<p>Where I live, we have a university that accepts 75% of its applicants. However its reputation is that it is VERY hard to gain acceptance to. About 2/3 is female. Is the tough reputation because females have a harder time getting in? Their middle combined SAT score is 1750. They accept 4,000 per year. I have seen schools that accept well less than 50% that have much lower standards than this. How is this the case?</p>
<p>It’s just about the number of applicants. Apparently they only have ~5400 applicants every year. If university is slightly unknown, that may be the reason, despite its standards. People who don’t qualify may not even be applying. Often times, with small schools that are of average prestige, there’s no reason to apply if you’re far away, because there’s probably a similar or better school much closer and more appealing. </p>
<p>If somehow it got more attention, and more people applied, the acceptance rate would go down. So yes, in this case, it’s slightly misleading.</p>
<p>Hard to say without seeing more data, but a couple of things. First, some schools’ applicant pools are highly self-selecting. Until recently the University of Chicago had a high acceptance rate but its students had very high stats, mainly because the school had such a reputation for demanding academic expectations that pretty much only a small, self-selected group of the highly qualified applied there. Also, Chicago lost a lot of cross-admits to HYPSM, so it had to accept a higher percentage of applicants to fill its entering class. This has changed somewhat given Chicago’s high ranking on US News and its shifting to the common app, boosting the size of its applicant pool.</p>
<p>Careful, too, about that middle 50% SAT score. Are you looking at the middle 50% of enrolled freshman (the number US News uses), or the middle 50% of admitted students (the number many schools publicize on their websites and other promotional materials)? The figures for accepted students are typically higher, sometimes by quite a lot, because some fraction of those offered admission will be cross-admits with other, higher-ranked or otherwise more attractive schools. Other things equal, the more cross-admits a school loses to higher-ranked competitors, the larger the gulf between its stats for admitted and enrolled students.</p>
<p>Any school that rejects you is hard to get into. </p>
<p>We have a few schools in our area that have local reputations for being difficult to get into but they really aren’t for moderately strong students. Since they are nearby, however, lots of underqualified kids apply and then they are shocked to find out they’ve been rejected by a college that accepts 70% of all applicants. And so the reputation for selectivity grows.</p>
<p>Admissions are so hard to figure out. My daughter was admitted to her target schools and even a reach but she was waitlisted on schools that we thought were safeties. You dont know what the schools are looking for and this can change from year to year. A very big part of this website is to give students and parents some unofficial idea of where they can be admitted to (even if it is inaccurate). I have yet to see anything on this website that would give me our my daughter a better idea of her chances. You have to make your applications based on information that you can gather from all sources including your guidance dept., parents, college visits, etc. and see how it comes out. Good luck.</p>
<p>Even though they accept 75% of total applicants, more specific statistics might exist. Take MIT (the one I know best) as an example. Despite its acceptance rate is 11% (general), its international students acceptance rate is only 3%. As you can see, there is a very specific data for international students.</p>
<p>Bottom line is, check the numbers more deeply.</p>
<p>If a college wants to game the US News ratings, a piece of that strategy can be to attract applicants with non-competitive stats who they can turn them down in order to reduce their acceptance rate.</p>