High School and College Admission Requirements

When colleges calculate your GPA for admissions purposes, they will often ignore the GPA on your transcript and focus solely on your grades in these core subject areas. Grades for physical education, music ensembles, and other non-core courses are not as useful for predicting your level of college readiness as these core courses. This doesn’t mean that electives aren’t important, as colleges do want to see that you have a breadth of interests and experiences, but they simply don’t provide a good window into an applicant’s ability to handle rigorous college courses.

Core course requirements vary from state to state, and many of the more selective colleges will want to see a strong high school academic record that goes well beyond the core. Advanced Placement, IB, and Honors courses are a must to be competitive at the most selective colleges. In most cases, the strongest applicants to highly selective colleges will have four years of math (including calculus), four years of science, and four years of a foreign language.

If your high school doesn’t offer advanced language courses or calculus, the admissions folks will typically learn this from your counselor’s report, and this won’t be held against you. The admissions folks want to see that you have taken the most challenging courses available to you. High schools vary significantly in the types of challenging courses they can provide.

Note that many colleges with holistic admissions do not have specific course requirements for admission. The Yale University admissions website, as an example, states, “Yale does not have any specific entrance requirements (for example, there is no foreign language requirement for admission to Yale). But we do look for students who have taken a balanced set of the rigorous classes available to them. Generally speaking, you should try to take courses each year in English, science, math, the social sciences, and foreign language.”

That said, students without a basic core curriculum would have a hard time gaining entrance to one of the Ivy League schools. Colleges want to admit students who will succeed, and applicants without proper core courses in high school often struggle in college.