100 most selective admission schools

College Search & Selection
21

quote/2… ranked 1 to X using excel.

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I agree with MWolf that the rankings are not particularly meaningful due to varied admission criteria and relative importance of scores, combined with varying applicant pools. For example, Stanford is only ranked 25th in test scores. Does that mean Stanford is not as selective or that they are not emphasizing scores as much as certain other colleges in their decisions? Caltech had the same admit rate as the US Naval Academy, but are the two applicant pools comparably self selective, with comparable admission criteria?

Nevertheless, I still find such stats interesting. The specific numbers I get, as listed in IPEDS 2017-18 are below. As noted in earlier posts, scores for test optional colleges are not listed in IPEDS.

Highest SAT Scores – (Average of 25th + 75th percentile scores) *2

  1. Caltech – 1560
  2. Rice – 1535
  3. Chicago – 1530
  4. MIT – 1530
  5. Harvard – 1525
  6. Harvey Mudd – 1520
  7. WUSTL – 1520
  8. Yale – 1520
  9. Olin – 1510
  10. Johns Hopkins – 1510
  11. Vanderbilt – 1505
  12. Princeton – 1500
  13. CMU – 1495
  14. Dartmouth – 1495
  15. Columbia – 1490
  16. Morthland – 1490 (Closed in 2018)
  17. Northwestern – 1490
  18. Penn – 1490
  19. Webb – 1490
  20. Brown – 1487.5
  21. Williams – 1485
  22. Amherst – 1480
  23. Tufts – 1475
  24. Cornell – 1470
  25. Stanford – 1465

Lowest Admit Rate – IPEDS rounds to integer, Including colleges with >500 25th percentile SAT

  1. Harvard – 5%
  2. Stanford – 5%
  3. Princeton – 6%
  4. Columbia – 7%
  5. MIT – 7%
  6. Yale – 7%
  7. Brown – 8%
  8. Caltech – 8%
  9. Pomona – 8%
  10. USNA – 8%
  11. Chicago – 9%
  12. Northwestern – 9%
  13. Penn – 9%
  14. Claremont McKenna – 10%
  15. Dartmouth – 10%
  16. Duke – 10%
  17. USMA – 10%
  18. Swarthmore – 11%
  19. Vanderbilt – 11%
  20. USAFA – 12%
  21. Amherst – 13%
  22. Cooper Union – 13%
  23. Cornell --13%
  24. Johns Hopkins – 13%
  25. Olin – 13%
  26. Ozarks – 13%

Combined

  1. Harvard – 1525, 5%
  2. MIT – 1530, 7%
  3. Caltech – 1560, 8%
  4. Yale – 1520, 8%
  5. Chicago – 1530, 9%
  6. Princeton – 1500, 6%
  7. Columbia – 1490, 7%
  8. Northwestern – 1490, 9%
  9. Penn – 1490, 9%
  10. Stanford – 1465, 5%
22

This is like to average the length of an elephant’s nose and the amount of food it eats to tell which elephant is bigger.

Arithmetic mean does not work well when it involves measures of two different things, especially the biased selection of what we want to see. There is no statistical meaning to do so.

23

Not sure what point of this list is. It has no context. Where is Bowdoin? Bates? Wake? Etc… This list is pretty useless without more information.

24

Part of the problem is that there is no longer any consistency to how colleges uses standardized test data. Test-optional schools don’t show up on the list (even though Colby is now test-optional) but schools that superscore do, as do schools that go beyond super scoring to allow students with weaker SAT or ACT scores to submit AP or other scores instead.

Gone are the days when everyone in your state took the same test, took it at most twice, and was required to submit all scores, with no mixing of scores between dates.

25

Now that Chicago is test optional, I assume it will drop of the list.

26

Haha! True, @gallentjill ! Not selective enough anymore.

27

Also missing Wesleyan, presumably because it’s test optional. If this ranking is somehow meant to produce a list of the schools with the smartest student bodies, it already leaves out some schools that ought to be on the list. Further, as more schools become test optional, the methodology will only become less useful.