<p>Is</a> getting into college harder than it was a decade ago?</p>
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Students sending out applications to far more colleges creates the illusion of more applicants, when in reality there are simply more applications.
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In fact, the rapidly-increasing number of college applications submitted per high school student, as facilitated by online systems, accounts only for an appearance of shrinking acceptances.
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<p>Apparently the report is based on a comparison of 2004 vs. 1992 data–so I’m wondering how relevant it is in 2010. Although if the news was already bad for lower-income students six years ago, just imagine how bad it is now. :(</p>
<p>Wait, so if one kid applied to five schools people would count him as five separate applicants? Well, of course it would look like there are lots of applications!</p>
<p>That seems about right. When I applied in the '90’s, most people applied to 3 to 5 schools. I remember one girl in my high school class applied to 7. I was astonished. But at that time, you had to type out each application, and in the case of the damned UC apps fill in your own transcript. Now with Common App and the ease of online application in general it’s easier to apply to more schools.</p>
<p>That students do apply to more schools than in the past does not change much to the fact that each application received by ONE school still represents ONE unique application. </p>
<p>When Harvard receives 30,000 applications and admits 8% of them, that is still 2,400 admitted students. It does not matter that the same 2,400 also applied to all remaining 7 Ivies and might have been accepted to a few. The odds of being accepted are still 1 out 12.5. Multiple applications affect the yield.</p>
<p>I agree xiggi but out of these 30,000 how many are even in the ballpark for Harvard? I think the percentage of students with a realistic chance to be admitted to H hasn’t changed much. Common Apps make it just easier to send an app for the heck of it and see what happens.</p>
<p>guillame, that’s where I think you are wrong. The “percentage of students with a realistic chance of being admitted to Harvard” may not have gone up, but two things very clearly have: (1) The absolute number of students who are fully qualified to go to Harvard, and (2) the percentage of such students who actually apply.</p>
<p>It used to be that unless you went to a first-rate prep school, to one of a handful of fabulous suburban publics (Lower Merion, New Trier, Scarsdale), or to one of an even smaller number of public urban magnets (Stuyvesant, Boston Latin), you weren’t prepared for Harvard. Now, there are thousands and thousands of private, public, and religious schools capable of turning out Harvard students. The average quality of public education, especially in non-old-money suburbs, has increased considerably during the past 40 years or so.</p>
<p>Furthermore, it used to be that you had to be pretty sophisticated (or from New England) to know that Harvard was a big deal. (As I have related before, the people I worked with in a blue-collar job in Western New York in 1975 had no idea what “Yale” was, and thought I had to be mentally deficient to need to go so far from home to find a college that would accept me.) Now, thanks to hundreds of popular-culture plugs, everyone knows that if you are super-smart you’re supposed to be going to Harvard.</p>
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And as yield falls, the colleges compensate by increasing the number of students they admit.</p>
<p>This may not impact Harvard or a handful of other extremely prestigious and well-endowed schools, but it will certainly impact most other colleges.</p>
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<p>Or make sure they admit more students who have clearly identified a school as their first choice. </p>
<p>Yield management is such a strange animal. :)</p>
<p>I agree with JHS but will go a little further. The cachement area for the top schools was largely regional and, with improvements in public education and other egalitarian-in-spirit changes, that occured in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the cachement area became national. In the last 10 years, the cachement area has become international. That’s good for the schools. IIRC, between 2006 and 2008, the number of applications to Harvard increased from something like 18,000 to approximately 28,000. I don’t have the data, but I suspect a fair bit of that was the globalization of the market.</p>
<p>As xiggi points out, beyond an expansion of the cachement area, students have increased the average number of applications from say 4 in the '70’s to say 10 this year. This would have taken applications up by a factor of 2.5. That would imply 11200 applicants in 1975 for Harvard and 8785 for Princeton. We could compare the size of the market expansion effect relative to the increase in applications per applicant just by getting a couple of numbers.</p>
<p>Does anyone have a) the number of applications per applicant in 1975 (or similar) and now; and b) the number of applicants then and now?</p>
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There were about 6800 applicants to Harvard in 1975, but that was a little low. It ran a little under 8000 for most of that decade.</p>
<p>Four applications seems a little high for the typical student in the 1970s. I applied to 2 schools, but one was the UC system which had one app for all schools in that time period.</p>
