Since looking up a little data for another thread and also constantly seeing talk about low admissions rates etc, (not to mention other fallacies when looking at residencies of current students for another thread) it got me thinking. Applicant numbers…what are those numbers really? Are they completed applications? Are they anyone who started the process but didn’t finish for whatever reason? Does it vary by school as to what data they draw from?
It made me think simply because of those low admissions rates we all see and talk about. For some people those low rates drive them to apply (more selective = better school or more prestigious in some people’s minds). “Everyone applies there so I should, too.” Sure some of these schools get plenty of applicants without blinking for various reasons but what better way to make people think you’re even more desirable than to be more selective in your admission process? How do you do that, you have “more” applicants, or at least what appears to be more applicants by counting applications that were started but never finished.
Is there any proven information anywhere that those numbers are completed applications? Or are kids freaking out that they are up against 2000 other students when 700 of them actually never finished the application entirely and really aren’t in contention at all (but it looks great on paper for the schools)?
This is what happens after spending the last few days analyzing research data for regulatory committee audits and your head is swimming in number scrutiny.
I would guess that schools are counting anyone who submitted fees (whether or not they ended up with a complete application). I have a feeling that, adjusting for all the variables (unhooked/hooked, grade level of entry, boy/girl, geography, etc), the admission rates might be about what are advertised or maybe even lower.
Imagine that, in your scenario above, only 1300 students actually submitted a complete application.
Take away half for the gender of the child, leaving you with about 650 students.
Then, let’s say we’re talking about 9th grade entry. Maybe about 75% of the kids are applying for 9th grade. That leaves ~487 kids.
Assuming a 9th grade class of 150 (but, only half of those spaces are for one gender), that leaves you with about 75 spaces to fill. Assuming we are talking about a “big name” school with a good yield rate, maybe they accept 100 kids to fill those 75 spaces. That’s about a 20.5% acceptance rate.
But, you can’t forget “hooked” kids (athletes, development kids, faculty kids, URM, geographic diversity, etc). Assuming 25 of those slots are hooked kids, you are now at 75 acceptances out of your 487 kids. That brings you to an admit rate of ~15% for a typical, unhooked, 9th grade kid. It’s not great. I’d also assume that the number of completed applications out of 2000 is much higher, so that will bring that admit rate down.
All complete conjecture and assumption, but it’s fun to do at this point while we wait.
Gaming application numbers sounds a little too strong, but I think many schools try to encourage more students to apply regardless of the applicant’s qualifications.
Given the way admissions staff move between colleges and prep schools, my guess is that they use similar methodologies.
Most measure inquiries and applications separately, but my sense is that each school decides for itself what level of completion is actually an application. Payment? Score submission? Profile +interview?
Most will do what they can to attract applicants. They benefit from having choice. For example, while many schools (and colleges) have long asserted they could make good decisions without test scores, pretty much every one that has gone TO has been able to increase its applicant pool by doing so. There are a whole host of reasons why students may need to apply without scores, from not having money to test, not having access to the test, or simply not knowing how to go about testing. There are others who prefer to do so because they don’t have competitive scores. Either way, the schools get to see more applicants, and often, they like some they may have not seen without TO.
I don’t think most “game” the system, but it’s hard to compare-- even when the counting methodology is the same as they may not attract the same students. Like comparing admissions at Julliard to admissions at Caltech.
I wasn’t really referring to categories of kids. Just “applications” or “applicant” in general. I’ve never seen data on breaking down applicants into hooked categories or demographics, though admitted or enrolled students may be categorized by demographics, sure. But again, I’m just talking general applicant/ and student body as a whole. Not the worthiness, not the household income, not the faculty member’s relative. Schools list “number of applicants” that’s all, not concerned with DEI in my inquiry, simply what is the definition of or what is considered “an applicant”.
It does make sense to perhaps consider an applicant as one who pays the application fee, as someone mentioned above, regardless of whether the application is completed or not. The student would likely get an applicant ID number at that point (my son did everywhere he applied but I can’t speak for every single school out there) and numbers could easily be calculated by subtracting the earliest number from the latest number to get number of applicants, perhaps. Possibly that is easiest to asses decision point rather than having to pull incomplete files from the numbers here and there. The application fee (and amount of waivers) would be something they would have to document and reconcile against numbers of applications when it comes to budgeting/balancing the books. I’m sure we won’t ever know but just something to think about when talking about a school only accepting 10% or 40% of applicants when we don’t know if that includes people who didn’t even finished anything beyond paying the application fee. Food for thought.
You’re right that the selectivity depends on the “bucket”. Some schools are much harder for day students while others bend over backwards to get them! Others may be really popular with certain groups and are extremely selective for that group.
Nobody releases this publicly although schools share some of this information with each other for benchmarking purposes.
Sorry, I misunderstood your initial query and thought you were asking if a student should be worried about their chances based on the overall number of applications and I just wanted to share that, from everything I have read here, they are never truly competing against the full pool.
If you’re just wondering the number of applicants to a school in a particular year and not how that affects a student’s chances of admission, I still have no idea how they determine “number of applications”!
