<p>That's a sensible explanation, except for failing to account for the huge increases at peer schools like Northwestern, WashU, and Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>Plus, the applicant pool circa 1991 was much thinner than it is now. U.S. high schools were graduating 20% fewer students, and fewer of them were going to college. The number of foreign applicants from places like China and Thailand must have been miniscule.</p>
<p>There seems to be some sort of weird equilibrium for all these schools around the 25% level.</p>
<p>Where we live, Rice has Texas against it. When my son told his friends I was making him visit, they all agreed it was dreadful, that how could anyone go to school in Texas. Having visited Houston, and spent a day at Rice, his opinion turned around 180 degrees. Rice is not 100% Houston, and Houston is hardly 100% Texas. And even Texas these days may not be 100% Texas any more:).</p>
<p>Sure, where I live Rice is off the beaten path, too. But certainly the population of the country as a whole has moved closer to Rice over the past 20 years. That's not true of Northwestern, or Brown.</p>
<p>JHS, so a 20% increase in the college eligible population, other things being equal, would translate into a 20% increase in the competition to get in, not 150-200% as you stated.</p>
<p>Regarding foreign students, the mix (of countries) has changed over time, of course, but not the numbers. When I was in college, we had many foreign students from Africa and Japan. Now they are asian.</p>
<p>Regarding hawkette's data, a better way to look at the change is the percent change in the percentage. confused? Look at it this way. A school like Harvard had its admit rate change from 10% ot 9%. This is a 9% change in rate. Or you can say it was 100% easier to get into back then - using the recent data as the base for the change. Here is the data recast and sorted:</p>
<p>2008 1991 change university
24% 24% 0% Rice
37% 37% 0% U Virginia
23% 25% 9% Duke
22% 24% 9% Georgetown
38% 45% 18% U Chicago
25% 30% 20% Cornell
47% 60% 28% U Michigan
24% 37% 54% UC Berkeley
16% 25% 56% Dartmouth
30% 47% 57% Northwestern
11% 18% 64% Stanford
34% 56% 65% Vanderbilt
26% 43% 65% UCLA
10% 17% 70% Princeton
14% 24% 71% Brown
27% 48% 78% Johns Hopkins
32% 58% 81% Emory
27% 49% 81% Notre Dame
17% 31% 82% Caltech
34% 64% 88% Carnegie Mellon
9% 18% 100% Harvard
9% 19% 111% Yale
18% 41% 128% U Penn
13% 30% 131% MIT
12% 29% 142% Columbia
21% 54% 157% Wash U</p>
<p>That's exactly what I was talking about, newmassdad, except I didn't produce the chart. (And if I had I would have realized that Berkeley was closer to UCLA than my quick glance had told me, and that maybe I should have said "1-1/2 to 2-1/2 times harder" rather than "1-1/2 to 2 times harder".)</p>
<p>And I repeat and rephrase: There are a lot of private universities there where selectivity (I'll call it that for short) has increased 50-100%, and only a few where it has increased meaningfully more or meaningfully less than that. And I can't think of a simple hypothesis that explains why those particular schools are different.</p>
<p>JHS, it's not the off-the-beaten track thing, or proximity. It's the perceived politics and culture of Texas. In upper middle class liberal neighborhoods like the SF Bay Area, those who don't know Houston have a real bias against it. </p>
<p>I don't know if the other bastions of upper middle class liberalism, New York and Boston, feel the same way:).</p>
<p>I agree. Frankly, it seems puzzling that, given all the hoopla about rising applications and such, and the rising rankings of some schools, that Rice, Virginia, Duke and Georgetown have had virtually no change in acceptance rate. Contrast these schools with Notre Dame and CMU, who seem to me to be the hardest to understand.</p>
<p>Alumother, when I said "off the beaten path", I meant pretty much precisely what you did. Stanford and the Claremont Colleges aren't off the beaten path here, nor is Reed, really, at least among kids in the intellectual-LAC market. Tulane, Emory, Miami are all pretty popular, Duke extremely so. Rice isn't, so much, but lots more kids seem to have heard of it recently, and some even apply. I would have bet its applications were rising here.</p>
<p>Proximity does matter, though, since most prospective students see it as a good thing (and since 20 years ago a lot of these colleges were essentially regional). And presumably people in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico don't have as many prejudices against anything labeled "Texas" as my friends and neighbors do. (By and large, though, my friends and neighbor's don't. Notwithstanding GWB and Tom DeLay, Texas seems pretty cool. It's hard to say a lot bad about a state that has given us Lyle Lovett, Lucinda Williams, Old 97s, Spoon, Richard Linklater, Molly Ivins, Friday Night Lights, and the guy who produced Veronica Mars.)</p>
<p>It might be worth looking at admission rates over the past several years and present an average, rather than just one year. For example, I recall that a few yrs ago Rice's acceptance rate was around 22%. The increase back to 24% could reflect the slowly increasing class sizes with the current planned expansion. While the 22-24% isnt a big difference, it represents a 9% change (a la Duke and Georgetown), not a zero percent change. Just a thought...</p>
<p>Base acceptance rates don't reflect very well who is coming forward and applying. Maybe a much higher-echelon group of students is applying at the same School X today than used to apply to School X.</p>
<p>To add my final simple thoughts on Rice - I bet proximity is part of this. Isn't it true that the majority of kids aiming for the top 20 colleges come from the Northeast? Or at least that the percentage of college-bound kids in a given region aiming for the top 20 is highest in the Northeast? Most of those kids are likely to look closer to home for the next rung, i.e. Vanderbilt, Emory, etc. And the Northeast doesn't have a state university system that matches the ambitions of its students.</p>
