What the Harvard Lawsuit Revealed About Getting Into a Top School

Almost everything families believe about elite admissions is inferred from the outside. Parents read acceptance threads, compare score ranges, and try to reverse-engineer a process that no admissions office has ever fully described in public.

Then a lawsuit forced one open. Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard in 2014, and over the next nine years the case moved through discovery, a three-week trial in federal court in Boston, an appeal, and finally the Supreme Court. Along the way, Harvard was required to hand over the documents it had never shared: the reading procedures its officers actually follow, the rating sheets they fill out, and applicant-by-applicant data for more than 150,000 domestic applicants across the classes of 2014 through 2019.

Economists on both sides then modeled that data and published their analyses. Whatever you think of the case or its outcome, the record it produced is the single most detailed public account of how a school of this kind decides who gets in. It is worth reading carefully, because it contradicts a lot of what families are told.

Below is the process it revealed, in the order an application moves through it.

Step 1: Your file is sorted before anyone reads it

Applications are not read as one national pile. They are divided into geographic dockets, each covering a region and each assigned to a small team that reads that region every year.

This detail matters more than almost anything else families worry about. Your first comparison is not against every applicant in the country. It is against the other students from your area, read by an officer who knows your high school, has seen its transcripts before, and has a working sense of what a demanding schedule looks like there.

The practical consequence is that context is unavoidable. A student taking the hardest available courseload at a school that offers six APs is not being measured against a student at a school that offers thirty. The reader knows the difference. It also means the competition you should picture is regional, and it is a stronger comparison group than most families assume.

Step 2: Your file becomes a set of ratings

The first reader works through the file and assigns scores in several categories. The trial record identified the core ones as academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal, plus a separate overall rating. Recommendation letters are scored too, on their own school support ratings.

The scale runs from 1 to 6, where 1 is the best. In practice, almost every real applicant lands somewhere between 1 and 4, and readers use plus and minus modifiers within those numbers.

This is the part that surprises families most. Your application does not stay a story for very long. Within one reading, it becomes a short row of numbers, and those numbers are what travel through the rest of the process.

Step 3: What those numbers actually mean

The reading procedures entered into evidence define each rating. The definitions are far more specific than anything in a viewbook, and one of them reframes the whole exercise.

The academic rating, and the trap inside it

The court's findings set out the scale directly. An academic rating of 1 indicates summa cum laude potential, a genuine scholar, and near-perfect scores and grades combined with unusual creativity and possible evidence of original scholarship. An academic rating of 2 indicates magna cum laude potential, superb grades, and mid-to-high 700s on the SAT or above a 33 on the ACT.

This explains an outcome families find baffling every spring, when a student with a 4.0 and a near-perfect SAT is rejected. That student was never rated as exceptional. They were rated as excellent, along with a very large number of other people.

The court put numbers on how large. Among roughly 35,000 applicants to the class of 2019, about 2,700 had a perfect verbal SAT score and about 3,400 had a perfect math score. Harvard admitted about 2,000 students in total. There were more perfect scores in the pool than there were seats.

The personal rating

The personal rating is the most discussed and the least understood. For the cycles examined in the case, the reading procedures instructed readers to assign a 1 when personal qualities are outstanding, a 2 when they are very strong, a 3 when they are generally positive, and a 4 when the file reads as bland or somewhat negative or immature.

The qualities named in the record include integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness, fortitude, empathy, self-confidence, leadership, maturity, and grit. Harvard's own documents also reference traits as specific as humor and sensitivity.

The court also noted that these criteria were overhauled for the class of 2023, and that the procedures now state explicitly that race or ethnicity should not be considered in assigning the personal rating. Note who supplies the evidence for this rating. Some of it comes from the essays, which the student controls. A great deal of it comes from the recommendation letters, which the student does not. This is the rating most shaped by other people's writing.

The extracurricular rating

The extracurricular scale is calibrated to a level of accomplishment rather than a quantity of activities. A rating of 1 indicates national-level, professional, or other truly unusual achievement suggesting the applicant may be a major contributor on campus. A 2 indicates strong contributions to the applicant's high school, such as being class president or earning recognition at a local or regional level. A 3 is solid participation without special distinction, and a 4 is little or no participation.

The scale has no mechanism for rewarding volume. Ten activities at the school level do not aggregate into a national-level rating. They produce the school-level rating, once.

Step 4: The overall rating decides almost everything

After the category ratings comes a single overall rating. The court described it as the admissions officer's impression of the strength of the whole application, and its tiers are blunt: an overall 1 is exceptional and a clear admit, a 2 reflects strong credentials, a 3 good credentials, and a 4 respectable credentials.

The overall rating is not an average of the other scores. It is a judgment, and it is where a reader's assessment of the whole file gets compressed into one number that the committee will actually argue about. The economist who analyzed the data for the plaintiffs found that applicants with an overall rating of 3- or worse were almost always rejected.

Step 5: Subcommittee, then full committee

Files then move to a docket subcommittee, where the officers responsible for a region discuss candidates and vote. Survivors go to the full committee, which votes again, with the entire admissions staff present.

