Based on most current 17/18 IPEDS data for SAT and acceptance rates.
rank name
1 Harvard University
2 California Institute of Technology
3 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 Yale University
5 University of Chicago
6 Princeton University
7 Columbia University in the City of New York
8 Stanford University
9 Northwestern University
10 University of Pennsylvania
11 Dartmouth College
12 Johns Hopkins University
12 Vanderbilt University
12 Brown University
15 Rice University
15 Harvey Mudd College
17 Washington University in St Louis
18 Pomona College
19 Duke University
20 Swarthmore College
21 Williams College
21 Amherst College
23 Cornell University
24 Tufts University
25 Claremont McKenna College
26 Carnegie Mellon University
27 Haverford College
27 Georgetown University
29 University of Notre Dame
30 Colby College
31 Carleton College
32 Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
32 Wellesley College
34 Emory University
34 Barnard College
36 Middlebury College
37 Washington and Lee University
38 Hamilton College
39 Northeastern University
40 Tulane University of Louisiana
40 University of Southern California
42 Vassar College
43 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
43 Davidson College
45 University of Virginia-Main Campus
45 University of California-Berkeley
47 Grinnell College
48 Colgate University
49 Case Western Reserve University
50 Boston University
51 New York University
52 Boston College
53 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
54 University of California-Los Angeles
55 University of Rochester
55 United States Air Force Academy
57 Reed College
58 Scripps College
58 Lehigh University
60 United States Military Academy
61 University of Richmond
62 Brandeis University
63 Bryn Mawr College
63 Oberlin College
63 Babson College
66 College of William and Mary
67 Lafayette College
68 Kenyon College
69 Bucknell University
70 Skidmore College
71 Trinity College
72 Macalester College
73 United States Naval Academy
74 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
75 Villanova University
76 The University of Texas at Austin
77 University of Miami
77 University of California-San Diego
79 University of California-Santa Barbara
80 Binghamton University
81 Stevens Institute of Technology
82 George Washington University
83 Trinity University
84 Hillsdale College
85 Occidental College
86 University of Maryland-College Park
87 CUNY Bernard M Baruch College
88 California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
89 American University
90 University of Florida
90 University of Tulsa
92 Denison University
93 Pepperdine University
94 Stony Brook University
95 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
96 Fordham University
97 Ohio State University-Main Campus
98 Baylor University
99 Rhode Island School of Design
100 Southern Methodist University
Not sure how this data was compiled but there are schools missing from this list. For example Union college is more selective than Fordham based on SAT score and admission rates.
@Greymeer
I don’t understand the data set, I’m not saying your wrong as I’m not sure if I’m analyzing it correctly, but Emory has a lower acceptance rate and higher SAT scores than Gtech according to College Navigator ( and CDS).
And Why is Reed so high?
I also don’t know how to read the data sets. But according to every source I can check, Union has higher scores and a lower admit rate than Fordham, so I am unclear as to how this worked. Of course, I’m also not sure why any of this is important.
@momofsenior1 that’s true, but the majority of those schools in the top 50 are undergraduate colleges, not undergraduate universities. Once admitted to a college all majors are in play (yes I understand that there are some exceptions).
@merc81 Yes, but not by ranking the rankings of two variables that measure very different things, and are distributed very differently. Percent acceptance is not actually a measure of selectivity, since you can randomly select those 5%. The average SAT also means little, because we do not know what the average SAT of the applicants were.
And therein lies the problem. The absolutely ONLY way to measure selectivity is to compare that accepted applicants to the pool of applicants. You would need to look at the how good the applicants were, and how much better the selected students are. If the accepted students have the same average stats as the applicants, a school is not selective, no matter how few applicants it accepted or how much higher the SATs of the accepted kids were than that population at whole.
A small, random selection of applicants from a pool of very good applicants will result in a very high rank on this ranking, but it will not demonstrate any selectivity at all.
Statistically models often produce good results based upon assumptions with respect to natural distributions and patterns. Hypothetical scenarios that introduce uncommon possibilities do not invalidate these results. This isn’t an inaccessible problem, @MWolf.
@merc81 That was an extreme case brought to demonstrate the weakness of the model. Random selection is means selecting applicants from all academic levels. However, selecting applicants from the top 80% of your applicant pool is still less selective than selecting from the top 50%. This is not hypothetical, since, if a college is selecting a large number of applicants from lower academic levels, based, on, say, athletic ability or legacy status, that would affect just how selective the college actually is. So while Harvard selects 17% of their applicants based on legacy status and 12% are recruited athletes, because it accepts proportionally fewer students than MIT, it is considered more “selective”, even though MIT does not have legacy status, and they do not really have recruited athletes.
So the distribution of academic achievements of accepted Harvard students are more similar to their pool of applicants than the accepted students of MIT are to their pool of applicants. So, by any real measure MIT is much more selective than Harvard, but the model used here places Harvard higher than MIT.