<p>@sfdesigirl: I uploaded additional data from UChicago, UC Berkeley and Caltech. Hope that’s useful.</p>
<p>@Polyglot: Yes, if you don’t include those accepted off the waitlist, it is 6.02%. But I included it in my calculations because let’s face it… 6.3% looks nicer than 6.02%.</p>
<p>This thread makes me ='(</p>
<p>Wow. Thanks for making this chart, OP—great idea! Intimidating, I must say.</p>
<p>Oh jeez. And it’s just gonna get worse & worse :/</p>
<p>^I think we can take comfort in that, however awful that sounds. When I look at statistics from the early 80s, when the Harvard acceptance rate was ~30% (I could be wrong), I curse fate. But years from now when the rate is <1%, I think I’ll be doing just the opposite. :D</p>
<p>@myObsession: that’s not true. I doubt the admissions rate will go lower than 4% for the most selective college. The admissions rate is also correlated with the economy. Now, when the economy is as low as ever, everyone is seeking a college education to get better jobs. If you notice, the whole college enrollment rate over the country has increased dramatically. Once we hit another boom in the ecomonic cycle, the admissions rate will plateau and rise slowly. In addition, colleges are expanding every year ( in fact yale in a couple of years will have room for 800 more applicants).</p>
<p>No – colleges are NOT expanding every year. There is probably some marginal net contraction happening in New England and the northern Midwest. As for Yale’s expansion, it will mean about 250 more slots per class, not 800. Princeton made a similar expansion six years ago, when it built Whitman College. And that additional 500 slots will represent 100% of the expansion in the Ivy League since the mid-70s (compared with a huge expansion over the previous 40-50 years).</p>
<p>Add caltech, u of Chicago, Johns hopkins, duke, northwestern, and Washington university In St. Louis.</p>
<p>^If you actually clicked on the link, you would see that your request has already been satisfied… a long time ago.</p>
<p>Also, MIT is adding 80 additional slots this year (hence the slightly higher admit rate).</p>
<p>ice, nice work; I keep thinking I’ve seen this someplace before but no, I think you propose a nice approach to tracking the numbers.</p>
<p>My comment on the data is simply that while the number of applications has ballooned, the number of QUALIFIED applicants probably hasn’t changed much. There’s likely a ton of apps going to places like Harvard and Stanford with sub-2000 SAT scores or spotty transcripts, and it must be sad to watch the admissions boards at these schools spend all of 30 seconds reviewing before dumping these in the can. Too many people think they have a chance (e.g. the 95%) at getting in or at least thinking they should give it a try - shame on everyone that creates these false expectations.</p>
<p>The denominator of RD rate should include deferred ED applications. The number of applications that receive decisions in the RD+WL rounds is (number of RD applications) plus (number of ED deferrals).</p>
<p>After making that adjustment, MIT comes out second, not fifth, in RD rate (5.1 percent after Yale’s 4.6 percent).</p>
<p>^that is the problem. colleges can defer most of the early applicants to the RD round to ‘manipulate’ their acceptance rate. Yale, Brown and MIT deferred majority of early apps with 50-60% defferal rate. that will push down RD rate – the total acceptance rate is a better measure</p>