How Early Should You Prepare for College?

How early should you prepare for college? We get this question asked all the time. The short answer: the earlier, the better.

Because we can certainly tell you that there are students who are preparing as early as 5th grade to maximize their chances at getting into one of these schools.

Whether it’s competing in MathCounts or preparing for the SAT through the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) program, or training for any of the Olympiads, honing your skillset early on so you can compete at a high level that would ultimately increase your odds of getting into the top schools in the country is an excellent idea. 

Early college programs like Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth (CTY) or Duke’s Talent Search are excellent opportunities for budding high school scholars.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY) program offers the SAT for 7th and 8th graders. This is an excellent way to prepare for standardized testing such as the SAT at an early age, as well as expose a child to a community of high achieving students through the summer camps. I believe that a truly talented student in the Top 1% of his or her peer group should able to score a 1300 or higher by 7th grade, and a 1400 by 8th grade. These are certainly high standards to meet, but we’re also talking about getting into the country’s very best universities. 

Preparing early on is important because by the time you hit enter 9th grade and you find about the leadership roles, extracurricular activities, and academic competitions that give a significant boost to your admissions profile, it may be too late as you’ll find yourself scrambling to prepare over summer and winter break in addition to all of your regular school work and summer reading list piled on top.

For those who don’t know about the opportunity set that a high school student must take advantage of in order to get into Ivy League, Stanford, and other top tier schools, it simply speaks to the broken state of college admissions process in America.

We can tell you some of these milestones such as academic competitions are no joke – they require a fundamental understanding of the subject matter and doing lots and lots of practice problems to develop that nimble mindset able to solve these challenging questions.

Check out the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Exam (AIME), for instance. How many of these questions can your high school student answer correctly?

These problems are many orders of magnitude more difficult than the SAT’s, for example, which many students already find challenging. You certainly aren’t going to get brilliant overnight. Qualifying for AIME and advancing to USAMO has been one of the highly touted exams that would drastically increase your probability of getting into schools like MIT or Caltech.

We’ve consulted with students as early as 5th-6th grade and provided them a long term roadmap to achieve this level of success. It requires the right study habits, hard work, persistence, and the right attitude to perform well.

More importantly, it requires understanding what the opportunity set looks like out there in terms of regional and national competitions like the Scholastic Art & Writing Competition or the Regeneron Science and Engineering Fair so you can be well prepared to navigate these challenging competitions that are well outside of the high school curriculum.

For our high school students, we lay out the foundation at the very beginning of our engagement – exactly what you need to do to prepare and the actionable items and goals you need to accomplish to get into these top tier universities.

It’s certainly not an easy task, especially with acceptance rates dropping to all time lows.

That vague notion of “pursuing your passion” is sound and true, but the pathway to get there and the actionable items in order to achieve those goals to maximize your probability of getting into one of the HYPSM schools is possible. 

But first, you need to understand what’s at stake and the level of preparation required in order to ascertain those goals in the first place. That’s where we as experts admissions consultants come in to help the student identify their interests and passions early on, and determine a roadmap to prime our students for success. Lucky is when preparation meets opportunity.