<p>Whereas, look at California, maybe the next highest percentage of kids aiming for top 20 (I am just guessing). We have Cal and UCLA etc. So kids who might on the East Coast go to Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, etc., here aim for the UCs. Rather than Rice. </p>
<p>It's so much fun to put forward hypotheses in the morning:). BTW, I think Rice is a wonderful school.</p>
<p>jym626: hawkette's data was for 1991 vs. 2008. So, even if the numbers bounce around some year to year, the differences in long-term trends ought to be reflected in those numbers.</p>
<p>I thought you might be on to something with the question of enrollment growth. If a college expands the size of its enrolled classes, obviously it will have to admit more kids. This could clearly be a factor for Chicago (which has expanded its class size almost 50% since the 1970s). I don't know about Georgetown, though. And I know that two of the biggest enrollment expansions over the past 25 years have been at CMU and WashU. So that alone doesn't explain the vast differences in selectivity change.</p>
<p>Also, re: proximity. In looking around briefly, I learned that Rice draws a significantly greater proportion of its students from Texas than any of its peers draws from its home state. Part of that is due to Texas' size, of course, and the difference between Rice and Stanford (California) or Columbia or Cornell (NY) is much less pronounced than that between it and, say, WashU.</p>
<p>Rice is increasing its class size gradually, while trying to keep the acceptance rate constant. Their goal is to keep the student distribution around 50% Texans and 50% out of state/international. It's an amazing school. </p>
<p>We are from the Northeast, both ivy grads, both previously "northeast-centric." S was waitlisted at # 1 choice (our alma mater) so decided to check out #2 choice (Rice). We all fell in love with the school and with the surrounding area. How did Rice become son's #2 choice? He was attending a summer program and met a teaching fellow from Houston. The guy encouraged him to check out Rice. The teaching fellow's comment: "I really wanted to go to Rice, but it's hard to get in from Houston, so I had to come up here to the Northeast (another ivy)." Poor kid had to "settle" for an ivy! It was an eye-opener for us; it showed how skewed our perspective was. </p>
<p>S loves Rice! Houston is extrememly cosmopolitan and is second to NYC in the number of Fortune 500 companies. The area around campus is beautiful. Finally, he's working harder that we did at our alma mater. Academics are excellent.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Where we live, Rice has Texas against it. When my son told his friends I was making him visit, they all agreed it was dreadful, that how could anyone go to school in Texas. Having visited Houston, and spent a day at Rice, his opinion turned around 180 degrees. Rice is not 100% Houston, and Houston is hardly 100% Texas. And even Texas these days may not be 100% Texas any more.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Where we live, people might think that the biggest handicap of Rice is not Texas but ... simply Houston. :)</p>
<p>My D went to Houston with a friend to stay with the friend's grandparents two years ago for spring break and came home absolutely sold on Texas. She liked the weather, the energy, the food, the shopping, etc. I've still never been. But Rice was one of the first schools on her list. Whatever. Kids have to chart their own path and if Texas is hers than I will support it. But if she starts using a lot of hair spray and wearing boots . . .</p>
<p>newmassdad,
I have read elsewhere that the number of high school graduates increased from 1.3 million in the early 1990s to 2.4 million in 2006. Combined with more minority apps, more female apps, and more international apps, I suspect that the absolute numbers applying to colleges is up more than, and perhaps a lot more, than 20%.</p>
<p>BaystateNutmeg,
Glad to hear that your son found Rice and is enjoying their time there. It is a wonderful college and so many positive traits of other highly ranked colleges while still providing some of the fun aspects that can be found at places like Duke, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt. </p>
<p>As for perspectives, your comments say it all. Opinions are formed thru different prisms and both are seen as "right." Hopefully, more folks will adjust how they look at the world of college admissions and give Rice a closer look.</p>
<p>Mammall,
Glad your daughter enjoyed her spring visit to Texas, but if she had gone in summer, it is a bit different. Hot as heck and Houston can be really humid. But it's great during the school year and baseball season for the Owls is nearly ready to start.</p>
<p>hawkette: In post #99, I linked to a pretty reputable chart showing high school graduates actual and projected over a 25 year period. It didn't have actual figures, but the increase was from about 2.5 million to just over 3 million between 1993-94 and 2008-09 -- a 20% increase. I don't know where you got your 1.3 million number, but it's wrong.</p>
<p>It's a little hard to find in the report tokenadult linked, but the most relevant data are in Table 15, which shows total fall enrollment among 18-24 year-olds in Bachelors degree programs 1994-2004. (That's all students, not just entering students, and thus affected by people staying in school longer as well as new students exceeding graduates and drop-outs.) The increase over that 11-year period was 23%, roughly 1.2 million to 1.5 million. So -- higher than the increase in high school graduates, but not wildly different.</p>
<p>Interestingly, one chart (first one in Section II) shows a 12 % rise in the 15-19 age group between 1986 and 2006, and a 1% drop in the 20-24 group.</p>
<p>Another slide shows growth in total HS grads between 1994 and 2006 by region, from a low of 11% in the midwest to a high of 29% in the southwest, including California.</p>
<p>So stop fighting over the data JHS and Hawkette... :)</p>