Receiving a rejection in the Early Decision round from Vanderbilt is a gut punch. You took a swing at a dream school — and it may not have even felt like that big of a swing. But yet you are here, reading this post, trying to figure out what to do next.
Vanderbilt has always been a great university, but over the past decade it has joined the upper echelon of colleges and universities that are extraordinarily difficult to get into. Now, let’s be clear. This shift hasn’t been because of massive changes at the school. It’s still the Vanderbilt it was 10 years ago, but the landscape of college admissions has shifted. With a small number of elite schools boasting acceptance rates under 5%, there are more exceptional students applying to Vanderbilt than ever before. This has made Vanderbilt’s former target students unavoidable reaches — and it’s really not a target, let alone a safety, for anyone anymore.
For the Class of 2029, the overall acceptance rate was only , below that terrifying 5% threshold. The regular decision acceptance that year was a measly 3.3%, but the Early Decision acceptance rate was a more hopeful
In this post, we are going to break down what may have gone wrong with your Vanderbilt application, and what you need to be doing now to bounce back and get into a dream school.
We help strong students get into dream schools, even after an ED rejection. Learn more.
There are four key steps that you must be taking now to ensure successful outcomes as you continue applying to outstanding schools.
Step One: Take a Break
Before you start with Regular Decision applications, you need to slow down. We’re serious about this. Charging ahead into the RD cycle with the same list you had before your ED rejection, and with the same essays, is a sure way to guarantee unfortunate outcomes. So, you are going to have to do something different. And, to do that, you need to reset and recharge. Take a day or two to truly turn off any college conversations, both with friends and family and through online platforms. Give yourself time to sleep, go for a long walk, or bake a dozen cupcakes. Having a little fun in this moment will set you up for success for what comes next.
Step Two: Strategize
As you devise an approach for the Regular Decision round, or indeed EDII, it’s critical that you properly break down what may have gone wrong with your Vanderbilt application.
The first place to look is whether your grades and scores were a match for what Vanderbilt expects from applicants. If you did not meet the for academic distribution, that’s an easy answer for why you weren’t at least .
Next, look at your GPA. If you have a GPA below , that is another easy thing to point to and say, “that was the problem.” Of course, there is rarely one place that tells the whole story of why an application was rejected, but a low GPA is an easy culprit. This is especially true if you didn’t submit sky-high SAT or ACT scores.
Vanderbilt does not require the SAT or ACT, but of recently accepted applicants did submit them. This tells us that they are important, either to underline your transcript or to possibly counteract a GPA at the lower end of what Vanderbilt expects. A strong SAT for Vanderbilt is over 1540, and a strong ACT is a 35 or 36.
If your application was not a match for Vanderbilt based on grades, you need to rethink your college list. You are passionate and driven, but you are aiming at the wrong type of school. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get into a great college or university, but colleges with acceptance rates under 10% are probably not the best schools to aim for. Instead, recalibrate your list to have 3-4 true target schools, where your grades and scores are in at least the middle-50% of accepted students, 3-4 safety schools, and 2-3 reach schools that are more accessible than Vanderbilt.
If you have the grades and the scores, though, something else went on with your application: it simply didn’t click. Something about how you presented yourself did not make a compelling case for admission to Vanderbilt. Typically, this can be found in your essays. It isn’t that you didn’t do enough activities — it’s that you didn’t tell strong enough stories.
Step Three: Essays
Obviously, you can’t do anything to change your grades or scores at this point, and you can’t add new activities that will make an impact. You can, however, turn around the trajectory of your college admissions experience through one simple thing: better writing.
More than ever this year, we hear from students who are approaching essays from a place of anxiety. They’ve heard about what works and what doesn’t on social media, they are terrified of getting flagged for using AI despite producing all original work, and they know how much rides on this writing. The thing is that’s completely the wrong approach.
We work with our students to produce written essays and supplements that are authentic to who they are, not influenced by what some random person who doesn’t know them decides to promote as a ‘winning’ approach online. The key to this is to center all writing on stories that are personal, meaningful, and that are individual enough to be entirely yours while also speaking to larger themes that connect with the reader.
The point of all of this extra work rewriting and producing truly impactful writing is to make it hard for the application reader to say no. When you are a bunch of numbers and an anemic written portion, it’s easy to say no to you. When you connect with the reader on a personal level, though, it’s easy to say yes.
Step Four: Ask For Help
The final step is to give yourself the best chance possible of submitting RD applications, and an EDII should you choose, that make an impact. And the best way to accomplish that, in our experience, is to ask for help. Don’t ask your friend who is a good writer or your parents who last applied to college in the 90s, though. Instead, you need truly expert guidance. This could be a school counselor, a trusted teacher, or a consultant like us, as we live and breathe elite college admissions.
Reframing your college admissions process and formulating a new strategy after the ED rejection isn’t just important — it’s imperative if you want to achieve dream-school results.
After a rejection ED, it’s time to ask for help. Learn more.