Acceptance Rate?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Occidental College
1

<p>according to oxy's website, they have 6,000 applicants for about 500 spots. This would work out to approx. a 10% acceptance rate... but That cant be right because that's ridiculous! and they also say on their website that their acceptance rate is about 44%... But if they accept 44%, then they will have to accept 2,500 students which is more than their entire student body! </p>

<p>So I am probably an idiot, but what am I not calculating here? </p>

<p>If someone can help me out, that would be great...</p>

2

<p>Don’t worry, I was so confused at first too. Essentially, 500 is the amount of students that will end up attending. They need to accept quite a lot more than that since many students will end up denying acceptance. So if they accept about 2500 students, then most likely about 500 will end up matriculating. At the more competitive schools, more people apply so their general acceptance rate is even lower, and then the amount of students matriculating ends up landing around a single digit percent. Make more sense?</p>

3

<p>Last year it was 39%, so I would imagine this would trickle to somewhere around 35 or 36%?</p>

4

<p>I don’t think it will drop too much, if at all, because yield may lower due to Oxy being a private school</p>

5

<p>Actually I got accepted this year and out of an over 6,000 applicant pool around 500were accepted. I was told by an admissions officer when I visited that the acceptance rate for the class of 2013 was 8%. I do not know why the website says the acceptance rate is 39% but that was in a previous year. I am not going to occidental but good luck applying to schools!</p>

6

<p>class of 2012:</p>

<p>5,790 applicants
2,258 acceptances (39% accepted)
469 enrollments (21% yield)</p>

<p>class of 2013: </p>

<p>6,010 applicants
X acceptances
550 enrollments (the aim was 465, so they’re oversubscribed due to a high yield and probably a higher acceptance rate because of fear about the economy. this will make transferring into the class of 2013 difficult, not to mention probably lower the acceptance rate for class of 2014 if the number of applicants stays above 6000.)</p>

<p>there’s no way the acceptance rate this year was 8% (it was probably a little above 40%, maybe less). not everyone that’s accepted enrolls. the admissions department has to play a game of statistics based on previous years. they accept a certain number, knowing that a certain percentage (probably 20% or so) will actually enroll. ergo, they accept many more than enroll.</p>

<p>they planned on 465/6000 enrolling, so maybe that’s where you get the 8% number. out of all the applicants, 8% end up at oxy.</p>

7

<p>where did you get these figures from?</p>

8

<p>abrooks - thats not possible. if 500 were accepted, all 500 would have to enroll</p>