MIT is not only one of the most renowned STEM-focused schools in the country, it’s famous globally for educating and incubating the brightest young, STEM-focused minds in the world. Why MIT works, though, is that it isn’t a siloed educational experience where students can coast through on what they are already good at. Instead, it challenges students to push beyond their perceived limits and to break down subject area boundaries to fuel breakthrough discoveries. MIT students come from across the country and around the world, and there are about 1,200 seats in each class. The overall first-year acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 was 4.6%.
With such a low acceptance rate, figuring out how to get into MIT is a puzzle tens of thousands of students (and their families) try to crack each year. We help many students gain MIT acceptance each year, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. It is, after all, a non-standard application. They have their own application system entirely, their own priorities, and their own way of assessing applicants. They also have their own approach to admissions statistics. Whereas most colleges have become increasingly hush hush about the statistics behind their admissions process, MIT is an open book. Each of our suggestions below are guided then not simply by what we have seen work well over the past decade, but also by their own numbers. Now, let’s talk application options.
What Are My Application Options?
MIT does not believe in Early Decision. They want students like you to have options, and to get to really think about where you want to go once you have all your acceptances in front of you. Instead of offering a binding Early Decision option, they only offer non-binding Early Action and, later, Regular Action (which is the same as Regular Decision anywhere else).
MIT says that there is “no strategic benefit to applying in one vs the other.” We’ll dig into whether that is actually true (hint: it isn’t) next.
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Why Should I Apply Early Action To MIT?
MIT says that applying early does not offer students any advantage. We know what they mean. Their standards don’t change for applicants who apply early, and the early action application pool is chock full of students with an advantage (pre-screened athletes, faculty children, and the like). However, even when one accounts for those applicants, applying Early Action gives students a statistical advantage. Let’s look at the numbers to prove this.
For the Class of 2029, MIT received 12,052 Early Action applications. 721, or just under 6%, were admitted. A massive portion, over 7,000, were deferred. Of those deferred students, 175 (2.3%) were admitted in Regular Action.
Now, let’s look at Regular Action that same year. 17,229 students applied regular action, with then the addition of the deferred candidates from the Early Action cycle. Only 428 of the students who were eventually accepted in the Regular Action cycle had not previously been deferred, or 2.5% of Regular Action applicants.
What this illustrates to us is that Early Action offers a distinct advantage, even when you allow for athletes and students with special considerations (like faculty children), and that deferred students have nearly the same chance of getting in following their deferral as a Regular Action applicant.
Ultimately, applying to MIT Early Action is your best option, especially if you pair your early MIT application with another Early Action or Early Decision application to another college or university that you would be enthusiastic to attend.
What Can You Do?
There are a number of things that you need to be doing to prepare for your Early Action application to MIT. Ideally, you’ll have at least a year between jumping into MIT application prep and pressing submit. If you have less time, though, there are still strong actions you can take to greatly increase your chance of admission. We break the most critical pieces of application prep down into four core categories: grades, scores, extracurriculars, and essays.
Grades
It should not come as a surprise that MIT expects to see exceptional grades that go beyond what is typical of high school students both in caliber and in the level of challenge the courses you take offer. MIT-minded students, even those at highly competitive high schools, often take additional coursework through a local college, summer program, or accredited online learning platform. This is in addition to excelling in the hardest STEM courses that you have access to at school.
At the risk of being repetitive, we want to make sure that we are being clear when we say “excelling.” Strong MIT applicants have a multi-year track record of straight As. It isn’t just about math and science, though. Even if your planned major is STEM-oriented — which it nearly surely is for MIT — they look for multidimensional applicants who express passions in the humanities alongside their STEM projects.
Basically, there is no excuse for a lower than excellent grade in any subject. This includes your early high school years. It is possible to make up for a B in freshman year, but a slew of lower grades or having those lower grades creep into sophomore or even junior year is really a nonstarter with MIT. This isn’t because you couldn’t thrive there, but because they have so many applicants with such exceptional academic records that they don’t have a good reason to accept students with imperfect transcripts except for when there are extreme mitigating factors such as being recruited for MIT athletics.
Scores
For some schools, exceptional standardized test scores are a perk but not a necessity. You can get in with solid scores, or can omit them entirely and still achieve admission. MIT is not like those schools. While there is no published minimum score on either the SAT or ACT for consideration, getting in without a super strong score is extremely difficult. It is also required that you submit a score, so you can’t simply pretend the tests didn’t happen.