<p>bovertine, I applied to 4 in 1974. One NE private, 2 regional privates and the state flagship. That was about 1 more than most of my friends with “my extra” being the NE private…I was accepted to all 4 and attended a regional private. To me, the far more interesting number would be the enrollment number. I highly doubt that enrollment has expanded to the same degree that applications have expanded. So if applicantions contract it does not stand to reason that enrollment will contract across the board.</p>
<p>…and, it makes admission more and more mechanistic…GPA and test scores are the only way to winnow such a huge pool of applicants. No one is going to read 28,000 essays or recommendations and make any sense of them. They have to cut according to the numbers before they can take more holistic measures into account (and of course the rankings encourage this)… Who knows where this will lead? In the short run, to more stress and less creativity in high school, but in the long run… it will be very interesting to see. Some colleges (Chicago seems to be one) will attract a more unusual and various student body, and those may produce more leaders and see their reputations grow. Meanwhile it’s hell for the kids.</p>
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Looks like the Harvard freshman class was around 1200 in the 70s. I don’t think it’s grown much.</p>
<p>All the info is buried in here-
[Sequence</a> 15867 (Page 95): Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College and reports of departments. Harvard University Library PDS](<a href=“http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2582287?n=15867&s=4]Sequence”>http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2582287?n=15867&s=4)</p>
<p>I want to go back to the original assertion, that it is not harder to get into college now than it was a decade ago.</p>
<p>xiggi and calmom hit the nail on the head. The admittance rate is impervious to the number of applicants. If students typically apply to more schools than they used to then each school gets more applications. But the number of students who will attend college hasn’t changed so each school can expect their yield to decrease. Therefore each school must increase the number of applicants that it accepts in response to the increase in the number of applications.</p>
<p>The rate of acceptance is not affected by any of this and it continues to be an accurate measure of how hard a school is to get into. The acceptance rate at the top schools has dropped in the last ten years which shows these schools are harder to get into.</p>
<p>I think its obviously harder to get in now judging not only by the selectivity percentage but by the types of stats these kids have to have to distinguish themselves these days. However, to tell just from admissions statistics you would have to know how much overlap there is in admissions and how many obviously unqualified applicants apply (assuming you cold even establish what that meant). I dont think theres any way to do that.</p>
<p>There is more than one factor involved in application growth. Sure, there are more apps per student, but there are also many more applicants. Awareness of top programs is much higher, and access (due to better financial aid) is at an all time high. </p>
<p>I have no doubt that colleges are more selective today than 10 years ago. Anecdotally, I look at the private high school I graduated from over 10 years ago. In my class, perhaps 25% ended up at a top 10 school, 50% to the top 25. Today I would say about 10% of the students get into a top 10, and maybe 25% into a top 25. There’s definitely been a shift. Rising scores are also indicative of this trend.</p>
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<li><p>I don’t think the Harvard freshman class has grown since the integration of Radcliffe, which was sometime in the early 70s. It’s been 1,650 ever since. Same with Yale – 1,300, give or take.</p></li>
<li><p>Average applications overall and average applications of someone applying to Harvard are two different things. HYP did not have ED or EA when I applied in 1974, so people applying there naturally did more applications than people applying elsewhere, on average. Same thing today, of course. A certain percentage of elite-college applicants file only one application to an ED (or sometimes EA) school. (Well, they may have other applications in that they withdraw. And I bet the colleges count those in their application numbers, but they shouldn’t.) But anyone who wants to think about Harvard or Princeton is virtually forced to file a bunch of applications.</p></li>
<li><p>Yale had 9,333 applications in 1975 (for the class of 1979). See <a href=“http://www.yale.edu/oir/book_numbers_updated/D7_Summary_YC_Admissions_1979_2001.pdf”>http://www.yale.edu/oir/book_numbers_updated/D7_Summary_YC_Admissions_1979_2001.pdf</a> for more information.</p></li>
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<p>Pea true, but no one even talked about yield in past decades. Yield is an artifical measure that can be manipulated. Strip yield and you have higher applications these days but I still maintain that enrollment has not escalated exponentially. I would also hazard a guess that it is just a small contingent of colleges/unis where it is now more difficult to gain admission. For the vast majority of colleges and unis I imagine they have pretty similar classes year after year. There may be an outlier here or there that is particularlly “hot” at the moment but in general I can’t imagine the swings are statistically significant. I could be totally wrong, who knows. I’m also not sure about “rising scores” and what that really means.</p>
<p>Interesting points all around. But I remain skeptical. When colleges have applications growing by 10 to 40% year after year, with a high school age population starting to dwindle, something isn’t right. Yes sure there are more qualified and interested students now than in 75 but I don’t think that explains the ballooning of applications. It’s a lot of air IMHO.</p>