Good point re decreasing acceptance rate.
However, nearly all the private colleges and universities, good-bad-indifferent, have seen applications soar and acceptance rates fall over the last 8-10 years, so this phenomenon by itself likely will not change the directional accuracy of the ED-adjusted Draw Rate for assessing relative prestige / desirability.
Just for Kix – which are, as you will recall, for Kids! – here are the highest ED-adjusted Draw Rates for universities and colleges (does not include the service academies, conservatories, or specialized programs such as Cooper Union):
Stanford 11.5
MIT 9.7
Harvard 8.0
Yale 6.4
Princeton 5.5
Georgetown 5.4
Columbia 5.2
Brown 4.2
Pomona College 4.2
UPenn 4.1
CalTech 4.1
Notre Dame 3.9
USC 3.8
Duke 3.7
Dartmouth 3.6
Harvey Mudd College 3.2
Cornell University 3.2
Northwestern 3.1
UC BERKELEY 3.0
Vanderbilt 2.8
UCLA 2.8
Bowdoin College 2.4
Good point. The small amount of FA at CalTech is clearly depressing that fabulous institution’s ED-adjusted Draw Rate.
But it’s also true, as their astronomical EDDRs indicate, that our money-mad society is obsessed with Stanford, MIT and Harvard beyond all connection to those institutions’ quality. O tempora , o mores !
1 Like
Purple Heart?? Get better soon and thanks for your service
1 Like
University of Chicago doesn’t make the list?
Where did you find that FA at Caltech wasn’t as good as other places? This wasn’t my experience. It was the least expensive school that son was accepted to.
4 Likes
U Chicago’s system of EA, EDI, EDII is so opaque that one suspects that not even they themselves know what their ED-adjusted Draw Rate is. I’m guessing it’s somewhere in the 5-6 range but it could be slightly higher.
I don’t think it’s the FA at Cal Tech, it’s that they’re competing with Stanford, MIT and to some extent Harvard (for non-engineering STEM), the top 3 in the list.
1 Like
The draw rate for UChicago reached 13.09 in 2019. Looking back one decade, its rate was 1.32 in 2009.
1 Like
3.55 in 2019; 1.33 in 2009.
That’s wild. Totally counterintuitive.
With respect to the uneven value of the concept of draw rate, consider an example of the academic attributes of an entering class far surpassing that suggested by draw. Reed’s class of 2018 standardized scoring profile placed it within the top 50 schools of all types nationally, yet its draw rate for that class was 0.58.
Combining two rates (acceptance rate and yield) that both represent popularity yield nothing more than more popularity, perhaps more intensified and distorted. As an example, it’s unsurprising that a college with more rigorous academics deter many students from applying in the first place (fewer applicants mean higher acceptance rates with fixed number of acceptances) and some more admitted students not choosing it because of their concern of its more challenging academics (resulting in lower yield). Such a ratio is just too simplistic to be useful.
7 Likes
The last decade has seen an exponential increase in the numerator for our ED-adjusted draw rate, which is the number of APPLICANTS to each college. This is a general trend that affects nearly every selective college and university.
At the same time, certain colleges and universities have taken all sorts of measures to boost their ED admission rates – Chicago being one of the most flagrant examples. So if you don’t capture this measure, as the “higher ed data stories” blog fails to do, you will not get a good measure of the RELATIVE Draw Rate.
U Chicago’s extravagantly complicated ED options, along with their refusal to make the ED acceptances data publicly available, are why it’s impossible to include U Chicago in any directionally accurate comparison of its prestige / desirability relative to its peers.
BTW there’s nothing morally wrong with this; no one owes us anything, and we the parents are ultimately really just suckers in this game. But the ED-adjusted Draw Rate data can at least give us a sense of what the market – defined as other parents and their children – thinks regarding prestige and desirability in undergrad education today. Think of it as similar to the old Hollywood ‘Q’ rating for actresses.
1 Like
Wash U’s ED-adjusted Draw Rate was about the same as those for Carleton College and NYU and a touch below those for U North Carolina and U Michigan. A bit further below the EDDRs for Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins and Rice.
It is significantly below those for Northwestern, Vanderbilt and UC Berkeley.
Again, though, prestige and desirability in the eyes of parents and 17 year-olds ie EDDR is NOT AT ALL THE SAME as quality or prestige in the eyes of employers and graduate schools. EDDR appears to be significantly influenced by the school’s “hipness” quotient, which depends largely on whether or not the school’s surrounding city is seen as offering superior employment opportunities and economic growth.
So Wash U, like Hopkins, Rice and CMU, has a lower EDDR than schools located in “hip” destinations. The same factor depresses Yale and Princeton’s EDDRs relative to Stanford’s and Harvard’s.
Interesting, btw, that Vanderbilt’s hometown is now apparently “hip.” Not sure how long the increasingly anarchic cities of Chicago and NYC will continue to fetch a superior EDDR for their schools relative to those schools’ peer institutions. I’d bet the EDDRs for Columbia, NYU, Chicago and Northwestern will start to fall in the next few years – interesting to watch.
Should this become its own thread?
I think we’ve kind of lost track of Williams, Amherst and Bowdoin.
Not having yet posted my two cents, I think all three are great. I would give a verrrrry slight edge in prestige to Williams and Amherst, but my internal poll has not been peer-reviewed. Williams has been #1 for a long time in USNews, and Amherst has been #2 for roughly an equally long time, so they’re like the Princeton and Harvard of the LAC world. Bowdoin is usually somewhere like 4-8 – perpetually top-10.
Fit is the thing we should be after here, 100%.
5 Likes
The point is that Bowdoin clearly is viewed by parents and applicants as equal (if not superior) in prestige and desirability to Amherst and Williams. Why this is so is an interesting question.
Maybe because Bowdoin is associated in the public mind with one of the high-profile high-tech billionaires (R. Hastings), whereas no such prominent figure exists for Amherst and Williams?
1 Like
Well, it seems fair to ask whether draw rate offers relevance when comparing colleges with student profiles that don’t match each other by important statistical characteristics. An applicant with an SAT score that would reach the 25th percentile at Bowdoin, 1340, would probably not consider Williams — with a 25th percentile SAT score that registers 90 points higher, at 1430 — to represent a realistic or suitable option, at least in prior years.
That’s assuming the general public has any idea who R. Hastings is.
5 Likes
Given the wild changes and variations now re. SATs – some colleges not even requiring them at all, many applicants taking the test but opting not to submit their scores – it seems that SAT scores are an increasingly less important “statistical characteristic” for our purposes here.
Again, none of this analysis represents my or anyone’s preference (I personally think it’s appalling that selective colleges are moving away from the SAT). The point is that we can no longer get a directionally accurate comparison of prestige / desirability by looking at the kinds of indicators that USNWR has looked at – including but not limited to SAT score differences such as the one you highlight here, ie a difference of less than one standard deviation. (Note also that Claremont McKenna has a higher 75th percentile SAT score than Amherst or Williams; ditto for WUSTL, Vanderbilt, and Rice; and Case Western’s SAT scores are similar to Amherst’s and Wms’ scores).
We need a more reliable metric. ED-adjusted Draw Rate is the best one available for us poor parents trying to get beyond the shadows on the wall of our cave. YMMV