by Jim J Jones

Created on: June 16, 2010

The vast majority of Americans, and of people everywhere, would like to go to college, and would actually do so assuming that they had the financial means and the academic record that would allow them to. Of course, not everyone can get into college at all, and many colleges are so "selective" that most students can not get into them. Of course, this raises an interesting question of which colleges are the "best," and how one should define selectivity.

In the American college application process, there are four basic metrics used to evaluate a high school student. There is the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the famous SAT, or occasionally the American College Test, or ACT). In addition there are the three academic metrics. There is class rank, which compares a student's grade point average to that of everyone else in his or her class (although some school use different systems, such as weighted grade point averages.) There is grade point average alone, which measures a student's performance on an A to F scale. Finally, there is the teacher recommendation, which teachers use to evaluate a student's performance in their own classroom, and to assess the student's readiness for the college he or she is applying to.

Different colleges give different weights to these factors. For example, some have SAT or GPA cut offs, and will not allow any student who scores below a fixed numerical value on one of them. Others will take a "holistic approach," evaluating the applicant as a "whole person," and taking into account personality strengths that may offset numerical weaknesses. Still others focus exclusively on an applicant's strength in a particular field, such as Cal Tech's emphasis on math and science.

Thus, defining the hardest college to get into requires naming the toughest in each category. Luckily, a small group of schools are the hardest in all categories. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are generally the toughest in all categories, among large universities. Cal Tech (sometimes referred to as "the school for kids who were too smart for MIT") is considered far more selective, but its entering class of 200 is so small that it is generally not ranked. Of course, art lovers will not be going to any of these, but may instead be looking at places like the Pratt Institute, which does not care if its students score 0 on the Math SAT, much as Cal Tech does not care if its students cannot sketch for their lives.

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