<p>Case Western ranking is good, but why the admission rate is so high? 70%+</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>It’s actually 67%. <a href=“Institutional Research | Case Western Reserve University”>Institutional Research | Case Western Reserve University; Self selecting population. You’ll notice that the scores and class rank are not exactly low.</p>
<p>It was used as a safety school by a lot of Ivy applicants. They got a high quality level of applicants but had to admit most of them to fill their seats. </p>
<p>2011, a new Admissions Dean took over and things changed. They dropped the admit rate to 48%, trying to eliminate those who were very unlikely to accept. I’ve heard that they paid for that with a significantly smaller freshman class, but I don’t know how true that is. </p>
<p>They’re making some other changes too. One of their reps said at a college fair last spring that this year, for the first time, they will require the CSS PROFILE. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Do you mean it’s still hard to get in?
Self selecting population? Why Caltech admission rate is ~15%? </p>
<p>I just wonder maybe the courses in Case are very hard.</p>
<p>It’s a self-selecting population. Cleveland is not a popular destination (whether that’s fair or not is a different issue). It doesn’t mean the kids aren’t smart and it doesn’t mean it doesn’t offer a fine education. I suspect you are confusing selectivity with excellence.</p>
<p>well knowing it’s an engineering school, I can’t help but think if some people get weeded out freshman year. Any truth to this? (just a random guess haha)</p>
<p>It is not strictly an engineering school. When we were there for an Open House, one of our tour guides was majoring in intl relations and the other had been admitted to med school. The school is a product of the merger of two predecessors, Western Reserve University and Case Inst of Technology, and offers a full range of programs. </p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Admission rate too high? Most college applicants should be so lucky. </p>
<p>I’m reminded of that old Groucho Marx joke: “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.”</p>
<p>You have to remember colleges have a given number of seats to fill every year and a good idea of what their yield usually looks like. After that, it’s just the number of applications that determine the admission rate. If the number of applications increase, the admit rate will go down, simply because they still have the same number of seats to fill. Doesn’t mean the school’s quality suddenly increased, and it doesn’t even mean the average stats required for admission went up, since the number of applicants says nothing about their quality.</p>
<p>Admission rates need to be taken with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>"It was used as a safety school by a lot of Ivy applicants. "</p>
<p>It was also used as a safety school by everyone else.</p>
<p>Case Western is one of those “admissions bargains”, where it is well respected academically, but has a relatively high admissions rate. </p>
<p>It seems to be due to a self-selected pool of applicants. The school doesn’t score well on “Quality of Life” type metrics, e.g. isn’t a pretty campus.</p>
<p>Cleveland–not a magic location to most. Move it to Boston and you have Tufts II. The focus on admissions rates is often ridiculous. Much like the tulip/ tech/home bubbles.</p>
<p>Schools with great locations, in nice cities, with beautiful campuses, and/or cool names are generally harder to get into than their academics warrant.</p>
<p>Schools with bad locations, in dull cities, with blah campuses, and/or awkward names are generally easier to get into than their academics warrant. Case Western Reserve is the posterchild for this type.</p>
<p>I’ve always been a bit puzzled that Case Western is as highly regarded as it is by some on CC. I mean, it’s not a bad school. But it’s not a great school, either. It’s OK in the sciences, but with no truly top-ranked programs. It’s probably best known for engineering, but its engineering program is nowhere near a top-25 program, either. In fact, it’s the second-best engineering school in the state of Ohio, after Ohio State, and Ohio State is the 8th-best engineering school in the Big Ten. Maybe that’s why so few people apply to Case Western (9,382 applicants in 2010): its natural applicant base would come from Ohio and surrounding states, but Ohio and every nearby state save WV and KY (and they’re not exactly in the same region) has a public university that is as strong or stronger than Case Western overall, and significantly stronger in engineering, supposedly Case’s signature program. So I guess if you’re an Ohio kid you might apply to Case Western as a back-up to Ohio State, but if you get into OSU you probably go there unless Case lures you with enough FA or merit money to make it cheaper to attend than the in-state flagship. Or unless you’re just really, really into Cleveland and can’t stand to be as far away as Columbus.</p>
