<p>If a program has a 70% acceptance rate, does that mean it's pretty easy to get into?</p>
<p>What does that say about the quality of the program itself?</p>
<p>It’s probably not very good. It means it isn’t selective or not many students apply there. </p>
<p>Most schools have ~20-25% interview rate, and then a 10-20% acceptance. Even one of UC Riverside’s program I was looking into had an 18% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>If you’re very interested in the research/work/professors, however, you should pursuit this school.</p>
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Wouldn’t that depend heavily on the field and degree? In my field, from what I’ve heard, those numbers would be very very high for PhD programs.</p>
<p>Of course, and yeah, they’re aimed a little high. I’m going for PhD in a bio field. Those are the rough average percentages I’ve figured based on my research. Let me give you some harder numbers too. </p>
<p>example 1/
A graduate group receives 100 applications and accepts 5-10 grad students.</p>
<p>example 2/
An umbrella program at a big university might receive 1200 applications, interviews 250, and accepts 200 students (spread across those 12 departments). </p>
<p>example 3/
An umbrella program receives 350 applications and accepts 35-50 applicants spread accross maybe 5 departments. </p>
<p>I will not tell you the names of the schools these are based on (do your own research! Lol) but I will tell you they’re all real numbers from program coordinators and more than once have I seen the same types of statistics for other programs.</p>
<p>High acceptance rates can be deceiving in Bio. Most top programs accept a large percentage of those they ask to interview, but you have to get the interview for the statistic to be of value.</p>
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<p>I know some fairly top 5-7 programs that have a 50+% acceptance rate. They tend to be highly self-selective- makes sense I am not going to, as a <3.6 students build up an application package for say MIT or Berkeley EECS.</p>