Will Yale Young Global Scholars Help You Get Into Yale?
Let’s cut to the chase: nope.
Here’s what Yale says on its website:
You can see that this is a long way of saying “no.” What about other colleges? Will it help? Consider this: if it doesn’t help you get into Yale, why would it help you get into other colleges? Yale is already telling you that you do not come out of YYGS as a stronger candidate, otherwise it would help your Yale application on its own.
Why doesn’t it matter? We can deduce this from the nature of the program:
They are selecting based on the same criteria that the college admissions officers are looking at: SAT, GPA, and essay. Therefore your offer letter offers zero new information to the college admissions officer.
It is not creating a transformative experience — you are not growing in some unique way that an admissions officer would identify as outstanding. You’re sitting in classes, yes, but curious students are learning all of this on their own, online. You are not coming out of YYGS a different candidate than when you went in.
If YYGS doesn’t tell the admissions officer anything new about you, and it doesn’t transform you as a candidate, then it makes sense that it wouldn’t impact your chances of admissions.
So, why might you go? Here’s what Yale says:
You get to take some classes in a subject you want, explore Yale, and meet smart and diverse people. If that’s your top priority, great. If you are primarily considering YYGS (or Harvard Summer School, etc) because you believe it will advance your college resume, save your money. If YYGS helped you get into college, they would say so.
This of course begs the question: will Futures Forge help you get into a better college?
Briefly, it might! Let’s discuss.
First: padding a college resume is not our priority. We believe for the most part that padding is transparent to admissions officers; they are wise to “the game” everyone is playing. We speak elsewhere about what college admissions officers are looking for.
Our priority is preparing you to perform anywhere you go. There is substantial evidence that your performance skills matter much more to your career trajectory than whether you went to a top-20 or top-50 university. We focus on what matters: driving performance. Students transform into higher performers at Futures Forge through our combination of challenge and feedback that we call catalytic learning.
Somewhat ironically, this may have helped some of our grads get into great universities. Zeybek, who got into Cornell, believes we were a major part of his admissions decision — he included Futures Forge as a key component in his admissions essay. Alex, who got into Emory, did the same.
Futures Forge may have helped because at Futures Forge, both of these guys had transformative experiences of significantly improving their skills, learning about themselves, and altering how they think about learning and growth. They’re carrying that forward into college intentionally. That probably impressed admissions officers. (They’re also both smart, passionate, driven guys and might have gotten into Cornell and Emory without us!)
Will this scale? That is: can individual transformation scale to your summer at Futures Forge? It’s the only thing that can. If you snooze through Futures Forge, you will not transform, and you will not be able to demonstrate that transformation. If you show up and give it everything, you will grow rapidly and be far stronger in the future — whether or not you decide that this particular growth experience is what you put in your college essay.
Logos are pointless: the purpose of an educational experience is what you get from it. We provide the experience; our students need to translate that into their admissions story. This will always be your responsibility, no matter what the extracurricular experience looks like.
But there’s good reason to think it does scale. After our inaugural summer in 2024, we have a few dozen college counselors and admissions consultants sending students to Futures Forge. They seem to believe in what we do.
