Rewritn Blog

Colleges Are Businesses. Apply Like It.

Rick Yang — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

In September, MIT took the No. 1 spot in the U.S. News rankings. Princeton had held it for 15 years straight.

If you’re a high schooler, your first thought was probably something along the lines of “huh, okay?” As an EECS major in college, mine was “okay, which exact weights changed?”

Nothing really changed at Princeton, and nothing changed at MIT either. They have the exact same professors, the same campus, and of course the same students complaining about the exact same dining hall. What changed was the formula: U.S. News dropped its graduate debt metric and swapped in one called earnings by major, which looks at how much students make a few years after graduating.

That one tweak reshuffled the entire list. It also gives you a subtle hint about how to approach your application, even if you never look at the rankings again.

Same schools, one weight swapped.

Princeton didn’t get worse. The scoreboard changed.

Rankings are essentially a weighted sum. Change the weights, and the output changes. This year, U.S. News decided outcomes matter more, and the outcome it picked is basically a salary number. Schools pay attention to this. Not because admissions officers sit around refreshing the rankings page, but because rankings feed into everything else a school cares about: prestige, how many students apply, the caliber of the students who apply, and how the school pitches itself to donors.

Colleges are businesses (and that’s not a bad thing)

I’m an engineer, not a business guy, and I genuinely love going to Berkeley. But even as a guy who stays far away from business, I can see it: universities are ultimately businesses. Each one has revenue, costs, a brand, and a reputation it needs to keep up.

Here’s roughly how that business runs:

Tuition and fees keep the lights on.
Alumni donations fund the big stuff, and alumni give more when they’re doing well.
Research money and partnerships follow prestige.
Rankings and reputation drive applications, which drive selectivity, which drives rankings. It’s a loop.

The loop every admission feeds.

So when a school admits you, it’s making a calculated bet. It’s betting, essentially, that you will make the school look prestigious: you go to class, graduate with a high GPA, and go on to do something great with your life. Every “UC Berkeley alum founds X” is a headline that screams free advertising.

How to show you’re going somewhere

So what exactly should you do with this information? This is the part that actually matters. With these metrics in mind, here are a few things readers will especially look out for in the coming years:

Put numbers on your impact. “Led the robotics club” says you had a title. “Grew the robotics club from 6 members to 30 and landed our first sponsor” says you made something happen.
Show something you started. It doesn’t have to be a startup: a tutoring program, a small business, a newsletter, a fundraiser. Building something from zero shows initiative better than almost anything else on an application.
Tie your interests to a real problem. “I want to study economics” is fine. “I want to study economics because I watched my family’s restaurant almost close, and I want to understand why small businesses are so fragile” tells a reader where you’re going.
Show trajectory, not just a trophy case. Readers want to see that each thing led to the next: you got curious, then you built a small project, then a bigger one.
Write your “why us” essay like a pitch. Name specific programs, professors, and clubs, and say what you’d actually do with them. The school is investing in you, so tell them what the return looks like.

A title versus a number.

What not to do

The flip side is that this is really easy to overdo. A few ways it backfires:

Talking about money. Salary, prestige, “I want to be successful” with nothing behind it. It reads as shallow, fast.
Picking a major for optics. If you put CS because it looks impressive but nothing else in your file backs it up, readers notice. I can say this as an EECS major: there are a lot of us, and the pool is stacked. (We wrote about how crowded that pool already is in How I’d Approach a STEM Application.)
Listing ten activities with no thread between them. Breadth with no direction looks like you were collecting things for the application.
Inflating. “Founder and CEO” of an Instagram page with 40 followers gets found out pretty quickly. Small and real beats big and vague every time.

The quick evaluation

Here’s a simple way to test your file. Picture an admissions officer explaining your profile to the selection board in under half a minute, armed with only your folder.

Can they clearly articulate:

what you’ve accomplished so far,
what goal you’re pursuing next,
and why this campus makes sense for your future?

What the board hears in 30 seconds.

If the answer is yes, you’re set up well. But if their summary boils down to “high GPA, standard list of clubs,” your file comes across as a boring transcript rather than an exciting investment.

Universities operate as enterprises, placing calculated wagers on high schoolers every cycle. Show them why you’re worth taking a chance on.

If you want feedback on your file from someone who just went through this process, our team is ready. Start with a free essay review, or browse our counselors on Rewritn.

How I’d Approach a STEM Application Knowing What I Know Now

Rick Yang — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I didn’t know what I was doing.

I still don’t. Most people don’t either.

But I can talk about my experiences and what I would do differently, looking back on past rejections.

When I applied to college, I thought the formula for a STEM application was pretty simple: stack on as much STEM as possible. That meant more coding projects, more math competitions, and more Decathlon. If I was applying for EECS, my entire application should scream EECS, right?

Now I’m an EECS major and math minor at Berkeley, so I guess I did at least some of it right. Looking back, though, I realize that most STEM applications don’t fail because they are weak. They fail because they are identical. Admissions readers go through thousands of files from students who code, compete, and “want to change the world.” After a while, those files blur together.