By this stage an application has stopped being a document and has become an advocate's case. Someone in that room has to be willing to spend limited credibility arguing for your student, in a few minutes, against other officers doing the same for theirs. What that person can say out loud is roughly the ratings, plus one or two specific things that make the file memorable.

An application that is uniformly strong is very hard to advocate for, because there is nothing short and vivid to say about it.

Step 6: Lopping

The committee's votes usually produce more admits than there are seats. The final stage, known internally as lopping, cuts the list down to the size of the class.

This is the least romantic part of the process and the most revealing. According to the court's findings, the committee works from a prepared lop list that may show a small set of attributes for each candidate under consideration: financial aid status, athletic rating, legacy status, gender, and, at the time, race. At this point the decision is not really about the quality of the file anymore. It is about the composition of the class as a whole.

A student can be genuinely good enough, be voted in, and still not survive this stage. That is not a comforting fact, but families deserve to know it exists rather than assuming a rejection was a verdict on the student's worth.

Step 7: The Z-list

A small group of applicants each year is neither admitted nor rejected but offered a place in the following year's class instead. This is the Z-list. The court describes the mechanism plainly as deferred admission. Analyses of the trial exhibits reported it running to roughly 50 to 60 students a year, with just under half of those students being legacies across the classes of 2014 through 2019.

The thumb on the scale: ALDC

The category that generated the most public attention is what the litigation called ALDC: recruited athletes, legacies, applicants on the dean's interest list, and children of faculty and staff.

The admit rates for these groups, drawn from six admissions cycles in the trial data, were not marginally better. They were of a different order.

The economists who analyzed the data estimated that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would not have been admitted without that status, and that more than 43 percent of white admitted students fell into one of those four categories.

There is no way to make this information actionable for most families, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Its value is different. It corrects the denominator. When you read that a school admits five percent of applicants, a meaningful share of those seats were spoken for by categories your student is not in. The rate that applies to an unhooked applicant is lower than the published number, and understanding that should change how a family builds a college list, not how they build an application.

What changed in 2023, and what did not

In June 2023 the Supreme Court ruled against the race-conscious admissions programs at issue in this case and its companion case against the University of North Carolina. Schools can no longer use race as a factor in the way they previously did.

It is important to be precise about the scope of that ruling, because a lot of coverage was not. The decision addressed the consideration of race. It did not dismantle the rest of the machinery.

• The rating system, and the definitions behind each score, were not at issue and remain the framework readers use.
• The docket structure, subcommittee and full committee votes, and the final trim to class size were not affected.
• Legacy preference was not addressed by the Court at all. It has come under real political and regulatory pressure since, and some states and institutions have restricted or ended it, so this varies by school and is worth checking for each school on your list.
• Recruited athletic preference was not affected and remains the largest single advantage in the data.

So the parts of this process a family can actually prepare for are almost entirely intact. The ratings still exist. The definitions still say what they say.

What this means for your student

Read against the ratings, most of the standard advice given to ambitious high schoolers is either incomplete or backwards. Here is what the record supports.

1. 1Treat grades and scores as a gate, not an edge. They have to be strong enough to keep the file in the conversation, and past that point additional perfection buys very little. A student already scoring in the top band is better served putting the next hundred hours somewhere else. If the score is not there yet, that is a different problem, and structured test prep is the faster fix.
2. 2If the goal is the top academic rating, the path runs through real scholarship. Work that exists outside of coursework, and that a qualified adult has genuinely evaluated, is the thing the definition actually describes. Research with a faculty member, serious independent work, submitted and judged writing or mathematics. Not another AP.
3. 3Go deep in one thing rather than broad across seven. The extracurricular scale rewards level reached, not number of items. Two years of real depth that reaches regional or national standing beats seven clubs, and the seven clubs are a very common profile.
4. 4Choose recommenders for specificity, not seniority. The letters are separately rated and they are a primary input to the personal rating. A teacher who knows your student well and can tell a specific story about them is worth far more than a department head who can only confirm they earned an A.
5. 5Give your recommenders something to write with. Students who talk to their teachers, ask real questions, and show intellectual character over time get letters that can support a strong personal rating. This is a two-year behavior, not a two-week request.
6. 6Write essays that make a committee member able to argue for you. The test is not whether the essay is beautiful. It is whether someone who read it once, three weeks ago, can say one vivid sentence about your student in a room full of people who are tired. This is the hardest part of the application to self-edit, and the part where working with a counselor changes the most.
7. 7Build the college list against the real denominator. Understanding how many seats are effectively committed before the pool is read is an argument for a wider, more honest list, and for taking the schools in the middle of that list seriously.

The honest caveat

Everything above describes one institution, as its process stood during the years covered by the litigation, and some of it has certainly changed since. Other selective schools are not identical. They differ in how they weight ratings, whether they read by region, and how they run committee.

But they hire from the same pool of admissions professionals, they face the same arithmetic of far too many qualified applicants, and the broad shape of the process is widely shared. The specific numbers belong to one school. The logic does not.

The more useful takeaway is a change in posture. Most families prepare for admissions as though the task is to accumulate credentials until the pile is undeniable. The record suggests the task is closer to the opposite: to become legible, and to be exceptional in a way that is specific enough for one person to describe in a sentence.

That is a harder assignment than taking another AP. It is also a much better use of a high school career.