The New York Times Has Discovered How to Get into Harvard: Be Male, and Write for The New York Times
For the past few years, The New York Times’ college blog “The Choice” has profiled several high school seniors as they make the journey from boys to men, girls to women. Each year, six to eight aspirant collegians guest blog about their school search in a feature called “The Envelope, Please.” These youngsters come from a range of backgrounds, and are looking at schools all over the map. However, as we at IvyGate recently noticed, men who write for The Choice tend to have a little boost with a certain Cambridge based school.
That’s right, despite Harvard having one of the lowest admission rates in the country, out of the five young male contributors who applied, four got in. To put that in perspective, Harvard’s regular decision acceptance rate this year was 3.8%, but if you look at The Choice’s male guest bloggers, Harvard has taken 80% of them. Even factor in the two women who applied but didn’t make the cut, that’s still 57% of the applicants getting in to Harvard, a school that has prided itself on their single digit acceptance percentages.
So how did this happen? Is Harvard’s admissions office reading The Envelope, Please? Does The Choice have some magic crystal ball to find future Harvard admits? Or, is writing for the most famous newspaper in the world the answer to an increasingly competitive college application process everyone is trying to game?
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t actually seem to be working in Harvard’s favor. While Harvard’s yield for the class of 2016 was 81%, only one of their four chosen bloggers over the years decided to take the Crimson up on their offer. Again, to break it down into numbers, 81% for 2016ers, 25% of NYTers. Ouch. The other three decided to take their talents to Stanford, Yale, and, double ouch, Vanderbilt.




Last week, a Crimson blogger wrote that Columbia has the 

