Are Colleges Much Easier to Get Into for Domestic Applicants than General Acceptance Rates Suggest?

As a case example, consider Colgate, which offers sufficient detail in its statistics for a simple analysis. Though it most recently reported a 22.6% overall acceptance rate, when international applicants have been excluded, its acceptance rate jumps to 28.1% – a remarkable 24.3% increase. If this same factor were applied to other colleges, their acceptance rates for domestic applicants would also appear markedly different from – and more lenient than – their reported general levels.

https://www.colgate.edu/admission-aid/apply/first-year-class-profile

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This same concept applies when looking at OOS acceptance rates for public schools that don’t break out the detail for domestic OOS and internationals.

For instance see this UMich press release about last year’s class: https://news.umich.edu/fall-enrollment-includes-greater-economic-diversity-more-underrepresented-students/
Quote from the article “Among in-state students, 40.5 percent of the 12,177 students who applied were offered admission and 3,554 in-state freshmen enrolled for a yield of 72 percent. That compares with an admit rate of 18.8 percent of 52,740 out-of-state domestic and international students who were offered admission. Among those, 3,141 enrolled for a yield of 31.8 percent.”

I would think the domestic OOS acceptance rate is greater than the international rate (so greater than the average of 18.8%), we just don’t know to what degree.

about 27% of Colgate’s applicants are internationals, so their impacts might be a lot bigger than a school with much larger number of applicants (smaller
Percentage of internationals), such as schools like the UCs/IVYs/other medium to large size universities.

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Not sure I’d make too much of this info, considering more than 2/3 of Colgate applicants don’t get an admit. It’s a bit like the false hope when kids see Early admit rates: won’t work in your favor if you aren’t a solid match.

Admission rates by themselves are not that helpful without context of strength of applicant, admit, and reject pools.

For example, if college X has a 10% admit rate from admitting one B student and rejecting nine C students, while college Y has a 50% admit rate from admitting five A students and rejecting five B students, which one is harder to get into?

@ucbalumnus bit of a stretch on that example. Most that are admitting 3.0 GPA students have very high admit rates. Admit rates generally correlate well to the difficulty of admission, but there are exceptions.

Uclaalumnus’ insight is helpful. Stats can be very deceiving. Admit percentage is only one piece of the puzzle. Use Naviance’s comparisons of past performance at individual high schools for a better perspective.

Using Naviance can sometimes be helpful but often there aren’t enough data points at a given school to add insight, nor do most high schools even use it.

Further, many schools that do have Naviance do not enter all applicable data, such as round applied in…and of course, hooks aren’t entered either…no way to know who might have been legacy, and/or URM, and/or athletic recruit and/or full pay.

I think it’s important to note that Colgate’s acceptance rate for international students is only 8%, while domestic applicants get accepted at a rate of 28.1%. Maybe you “wouldn’t make too much of it” if you were domestic. Or maybe you would. In my opinion, you ought to be encouraged by your chances as a domestic applicant. Conversely, the numbers suggest that you’d certainly want to know your chances, and might be discouraged, if you are an international applicant.

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If your child is not planning on applying ED, I would focus on the admit rate (if you can get it) excluding ED and Internationals. As an example, does Colgate provide that?

Though Colgate doesn’t provide it directly, by inference using the coefficient from the original post, that figure lands at 24.9%, @SuzyQ7.