<p>Just a note, Statfinder uses only fall admission rates. I just noticed in the PDF that winter/spring admits to UCB/UCSD were included in the rate. At the bottom of the PDF, it says Berkeley's fall only percentage is 23% and SD's is 37.8%. I probably should have used those numbers for consistency.</p>
<p>Well, admission rates themselves don't tell all the facts. For example, there could have been an influx of crappy applicants that applied to a particular school that had no chance at admission. That would drive down the admission rate, but that doesn't necessarily mean the applicant pool was stronger. You have to look at other factors such as GPAs of admitted students and then enrolled students. In Davis's case, it was a combination of more applicants and less admission cuts as pointed out in the Regent's discussion.</p>
<p>Speaking of the economy, it also manages to hurt the application pool at schools like UCSB and UCSC. For example, only about 200,000 people live within half an hour of UCSB. A lot of people might choose to be commuters to save money, and schools in major metro areas could see a higher yield rate as a result.</p>
<p>Go to community college, and save your money, and the state's. You will also be more likely to actually graduate. Transfer admits actually increased, while freshmen admits declined significantly.</p>
<p>I'm shocked to see that irvine received the 3rd highest amount of applications next to UCLA and UCSD. Seems like socal campuses are becoming more popular as more people want to attend them. uci seems to becoming harder to get into as they passed davis and SB.</p>
<p>There's a lot of year to year variance in these statistics. For example, last year, UCSB was actually the second post popular campus in terms of applications. It's hard to predict trends, so who knows what will happen next year.</p>
<p>rc251-
Nice graph. You should use the total freshman admits, not just the fall, to avoid biasing data which is collected on an annual basis. One example of the effect of the bias is seen when colleges selectively defer students with lower GPAs and test scores, especially if they are likely to go elsewhere. The school appears to be more selective than it actually is when all the accepted students aren't included in the denominator. Gaming ranking systems, such as the one in US News, can be worth big bucks.</p>