I still remember comparing portfolios with one of my high school friends. On paper, we had the exact same competitions, projects, and even very similar extracurriculars. Yet I got into completely different schools than he did. What mattered most was how cohesive my portfolio was, or at least how cohesive I made it look. I tied everything that felt scattered and disorganized across my application into one story through the only instrument we students can really control: essays. Tennis taught me patience and how not to fumble under pressure. Handling pressure helped me in band performances, which also taught me leadership as first chair. That leadership changed how I led the Decathlon club as president. And somehow it all came full circle when I learned to be myself while leading, and to mold my tennis strategy to my own game instead of playing a really traditional way.

Same résumé, different story.

If I were applying as a technical major again, I’d do four things differently. I’d make my application prove more than technical skill. I’d show what real growth looks like. I’d make sure there was one concrete thing a reader would remember. And I’d run the whole thing through what I call the friend test. Here’s what each of those looks like.

Diversify what your application proves

Here’s the counterintuitive part: if your application is for STEM, it shouldn’t necessarily scream STEM at all. Colleges already assume you like science or math. That’s the whole reason you’re applying in the first place. What they’re trying to figure out is everything else. Your personality. Can you lead? What happens when you fail? Would you really be a good fit for that specific college?

So instead of asking, “How much technical skill does my application prove?” I would split my application evenly across major-aligned depth, leadership, time commitment, creativity, roadblocks, community, real responsibility, and curiosity.

The trick is that you don’t need a separate activity for each one. Three years on a robotics team can show time commitment, roadblocks if your robot died at regionals, leadership if you held an officer position, and major-aligned depth, all at once.

Three activities, one thread.

The “spike vs. well-rounded” debate you’ll see all over the internet is also more nuanced than it looks. I mostly agree that selective schools want you to show something you are really, really good at. Just don’t let the spike be the only thing your readers see about you. The opposite is just as bad: ten unrelated clubs you each did for a year sound like box-ticking, not like a person.

The bottom line: diversify what your activities prove, not necessarily what they’re about.

Show growth, but keep it real

Every admissions reader wants to see how you changed, not that you “worked hard.” They want to see concrete befores and afters. This is what people mean when they tell you to “show, don’t tell” in your essays. Show the concrete actions you took, using specific verbs. What exactly did you feel when you acted? Why did you act in the first place? What did you believe or do at the start that you don’t anymore?

STEM applicants have one of their biggest advantages here, because technical failures make great stories. Each one is specific to you, which makes it believable and makes you memorable. Most importantly, it shows growth and what you do when things collapse under pressure.

Where most people mess up is thinking they need a tragedy. You don’t. There’s a lot of pressure to compete in the hardship Olympics, but picking the biggest obstacle you ever faced, or inflating a small one, usually backfires. A small, true obstacle that is personal to you beats a grand, exaggerated one every time.

My own small, messy GitHub failures. Even something this small can be a specific obstacle that reveals a lot about you, if it’s personal.

Which brings me to the “real” part. Assume someone will check your claims: titles, user counts, hours per week, the club you “founded” that had three members, the research project you were on for two weeks. Colleges do take this seriously. The easy fix is to keep receipts as you go: GitHub repos, competition results, contact info. If it’s real, you never have to worry about it.

Be memorable

This is easily the most important part of your application, and easily the hardest. Picture the person reading it. They’ve read 100 applications in the past few hours, they’re exhausted from hearing the same thing over and over, and over half of those applications start with “I’ve loved building ever since…” or “I want to use technology to innovate and…”

The biggest thing I would change, even in my own application: being specific beats being grand. A reader is more likely to remember a weird, exact detail than a big, generic accomplishment. CS plus something unexpected, like music or a sport, is more memorable than CS plus CS.

A good goal: the reader should be able to pitch you to someone completely random in one sentence. You should be able to fill in this sentence using only your application: “The kid who built ___ for ___.” If you can’t write that sentence yourself from what’s in your application, the admissions officer probably can’t either.

The biggest takeaway here is to let your voice in. An application that reads like an actual person beats one that reads like a list of accomplishments. You’re allowed (even encouraged) to be funny, and to be honest about what you know and don’t know yet.

The name test

If you take away one thing from this post, make it this: if someone close to you read your whole application with your name blacked out, they should easily be able to tell it’s you.

There are a few ways to run this:

The friend test: Black out your name and give your full application to a close friend. Can they tell it’s yours?
The swap test: Put a classmate’s name on your application. If it still works, rewrite it.
The stranger test: This is probably the best one. If you run the test yourself or have a friend run it, the result will be biased in your favor. Give it to someone who doesn’t know you. Afterward, can they describe you in a sentence that isn’t just “wants to study CS”? (Shameless plug: our counselors will do exactly that for you.)

This is about the whole application, not just your extracurriculars or essays. Your letters of recommendation should point to you. Your activities and additional information should do the same. Each piece should add something the others don’t.

The fastest fix is to swap adjectives for specifics. “Passionate about coding” tells the reader nothing. What did you build? Who was it for? What did you learn? Answering those questions in a few sentences beats any application that just tells the reader you are “extremely passionate.”

The short version: if I were applying as a technical major again, I would stop trying to look like the most STEM-like applicant in the stack and start looking like the most me version of myself. Show them you are a real person with a real personality. Make sure nobody else could have written your application.