McGill University in Canada is a highly regarded university in both Canadian and world rankings. Yet the undergraduate acceptance rate is 43%. Some have wondered here on CC why this acceptance rate is so high compared to comparable US universities.
McGill’s undergraduate admission is not holistic. For American applicants admission is based solely on UW GPA and SAT/ACT scores. The minimum admission requirements are posted on their website: http://www.mcgill.ca/applying/requirements/minima/usa
The admission minima vary considerably by program. “Hail Mary” applications are a waste of time and money.
What motivated me to post this was an article in their alumni magazine and a quote from an the admissions officer:
This runs counter to what appears to be a trend at American colleges to boost the number of applications as much as possible. Some colleges buy lists from the College Board and ACT and send out mass mailings, often with offers of a waived application fee. In some cases with non-targeted mailings they are soliciting applications that will in all probability be rejected.
It makes sense on so many levels and many public US unis operate in a similar manner but not so much the highly selective. I do think it is somewhat inbred in American culture to want something that rightly or wrongly has been bestowed with a brand value. A mercury and a Ford were essentially the same vehicle but the mercury brand was considered a step up.
It has been said here repeatedly thst the essential difference between two schools might be entirely inconsequential but people will work very hard to get behind why one is “better” than the other. For some career majors there is virtually no difference yet the desire to articulate why one is better than another continued.
One reason this system works better for Canada is that there is much less local control of high school curricula. Of course, inequality exists across regions and high schools, but at least at the provincial level, there is widespread agreement about what university-bound students are exposed to in high school. U.S. schools vary so widely even within a given state that it’s much harder to compare students fairly across high schools.
@TomSrOfBoston I’m curious to know where you got the 43% acceptance rate from. Universities in Ontario and in the Atlantic provinces maintain a database of figures with regards to enrollment, acceptance, and class composition etc. (CUDO and ACUDS), but I haven’t been able to find similar data for Quebec, and Western Canada.
The reality of acceptances in Canada, at least for Canadian students, is that every program publishes it’s minimum grade cut offs for consideration. So if a student’s marks aren’t in the ballpark, they aren’t going to apply. While having a grade at the cut off is no guarantee of admission especially for highly competitive programs, it’s just as easy to find out what the actual minimum acceptance mark was for a given program the previous year. Since most programs in Canada do not practice holistic admissions, it’s a fairly simple process for a student to determine if they have a good shot at admissions or not. So, students are self-selecting with regards to both the programs and schools they apply to. Add to the fact that the majority of students only apply to 3-5 programs/schools, they aren’t going to waste their applications on programs or schools they don’t have a realistic shot at getting admitted to.
My point is that McGill and most other top Canadian universities are the polar opposite of top US schools in admissions policies. There is no “black box” for admissions applications that makes the reason for acceptance/denial impossible to determine at holistic American universities.
What would be the cutoff? Mcgill’s cutoff is less than a 95% average and a 1540’SAT. There are too many US kids with those stats to allow them all to be admitted.
McGill has about 27,000 undergraduates, or about the size of many state universities in the US.
However, Quebec, from which 52% of McGill students come from, has a population of 8.2 million. The rest of Canada, from which 21% of McGill students come from, has a population of 28 million. So it is unlikely that McGill experiences the phenomenon of very large numbers of applicants pressed up against the maximum possible academic stats that some of the most heavily applied-to US universities experience, with their smaller enrollments but drawing from a country with around nine times the population.
Holistic admissions really hurt a lot of high-score, high-GPA kids, but the foreign schools that would accept them (Oxford, Cambridge, et al) also require them to apply to a specific degree program. Many kids don’t know what they want to study in college, so they’re going to apply to the highly competitive US schools.
Even with holistic admissions, admissions to top US schools used to be more like McGill in certain ways. Holistic admissions are never going to be as transparent or easy to understand as schools with a cut off. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems.
But schools didn’t used to have a vested interest in decreasing acceptance rates and increasing yields. I recently read (sorry, don’t remember where) that in 1980, Penn’s admit rate was about 40%. That’s the year I graduated high school. I can tell you that, while one didn’t have the certainty one can have with the McGill approach to admittance, it was no where near as stressful and crazy making as things are now because the admit rates were so much higher. Yes, there was marketing, but nothing like today’s scale. Schools had absolutely no reason to encourage applications from people they knew they’d never admit.