An okay SAT for MIT is a 1520. That’s not a great score for MIT, but an okay one that you can feel good but not great about. Really, you want to be above a 1520. Getting in with an SAT below a 1520 requires some extenuating circumstances, like inventing a game changing technology or being really good (like one of the best in the nation) at running a mile. For the ACT, they want to see a 35 or 36.
When students struggle to hit these numbers, our first advice is to study more and try again. Only after a few well-prepared attempts should you begin to build an alternate strategy that requests that the admissions readers overlook a lower-than-normal score. It is key that you keep one thing central to any alternative approach: you are not the exception. It’s easy to embrace the idea that you will be an exception to MITs standards. They will see how awesome you are, and overlook numerical realities. The thing is, MIT loves numbers and they believe in the power of quantitative data to predict future results. Typically, those who are admitted with lower test scores, those who are an exception, have really good reasons that go far beyond not wanting to take practice tests on a Saturday.
Extracurriculars
After your grades, what you do outside of the classroom is the most important thing that MIT wants to understand from your application. MIT looks for students who are passionate self-starters. They lead times, rally friends for noble causes, and learn how to weld so they can rebuild vintage cars in their garage. Strong MIT applicants pursue passion unapologetically, and bring others along for the roller coaster.
If most of what you do is team-based, it’s important that you add a solo initiative component like independent research or a weekend project that you tackle because it is fun, not because you think it will look good on your applications.
If nearly all of your activities are solo endeavors, the opposite is necessary. We highly recommend that you add a team-based activity, ideally relevant to the STEM field you want to pursue. If you join the team or club by the beginning of junior year, there is even potential for gaining leadership as a senior.
In the end, you need a mix of group and individual activities that are relevant to your proposed major. You also need evidence of leadership before you will press Send on your application, so we prefer when a student can be in a leadership role by Junior year such that they have stories to tell when writing application essays the summer before senior year.
Essays
As we said, MIT has their own application and their own style to go along with it. Sometimes, there are pieces you can use from work you are doing for other colleges, but you need to be careful not to copy-and-paste. MIT wants to see writing that is specific to the university, so they ask questions that make using something you wrote for a different school purposefully difficult.
One of the biggest mistakes we see students make on applications to MIT is to treat the essays like a resume. They want to pack everything impressive that they have ever done into a few paragraphs, as if the density of their prose directly equates to the impact it will have on the application readers. They aren’t wrong, but it isn’t the kind of impact they are trying for.
The admissions officers at MIT, the ones who will be the first line of consideration for any application, are predominately not MIT graduates. They are talented and intelligent humanities-minded individuals who are more likely to read a book and have majored in English or Anthropology than to build a robot. They are not impressed by your technical language, and want to see who you actually are behind awards and accolades. So, show them.
We help our students turn their experiences and passions into compelling narratives that highlight their creativity, community-mindedness, and individual journey through academics and through life. Sometimes this means getting deep into the nitty gritty, but via a poem. Other times it’s calculating the precise angle of approach when canoeing through a rapid. Whatever it is, it’s focused not on being fancy, but on being genuine, likeable, and undeniably yourself.
Apply Early
After you apply to MIT, it will be reviewed by an experienced admissions officer who takes each facet of who you are into consideration, allowing for the context of your experiences and opportunities. If your application is deemed strong, it goes on to additional admissions officers who create summaries for the larger Admissions Committee. Having made the choice to apply early, even though it is not binding, is an important piece of this puzzle as it proves that you are prioritizing MIT. Your application isn’t something cobbled together from 15 other college applications you are rushing through over winter break. It’s actually for MIT, specifically.
It you have made it to the summary phase, the short version of your application is reviewed by a selection committee that includes people with knowledge of your region, area of academic interest, and specific skills and talents. They work hard to make sure that whoever is assessing your application has the expertise to understand it, but you need to remember that an application is inherently flat. You have the power to craft it into a dynamic and dimensional tool that makes saying “yes” easy. So, do it.
MIT does not make it easy to apply, and it certainly isn’t easy to get in. The application is singular, specific, and often a struggle for students so focused on earning top grades that they haven’t spent time practicing telling their own story. We help students achieve outstanding outcomes because we work together with our students to tell powerful stories of passion, growth, perseverance, and teamwork.
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