"… While applicants to these 13 schools face long-shot odds for acceptance, that isn’t true at the majority of schools across the U.S. In fact, the national average acceptance rate at the 1,363 ranked schools that provided acceptance rate data to U.S. News was 67% in fall 2018. Broken down, that means two out of three students were accepted last year at schools to which they applied.
The most selective schools, however, accept only small proportions of applicants. Stanford University in California, the college with the lowest reported acceptance rate among ranked schools, only took in 4% of applicants in fall 2018.: …
I understand your reasoning, @1NJParent. However, USN does not publish average scores in its guides, so they’d lack easily accessible data for this figure. By appearance, they seem to have taken the total of the 25th percentile scores for their “average.” They also seem to use “admitted” to describe matriculating students.
Selectivities, in the form of acceptance rates, are meaningless without data on the applicant pools. A school that more students feel qualified to apply for will have lower acceptance rate, everything else being equal. Significantly more students feel they’re qualified to apply to Vandy than MIT, so the average quality of its applicants is correspondingly lower.
I didn’t read the article, but there are several other schools with acceptance rate below 10%. For example, Curtis Institute of Music typically has an acceptance rate ranging from 3 to 5%. Colburn and Julliard are not much higher. Some of the military schools also reach below 10%, including one ranked among USNWR top 25 LACs.
Why aren’t we all talking about Alice Lloyd College? I’ve never heard of it. Why is this college so selective and can we learn anything from whatever is making it so selective?
Alice Lloyd has about 600 students and only admits students from certain counties in Appalachia. They are one of the work colleges. I expect they get many applications from students outside Appalachia due to free tuition offer, driving their selectivity lower.
The extraordinary acceptance rate for Alice Lloyd as posted above may be implausible. IPEDS, as an alternative source, registers a rate of 28% for the fall of 2018.
This seems to show where a mistake could have arisen. In order to enroll a typical class, Alice Lloyd would need to accept over 1300 applicants (based on yield indications from IPEDS).
Mathematically, in theory. I find it extremely unlikely. There would need to be a substantial number of very low scores in the bottom 25% and a skewed distribution.
Alice Lloyd has a 48% first year retention rate and a 7% 4 year graduation rate. The selectivity must be based on the tuition benefit for students from 108 Appalachian counties. According to their website:
Full-time students from within this territory will have their cost of education met by a combination of grants, scholarships and participation in the Student Work Program.
“Or, Duke and Vandy are better at marketing than Princeton and MIT.”
Two use ED, one SCEA, one EA, so Duke’s and Vandy’s acceptance rates are artificially higher. If all schools used EA, I think Duke and Vandy acceptance rates would probably double, or close to it.
