven’t seen your application, of course, so we are only able to speak in broad strokes about what we have seen historically with rejections from Princeton S-C EA. Even with those caveats, though, something is wrong with your writing.
For the next step in your college application journey, you need to remake a college list that is properly tuned to your grades, scores, and goals. You need to have a balanced list, weighted more strongly towards targets and safety schools, with a small number of reaches. If you can find a close-reach that offers EDII, even better. Do it. Then, once you have your new list, it’s time to write.
Step Three: Essays
It isn’t fun, but you have a lot of work ahead of you. When early applications work, attaining EA acceptances, there are often pieces that can be cannibalized for Regular Decision or EDII schools. You can massage or rework, lengthen or shorten, and cut down on the time commitment by using what you’ve already fine-tuned. This is not that situation, though. Your application to Princeton didn’t work, and it’s better to trash it than to try to parse out what, precisely, didn’t sit well.
We advise our students to write strong personal narratives in their main college essay that highlight one to, at most, three personal characteristics in — most of the time — a nonacademic setting. The challenge with telling you precisely what to do here is that there really aren’t any rules except being truthful, authentic, and connecting with the reader on a personal level. But we can tell you what you essay needs to accomplish.
Most of college application review is done in the readers’ heads. They have to say no to so many applications that they can’t think of them as applicants. Seeing the people behind the work makes it harder to move quickly, so they need to stay cold. Of course, this isn’t what they say on panels and during college fairs. “We read everything carefully,” is a common refrain. But it actually isn’t possible. There are simply too many applications and too little time to pull together a first-year class. What you need your writing to do, then, is to force them out of their heads and into their hearts. You need to make the reader pause and truly feel something, whether it’s joy, humor, conflict, or challenge. You need them to see you in your college essay.
This will then bleed into their review of your supplements. They will see an imagined face behind the prospective major and passions, the curiosities, and creative pursuits. That face is a lot harder to say no to. They will begin to feel invested in your journey, and instead look for reasons to say an enthusiastic yes.
Step Four: Ask For Help
The last step is to admit what you don’t know. You know yourself, and you know your schoolwork. You are not, however, an expert on college admissions no matter how much time you’ve spent searching or scrolling for answers. Expertise in this world is built by being in the midst of it, year-in and year-out, and seeing what works along with what doesn’t. We advise that all students reject S-C EA find someone to talk to and work with who truly understand the college admissions process. That could be a trusted family friend, a school college counselor invested in your future, or a group like us.
It is entirely possible to get into a dream school after an S-C EA rejection from Princeton, and we’ve helped students even attain Ivy League and Ivy-caliber acceptances when they’re in precisely the position you are in right now — but you need to take action now.
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