Surly if considering the “complete” applications, the acceptance rate would up from 10%, but it would not go to 40%. On this forum there are self reported stats threads. I would guess stats in those threads are an upper bound of the real number since the forum readers tend to be the skilled/more knowledgeable applicants and successful applicants tend to report back.
The federal government is addressing this issue with regard to college applications (see attached). Looking at the example in this article, there is a material impact to college acceptance rates when incomplete applications are excluded, but it is not a “game changer” for applicants.
Interesting article. It does mention that removing incomplete applications has a significant impact on the acceptance rate numbers. Even with 10 and 20 fold the numbers of applications at college/university level, the difference is seen rather than diluted. However, extrapolating info from college/university data can certainly be comparing apples and oranges when looking against BS.
Again my question has no interest in knowing WHY students don’t complete, just looking at the truths in numbers when evaluating “ooooo that school only accepted 15% of applicants”.
Many colleges/universities are public domain and have government funding for students, so the government has a stake in studies concerning colleges/university no doubt. There is a whole different play, as well, when it comes to full or part time students or when a school that has only a few hundred students vs others that have 75 thousand. This is absolutely not the case with BS as they have their own niche of students and (as far as I know) are all private institutions which is why the only cross comparative I’d be interested in is completed vs incomplete application counting in that “admitted” percentage.
Even the article mentioned the prestige this number brings to colleges and universities. You would have to be a fool to believe these schools don’t consider their prestige factor (which certainly has more than just % accepted or retention rates in there, but they are in there). Even public schools consider how their numbers for anything look to the public. Bottom line is, you aren’t really “competing” against an incomplete application are you?
I agree that incomplete apps should not be included in determining admissions selectivity. As an example, USMA is transparent that it counts incomplete applications (apps “started”), but it would be more revealing to show “completed” as well:
The academies are considered selective, but once a candidate has a nomination and is 3Q (qualified physically, academically, and medically), the admission rate is well north of 50% which most wouldn’t consider all that selective. In this table, only those bottom two lines count. For the class of 2026, of those qualified, the admission rate was 68%. At least the academies publish this data so anyone who can handle simple math can figure out the real story.
Boost said his institution had a 44.8% admissions rate for fall 2022, accepting 28,354 students compared to 63,257 submitted applications.
However, about 6% of applications were denied for being incomplete. The new reporting rules would have altered the university’s admissions rate to be 47.8%.
“That change is statistically significant, but will it be practically significant when the change is implemented at all universities at the same time,” Borst [said on Twitter]
Obviously numbers of BS applications are smaller but even if a school receives 1000 applications, and should that rate be similar, that would be 60 people you aren’t actually up against for a seat as they wouldn’t even be considered anymore. My son is friends with kids at a couple of feeder schools to nearby BS (gotta love New England with one on every corner!). A few of them have, or have had classmates, change their lists during the process for various reason of their own. It happens. Some kids stopped applying to test required schools when their test scores came back. Some schools will have more incomplete than others, no doubt. There are incomplete applications, the question is how many? Kids stress about everyone else they are competing against (hence why we have all these chance me posts). It could relieve some of their anxiety to know that really out of those 2000 applications said school says they got, 337 of them aren’t actually even being considered. There are plenty of kids who freak out over their chances but I never see anyone questioning the numbers behind it all such as this, or what’s the breakdown by grade of applicants/admissions, or why does a school say they have a selective 35% admission rate yet has rolling admissions after their deadline and well into Fall? Nothing will change the outcomes of M10, that’s not at all where I’m going, but it is a good review for some in data manipulation/scrutiny when it comes to ANY information you give/get on any topic, from any source.
At any school, BS or college, I think you can generally count on some(about 20%?) of applications to simply miss the mark altogether for any number of reasons, from incomplete to total misunderstanding of what an institution is looking for. (This would be the equivalent of applying to the USMA without being 3Q!)
After that, you can decide how wound up you want to be. At some schools, being FP will give you a huge leg up. Or the pool from a given country may be very large and deep, which inflates all the numbers in a meaningless way unless you live in that country. Or it’s very popular with day students – ditto if you are a boarder. And most schools report out on all apps, freshmen through PG, yet not all are equally challenging.
I know you want to know how hard it really is foryour situation, but you’re unlikely to get this Intel. You almost have to put it out of your head until M10. Maybe that’s why this group always gets to cocktails recipes around this time of year?
And I would argue, even if statistically significant and the numbers changed dramatically, say even from 10% to 20% acceptance when taking this into account, this is a distinction without a difference. We know this because every year on M10 there are extremely well qualified kids (on paper…9x% SSAT, 4.0s, multiple languages, sports, instruments, yada yada) shut out of GLADCHEMMS and others.
The bottom line is that these schools are extremely competitive for entry. Whether “extremely” means 10% or 20% doesn’t really matter for a given applicant, practically speaking, IMO, even if schools like to flash this is a signal of prestige.
We know admissions officers at 3 of the HADES schools, and they told us approximately 10% of applicants (paid the application fee/completed candidate profiles) did not submit final applications on Jan. 15/Feb.1 2022. They do not count these incomplete applications when calculating acceptance rates.
I think their primary concerns are the quality of the pool of applicants, applicant fit, and yielding admitted students - not the acceptance rate.
