“better colleges” is, to a large extent, subjective, therefore any correlation here is meaningless.
I could tell you that there is a strong correlation between prestigious restaurants and difficulty getting reservations at those restaurants, but that’s meaningless if you think the casual Mediterranean Café cooks up some of your favorite food.
There are many hidden treasures out there as far as colleges are concerned. Acceptance rates and national rankings simply don’t tell the whole story…
Year 0: ten colleges are relatively young, and each has one seat available. They draw one application each from a local student, admit that student, and have 100% admission rate, with 100% yield.
Year 10: the same ten colleges push for more applications, and persuade the same ten students (well, equivalent students) to send out two applications each - one to the local college, and a back up application to another college, just in case. They each admit one of the two applications they received; their admission rates are reduced to 50%. They’re more selective now! The same 10 (equivalent) students attend each of the ten schools. They have 100% yield.
Year 20: the colleges continue seeking more applications. The students now see they only have a 50-50 shot of getting in, so they send out four applications to be safe. The colleges offer admission to 2 of the 4 applications they each receive, so they’re no more selective, but now the students have a choice of 2 schools. They each pick one and attend. Yield is now only 50%!
Year 30: With yield plunging dramatically, the schools decide they need a LOT more applications to choose from. So they reach out to distant high schools and convince guidance counselors to get students to apply from far away. They are each now receiving 4 applications from the original 10 equivalent students, plus 4 from students who had never heard of them before. They each offer admission to 2 of the students from before, and 1 of the out of towners. Admission rate is down to 3/8 (37.5%). One of the 2 local students decides to attend each, and none of the out of towners can afford the schools; yield drops to 33%.
The spiral continues… more applications to each school, more applications from each student to more schools, applications from students who once would never have considered them… admission rates go down, which scares students into sending out more applications… yields go down, which scares schools into seeking out more applicants… but basically the same students are going to the same schools in the end.
I am not sure if that is the right way to look at it.
The issue is of highly qualified candidates, what was the acceptance rate then and now?
Hypothetical numbers:
1980’s
Applications: 8,000
Highly Qualified: 6,000
Admits: 1,000
2015
Applications: 40,000
Highly Qualified: 6,000
Admits: 1,000
Clearly the number of applications schools get has risen dramatically. Due to the ease of the common app. This then leads to more people applying when they see that more people applying to multiple schools and the acceptance rates go down, and then more people apply again, rinse and repeat.
Back in the stone age, people I knew applied to 1 Ivy (the one that they really thought was a good fit), 1 State and 1 other school. That was it. No one who thought Columbia was a good fit for them, also thought they would be happy at Dartmouth, and visa-versa.
Some top schools say they could have filled the class 3x with the qualified applicants. So if the class size is 2k, that is 6k highly qualified students and they probably get 30-40k applications.
BTW, looking at Stanford numbers:
Number of Applicants:
1990: 13,000
2015: 42,000
That is not it, Purple Titan.
What can I say except to note that you have not presented a single counterargument to my point. To be clear, you made a statement about naïve teenagers --erroneously in your words-- confusing prestige and admission rates. You said **“because many teenagers do buy in to the (IMO, mistaken) notion that lower acceptance rate = more prestigious.” ** If we match opinions, I happen to think that those students have it right, and you, for whatever reason have it wrong. I would be happy to revise my opinion if you were to find support to the statement I objected to!
Again, the correlation between low admit rates and prestige is extremely clear. My point about the inability of describing schools that would have high admission rates all the while being perceived as prestigious was both simple and telling, and you know very well why it is simple: it is true!
Adding more qualifiers such as “better colleges” or others as you listed below does NOT change anything to the correlation to lower admit rates:
And for one good reason … most of those “ingredients” also happen to correlate with … low admission rates! If you do not agree, simply try to show how wrong I am. No biggie … you already could not do it before.
The Academy and Curtis do not present much in terms of relevance. The military academies misrepresent their true admission rates as they have a dual admission system --not that anyone cares one way or the other as they have no peers, except themselves-- and schools such as Curtis or Juillard are no more relevant than Deep Springs in the context of THIS discussion.
@xiggi: UChicago when it’s admit rate was around 50%. Did it lack prestige back then? Was it less prestigious than the non-HYP Ivies back then? From what I saw, not to the people who mattered.
What it lacked was the market demand.
Demand is some combination of:
Prestige
Awareness
Fit
Perceived Value vs. Cost.
Other
To answer your question, if UChicago had the same prestige as Harvard back then, I would think their admission rate would be lower than it was. So, yes, relative to the alternatives it lacked prestige.
^^ Good, Purple Titan, I was expecting that! We now have one school that was an outlier for the longest times. Rather than debating why it it was such an outlier (as I have done many times in the past) I will mark one down on your tally. So, adding the academies, we do have a few schools. I will now spot you a couple more with high admission rates and prestige, namely the single-sex schools such as Wellesley and Smith to a lesser degree. It would be hard to argue that among all girls schools, Wellesley carries a lot of prestige. Further, we could find examples of girls applying to selective schools in say engineering and having a high rate of admission. Perhaps, girls applying to Harvey Mudd until recently.
But we are still talking about a handful number of schools. Schools with a high correlation are simply more numerous. Can’t we agree about that?
The point is the acceptance rate depends on the applicant pool, and when you have a different applicant pool, looking at admit rate alone has less meaning. For example, College of the Ozarks and Claremont McKenna are similarly sized LACs that get a similar admit rate near ~10% each year. However, they have very different applicant pools, which leads to a completely different group of admitted students and relates to not being academic peers. I intentionally chose extremely different colleges in my examples to make the differences more explicit, but the same idea applies to other more familiar colleges that have a notably different applicant pool (for example, Caltech vs Claremont McKenna).