I blame US News and World Report. When I applied to college, there were no rankings or none that carried any importance. I looked at the selectivity categories in Barron’s. But there were maybe two dozen schools in the most selective category and no rankings within that category. Sure, we knew that it was harder to get into Harvard than Haverford and that Harvard was famous and prestigious in a way that Haverford wasn’t (not intending to knock Haverford, an excellent school). Parents and student weren’t obsessing about the difference between the number 5 school and the number 10 school because there were no ranks to obsess about , so schools weren’t obsessing about raising or maintaining their ranks.
Holistic admissiones have their origins in anti-semitism, but today can be a way to create an interesting class, give kids from disadvantaged backgrounds a chance and take into account the wide range of US high schools. If you want to keep the advantages of holistic admissions but dial back the crazy, convince the top 20 schools on US News’s 2 national lists to refuse to cooperate with the game.
@ucbalumnus Your geographic breakdown is a bit off. It is 42% Quebec, 26% rest of Canada, 32% international. which is a more geographically diverse student body than UC Berkeley.
Again my focus from that article is an admissions officer telling potential applicants not to bother applying if they are underqualified. I cannot imagine an American adcom saying that to a student.
As @Hanna pointed out above, there are standard curricula and grading policies within each Canadian province, although there is considerable variation among provinces. Hence McGill publishes different minima by province. In the US every one of the 14,000 school districts can do their own thing with minimal state guidelines. .
Sure it was less competitive to get into Yale in the 1960’s- half the population (HS girls) couldn’t even apply. Of course competition wasn’t as intense to get into Dartmouth- if you were a kid living in Texas, just the cost of transportation (bus, only rich people flew) was prohibitive. The top student in my HS class went to nursing school (the only girl in AP Chemistry and Physics btw). Not a BSN- a regular old hospital based program like they used to have to become an RN. The number 2 student in our class got a BA in early childhood education and commuted to college on the bus.
So yes, it’s more competitive now. Nobody would telling a girl who aced AP Chem and Physics that she belonged in an RN program- guidance counselors would be talking med school down the road, or at least getting a BS in science. Nobody would be telling the number 2 in the class (over 1000 kids in my graduating class) that she should just apply to the college down the street, even though she would have qualified for significant aid at a bunch of top ranked schools.
There were rankings back then- it’s just that large chunks of the population weren’t encouraged to aim high.
This sounds like a repeat of the old canard that the Ivies could fill their classes with just perfect stats. There aren’t enough perfect SATs to fill out the freshmen class at Harvard. There’s more perfect ACTs, but still only a fraction of the number that would be needed to fill up the Ivies+MIT+Stanford. The Ivies would get a lot fewer applicants if they set the minimum SAT at 1500, but, to state the obvious, then they would miss out on athletes or legacies or first gens or faculty brats or blacks or applicants who meet some other perceived institutional need.
McGill is a big public university. Among big public universities in the US, it is likely that most have admission mostly or purely by stats. Most of them specify some sort of minimum requirement. Some also list an automatic admission threshold.
There’s no question that other things have changed in the last 50 years besides US News starting their rankings. And as all male colleges have gone coed and schools have made more and more of an effort to recruit minorities and other things have happened that have naturally increased the applicant pool, even as the baby boom finished college, college admissions have gotten more competitive. But none of that explains colleges going out of their way to decrease admit rates and increase yield.
BTW, my high school valedictorian was a girl and she went off to Harvard. Among the maybe 10 or 12 people from my graduating class who went to Harvard and Yale, probably half or close to half were girls.
I don’t know whether the difference in your experience and mine about the attitude towards girls’ education is a function of the time (60’s vs late 70’s) or culture (I’m from an UMC Boston suburb), but I’m describing a time when all the Ivies except Columbia admitted girls.
Who was doing rankings in the 60’s and the 70’s and, more important, who considered them a big deal?
McGill is public. From what I can tell, public US colleges and universities don’t encourage prospective students to apply in order to drive down admission rates, either. It’s the private US colleges and universities that do that.
