Understanding 'College Fit': How Universities Match your Student Profile

When a college admission officer goes through your application form, they consider two things. First, whether you are academically inclined or not. After considering your academic records and scores, the second question they consider is whether you will be a good fit for their university or not?

From within the list of six essential components of college application form, there are certain sections where they will focus at more closely to find the answer. Those sections are your essay/statement of purpose, letters of recommendation, activity list, and the ‘Other’ category.

This particular question does not have a simple yes or no answer. Universities define prospective students are ‘College fits’. What this term means is that the student should be a match for the culture of the university.

What are the ways through which they measure your ‘fit’? It depends on the university. For some colleges, students need to be academically inclined and getting good scores is enough. For other colleges, they wish to enroll students with a passion for knowledge, love of learning, and possessing intellectual curiosity. These things are reflected in your essay, statement of purpose and letters of recommendations.

For example, if your college professor mentions in your letter of recommendation that along with being smart, you usually stayed quiet in class. Which means you don't ask a lot of questions, don’t raise doubts or don't contribute a lot to the classroom discussions.

How do you imagine this student profile will be viewed by the university where they have less than 20 students per class? The reason behind having small strength classrooms is that all students in the class should participate, debate and discuss ideas. So this low-key student profile may not be considered as the best fit for that particular university.

On the other hand, there are certain courses/colleges where the classes have more than 100 students at once. So at those colleges, your quiet profile will not hurt your application.

Apart from all this, Fit can also be defined according to something called the institutional priorities. What the term ‘Institutional priorities’ means? It basically means what the university currently needs.

For example, a university in the UK is looking for an additional player on their cricket team and you happen to be a national-level or an international-level cricket player. So by default, you fulfill the institutional priority and you are the automatic match.

However, this fit is the trickiest as the institutional priorities are very hard to identify by the public outside of the university.

So now you understand the concept of a college fit, which is an essential tool of selection the universities use to accept or reject the student applications. And it is the reason behind some of the most academically qualified students getting reject at the highly selective colleges.

Complete Series: How to Apply to Universities Abroad