<p>Case Western does have something of a following among those who believe private is always better. But most of those who apply apparently are using it as a back-up to better schools, because most who are admitted to Case go elsewhere, presumably to better schools. Case’s yield in 2010 was a dismal 16.1%.</p>
<p>Bottom line, it’s simple math: if you only get 9,300 applicants and your yield is only 16.1%, you’re going to need to admit an awful lot of those who apply into order to fill the seats in your freshman class.</p>
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<p>It’s a little bit of vicious circle, isn’t it ? I mean, low-yield schools need to admit more students, leading to higher acceptance rates and, therefore, less prestige, lower ranking, etc. That in turn translates into lower yields.</p>
<p>“It’s OK in the sciences, but with no truly top-ranked programs.”</p>
<p>I asked this a while ago and still haven’t gotten a convincing answer: If high-ranking programs, cutting-edge research, and Nobel laureates galore are necessary to get a great undergrad education, how do you explain the top LAC’s giving what most people agree are as-good-if-not-better-than-Ivy undergrad educations? In other words, the faculty at a place like CWRU probably isn’t as glitzy as those at HYPMSCCP, but wouldn’t they be every bit as sharp and accomplished as the profs at leading LACs?</p>
<p>^^Sorry I just had to comment: “HYPMSCCP” LOL </p>
<p>How long does this chain of top schools go? CCP Columbia, Caltech, Penn?</p>
<p>HYPMSCCPDDCNJW haha</p>
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<p>Well, not necessarily. Top LACs don’t have top-ranked graduate programs because they don’t have grad program, not because they don’t have quality faculty. But for universities with graduate programs (like Case Western), their graduate program rankings are first and foremost a reflection of the perceived prestige of their faculties. Now it’s true that most of the very top people in any given field are going to be on one of the top faculties, working with highly regarded colleagues and top grad students. So they cream is oing to tend to rise to HYPSM, the “lesser Ivies,” and top publics like UC Berkeley and Michigan that are known for having top faculties, and top graduate programs. But there are a lot of outstanding faculty scattered around elsewhere. No doubt there are some superstars on the Case Western faculty; just not as many as at a Cornell, say, or a Michigan, or even Ohio State. But some very distinguished academics really prefer to teach at LACs; or they just end up on a career trajectory that takes them there for a time, or perhaps their entire career. </p>
<p>The chair of the philosophy department at Princeton when I was a grad student there way back when had previously taught at Wellesley for many years; he was regarded as one of the most distinguished figures in the field. Currently on the Wellesley faculty is Karl Case, an economist who co-developed the widely used Case-Shiller real estate price index with Robert Schiller from Yale. Swarthmore’s faculty includes James Kurth, a leading conservative political scientist, and K. David Harrison, a linguist and anthropologist who is one of the leading figures in the global effort to save endangered languages. The classicist Richmond Lattimore who produced many of the most widely used translations of ancient Greek works including “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” was for many years on the faculty at Bryn Mawr. Many of these people have academic pedigrees and scholarly publishing records that are indistinguishable from the faculty at top public and private universities; in fact, many spend part of their careers at top universities and part at top LACs. </p>
<p>It’s also a common misconception that faculty at LACs don’t do research. All the faculty at top LACs do research. The difference is that LACs have smaller faculties and most LACs don’t have the lab resources to run big-science research. But many science faculty at top LACs either have their own smaller labs, and/or collaborate as co-investigators with faculty at larger universities that do have bigger lab facilities.</p>
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<p>I thought that, by CCP, he meant “Columbia, Chicago, Penn”; but maybe you’re right about Caltech.</p>
<p>Anyway, according to the [Wikipedia](<a href=“List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation</a>), Columbia and Chicago are the two top universities in the US in number of affiliated Nobel laureates (counting the memorial prize in economics as a Nobel prize of course).</p>
<p>Actually, I meant Columbia, Cornell, Penn. Caltech and Chicago have relatively tiny undergrad programs for reserch universities, so they weren’t particularly useful in the discussion.</p>