Is there any formal evidence that colleges are going to their waitlists more this year? It seems that way to me this year. At least anecdotally, I am seeing a lot more mentioning of students getting pulled off the waitlist this year than the prior years.
And that reinforces the idea that is best to stick to … (generally) comparable schools!
Look at colleges with the lowest acceptance rates in the original post. Do those colleges, more than any others, pander to teenaged tastes? I see schools with excellent academic reputations and generous need-based aid.
There may be a few excellent colleges with relatively high admit rates (some of the women’s colleges for example). How many mediocre, overpriced colleges with crappy aid get admit rates below 20%?
-Missouri S&T (average math SAT ~730), a well known and respected school in engineering = 82% admit rate.
-Purdue (average math SAT 690) = 60% admit rate.
-University of Washington (average math SAT 710) = 55% admit rate.
-Cal State Long Beach (average math SAT ~500), a party school = 30% admit rate.
-University of Arkansas - Pine Bluff (average math SAT ~400) = 27% admit rate.
-Chicago State (average math SAT ~450) = 29% admit rate.
-Edward Waters College (average math SAT ~390) = 27% admit rate.
… [the list goes on](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate/page+4)
As @Data10 pointed out, many schools have self-selecting applicant pools, therefore trying to correlate quality/prestige with acceptance rate is pointless.
@xiggi, and we can agree that stuff like endowment size, research prowess, and recruiting opportunities correlate just as well (also not perfectly) with prestige. Hopefully we can also agree that unlike admit rate, those characteristics have a direct impact on the opportunities available to students.
What did I say about that, PT.
Fractal, that’s a miss on the prestige part. Sorry! Purdue with 690 SAT Math average? Could it be the 75th percentile? I’d wager their RM average is around 1200 combined.
Yield is probably a more highly correlated metric of school quality, and certainly of value. From the list:
Single Digit Admissions / Yield (2013)
Harvard 5.33% 81%
Stanford 5.05% 76%
MIT 8.01% 72%
Yale 6.49% 67%
Princeton 6.99% 66%
Penn 9.92% 63%
Columbia 6.15% 61%
Brown 8.49% 58%
Chicago 7.81% 53%
Ten to twenty percent
Notre Dame 9.70% 53%
Cornell 14.88% 52%
Dartmouth 10.34% 48%
Georgetown 16.44% 47%
Duke 11.35% 46%
Northwestern13.03% 44%
Vanderbilt 11.29% 41%
UC Berkeley 16.48% 40%
Rice 14.53% 38%
Tufts 16.00% 38%
Hopkins 12.40% 37%
USC 17.47% 31%
More than 20 percent
Virginia 29.65% 40%
UMich 33% 40%
NYU 30.67% 35%
GWU 46.09% 31%
CMU 23.67% 30%
Emory 23.37% 29%
Boston Col 28.00% 28%
Boston U 32.00% 20%
Other fun ones:
BYU 51% 79%
U Alaska Fairbanks 72% 69%
U Nebraska Lincoln 64% 63%
This seems to confirm the hypothesis that most students who apply to Ivy’s apply to many of them, and are only admitted to one or two. What I find interesting is that admissions madness is concentrated in the Northeast and California, the northwest, south and midwest (except Chicago) seem a bit more rational.
These published admit and yield rates are not indicative of the prestige, quality, or strength of particular programs in large universities. They aren’t even indicative of the actual admit/yield rates for particular programs. For example, U Michigan’s admit/yield rates vary among the various colleges within that university. The admit/yield rates for USC will be much different for its film school than for some of its other colleges. Same for NYU vs NYU Stern or NYU Tisch (the latter two being highly selective). And Purdue engineering will have a much lower admit/yield rate for engineering than for whatever its liberal arts college is, or general studies, etc. For LACs and colleges with just one type of admission, sure…but many of the colleges I have seen listed in this thread will have varying degrees of admit/yield rates, as well as prestige and quality, within the university…and these can be very wide variations.
Yep, and for schools that admit by major (such as UIUC), the acceptance rate may be dramatically different depending on what major you apply for, even within the same school (such as engineering).
Do Georgetown’s SFS, Penn’s Wharton School, or Cornell’s CAS have higher admission and lower yield rates than all their other divisions? Do honors colleges in general have higher admission rates and lower yields?
Of course there are confounding factors (related to geography and costs for example, or to outdated perceptions). However, by definition a less selective college gets fewer applications per place. If its quality and prestige increases, and if the price and population stays the same, why would it not tend to attract more applications?
We can debate the extent or consistency of these effects or how much difference they really make to student outcomes, but does anyone here seriously doubt there is a correlation between selectivity and school prestige? I’m not so sure that some of the other features posters have suggested (like research prowess or recruiting opportunities) correlate as well. At any rate, they are harder to measure. They also are less immediately important in building a realistic college application list.
@tk21769, I don’t see anyone saying there is no correlation between admissions rate and prestige. I do see people saying that, outside of determining chances, it’s overemphasized by the “less sophisticated” (as some would put it). Also, fixating on something that that is easily seen but may not be all that relevent rather than researching aspects that are less easily measured is a very human thing to do, but also laziness (and unsophistication).
BTW, it’s interesting that you brought up Wharton. My understanding is that decades ago, Wharton was actually easier to get in to than other parts of Penn. So what does that tell you about Wharton’s prestige and how much acceptance rates should matter?