UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

below ND's average admission standards (a 1420 SAT is below the average accepted applicant's SAT of 1470, and even a bit lower than the converted average of it's average ACT acceptance of 34).

Also, the lack of class rank is often done by elite, very expensive high school prep schools who realized that they were going to lose students when parents realized that a class rank hurt their kids (for example a kid who ranks 10th at Ignatius in Chi or Loyola in LA is probably harder to achieve than number 2 a lesser school that is much cheaper, but the universities don't want every kid from the same prep school, and a valedictorian is always more impressive on a resume than the expensive school. Parents were starting to ask why they weee shelling out so much just to handicap their kids).
Additionally, the UN activities in Swaziland sound like a college resume builder that these prep schools arrange that has also met with a lot of skepticism at elite schools lately..
This may not describe your neighbor's situation, but I'd bet there is a good chance that it does.

The rest of the resume sounds great, but is the same as many others these schools are having to sift through. They can't accept them all, and they are the first to tell you that they will have misses in both who they accept and who they reject. The job is almost impossible.

What is odd is that Princeton's admission standards are even higher. He may have some sort of connection there as his numbers are well below their averages.


Link: ND admission averages