<p>It all came from each schools’ Common Data Set reports from their own website, so it would seem to be accurate, except for the incoming freshman class. For that, of course, I had to hope that the WP article is accurate with their numbers.</p>
Chance me: Duke, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Georgetown, UPenn, NYU Stern, Boston College, WashU, Vandy
<p>Dartmouth has released its 2013-2014 data set. Duke has not. I just wanted to point that out. Schools get more selective as time passes. It would be unfair to compare Duke’s old numbers with the more recent data obtained from Dartmouth’s Common Data Set. </p>
<p>^ Scratch that. It appears as though you have used the Washington Post article as well. I stand corrected.</p>
<p>Yes, I was careful to use matching years. But remember, Dartmouth actually got a little less selective this admissions cycle that just closed, at least technically. So in a comparison Duke benefited from using the newest data. If I had used older numbers from Dartmouth, it might have been to Dartmouth’s benefit since those seem to pretty consistently tun even lower than this year. Didn’t do all the exact calculations, but the 10.7% average compared to the 11.5% this year must mean that is so, since I know there wasn’t any one year that was really low. Next year Dartmouth might drop to 9%, who knows. At these levels it is just so much noise. Not like dropping to 5% or blowing up to 20%. So schools don’t always get more selective year to year. They seem to vary slightly both directions year to year, especially with percentages this low.</p>
<p>But in general, there is no question that with the advent of the Common Application and the ability (and inclination) for students to apply to more and more schools, many of which are extreme reaches they probably wouldn’t have applied to if they had to fill out an entire app and mail it like in the old days, that it makes acceptance rates lower at many, many schools. Not that there is any way to do this, but it would be interesting if we could eliminate the apps form those kinds of students to schools where they really have no chance at, would we still be seeing the headlines about colleges becoming so much more selective, or would it turn out to be entirely artificial. I suspect the answer is in between, that more students that are qualified apply to more schools than before, so the schools would still be genuinely more selective, but not to the degree that they are reporting now.</p>
<p>That’s a broad range of schools… they vary in selectivity. Your profile seems impressive!</p>