Wharton was the easiest school to get through - once you’re in, life is good. Wharton was about the same or a tad more selective in terms of admissions back in the 1980’s but it was near impossible to transfer into from the other schools. Engineering was the most selective and most demanding school of Penn undergrad. Nursing was alap a tough school but little prestige there.
Or does it (Wharton’s acceptance rate) just tell you that IB has gotten ridiculously popular as a career choice?
There are lots of examples of the overall college rate being very different from the collection of colleges they are made up of. If you are asked to apply to the actual division of that college it makes a huge difference. To take the example I know best, CMU’s overall admit rate is 23.67%, but the School of Computer Science rate is 5.8% (yield 38.4%). You can see the rest of it here: http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/undergraduate-admission-statistics Note that their stats are better too - the middle 50% of SCS SAT math scores is 790-800.
Note that some schools have high yields that are not reflected here, and it swings year to year. For example Mac has a 39% admit, but a very high yield this year (huge incoming class). It’s a bit of a numbers game year to year. And it is not reflective of the quality of the education, which has not changed when the numbers are up or down.
It is worth noting that the overall admit rate in the LACs are inflated by athletes, legacy and URM. The impact is disproportionately higher when the class is so small.
For a regular student, the RD acceptance rate is more indicative even if the student applies ED. The admit rate for girls can be lower still.
Inflated in which sense? A higher rate meaning less selective or the opposite? Further, one has to look for variable reliance on the ED process at LAC. LAC rarely fill 50 percent of their class via the ED round while IL schools do.
When I started college in the early '80s, I had a “final” list of 14 colleges and universities to apply to. Once I started to see how much work was involved in applying to all, I questioned if I really planned to attend one over the other. I ended up applying to a safety, a match and two reaches. I was accepted at the match and safety and not at the reaches. Today, I would probably use the common app and apply to all 14!
They are more selective for the average applicant than what the overall admit rate suggests. A NESCAC LAC for example will need roughly the same number of athletes as a much larger school, so the ED rate and overall rate may give the average applicant the idea there is a similar advantage in ED or a better chance overall. Recruiting, legacy and URM is an ED process in NESCAC, which has many of the top 20 LACs, about 50% of them.
I have not seen many schools disclose the RD acceptance rate, but Bates did for the 2019 class at 17% and higher ACT and SAT scores than overall.
Admit rates for girls were not released but an estimate would be about 15% in RD.
This must be taken into account by students considering these schools, that their chances are at least 20% lower than the overall.
@Data10, they accepted about 180, not 57. 57 (plus the previous admits) is the class size. So, the admit rate could be about 16.7% and their yield could be about 32%, which is still very good.
You may have to have faith in believing that no school went under your beloved school. 
I mean that you don’t have to search for such thing.
@ewho You’re correct that 57 is not the number of admitted students, but the numbers you suggested are incorrect. Olin’s class of 2019 will consist of 61 new admits + 25 students who were waitlisted last year and took a gap year. Just going by this year’s applicant pool, they accepted 105 students out of 1073 for an acceptance rate of 9.8% and a yield of 58%. If you include the gap year students, they accepted 130 out of 1098 for an acceptance rate of 11.8% and a yield of 66%.
Certainly the numbers of applications are way up over the last 30 years at the top schools, and the admission rates to these schools are way down.
This is particularly true for the handful of schools (HYPS and possibly a handful of others) that have substantially increased aid in the last 10 years. Even within the Ivies, there can be a big difference in financial aid between HYP and the other five, and there are only a handful of schools that are need-blind for international students (Stanford is not, for example).
Obviously the Common App and consequent ease of applying to a bunch of schools is also a factor, as is population growth (320M people in the US now versus 240M in 1985).
I’ve seen some articles arguing though that the decline in acceptance rate at a single school overstates how much things have changed. The argument is that because so many kids are applying at a bunch of schools, but can only attend one, the chances of a kid ultimately getting into one of their top choices (though not necessarily their #1) hasn’t changed nearly as much as the admission rates to each school would suggest.
Okidoki. I wanted to make sure that we were reading the term inflated in the same way, and not using a pejorative version. We agree that the rate appears higher than it really is and that the schools have become highly selective for unhooked applicants.
I am not sure who is correct and who has the “right” numbers, but what is crystal clear is that Olin is not a school that is comparable to others. Data10 made a point about specialty schools such as the one he listed and Juillard. It is obvious that from the narrative suggested in the previous posts, Olin admission with deferral and “waitlisted” students who take a gap year does not follow a normal process.
At this stage, the safe bet is to consider the past CDS and assume that the admit rate is closer to 20 percent than the 10 percent suggested in the last post. But again, it really does not matter as the admission process is not relevant for comparison purposes.
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@xiggi, I’m an Olin alum, and we receive e-mail updates every cycle that detail the admissions statistics, so that is where the numbers I gave came from. Independent of that, if you want to go by the CDS from last year, the applicant count was 983, with 118 admitted and 79 enrolled (12% acceptance rate, 67% yield). I agree that Olin’s admission process is unique (especially with Candidates’ Weekend), but I just wanted to provide some more accurate information about the numbers, since they were a bit out of alignment.
How should a hooked applicant use this data to strategize? If a good but not superstar recruitable athlete with bottom of the acceptable range of academic stats does not have a preference about whether to play top Div. III or lower Div. I, for which would they have a better chance of getting through admission? Let’s assume a similar concern on the part of the school to obtain the best athletes who are academically qualified. Would the athlete have a better shot at a smaller LAC where about 45% of the student body are athletes, or at the larger university where only about 20% are athletes?
@TheGFG This is exactly what we did. My son is a sprinter from a nationally known high school, all boys catholic prep school in NJ. He could have sat the bench in top tier D1 but we targeted Patriot League and NESCAC starting March 2014. We circumvented admissions by requesting pre-reads once the junior transcripts were official. By August, we had 15/15 successful pre-reads of which 5 were D1 in academic conferences and did D1 official visits. We also did several NESCAC overnights.
After going through all options, he applied ED to Bates. The coaching staff was excellent and they even have an athletic liaison in admissions. We actually withdrew a verbal commitment to D1 Patriot League school after some second thoughts and the overnight at Bates.
He had a 93.5 average through Junior year and 97 first quarter senior year at application time. His ACT was in the lower middle 50% and we did not submit it.
NESCAC will not bend the rules but there is a preference mechanism for athletes that are good students. A bordeline D1 athlete is the kid they want. From a parent’s perspective, NESCAC is ideal, much less travel.
I agree that casting a wide net is a good idea for students interested in pursuing sports in college and using that as a help with admissions at selective schools.
It’s hard to predict how things will work out with any specific school . . . a particular school just may not need a goalie next year, for example . . . so talking with a range of schools is important.
The athletes are of course better in general in D1 than in D3, even at D1 conferences that are at the lower end athletically, but there are certainly a number of kids every year with D1 opportunities that choose to go the D3 route.
Also I think it’s important to try and understand how much influence teams have on admissions at each school. From what I hear about MIT for example, being on a team’s list doesn’t count for all that much in admissions and many kids on team lists each year are denied admission.
In the Ivy League on the other hand - where each team has a specific number of slots and recruits are pre-screened by admissions before a coach would even think about offering one of their precious slots - being on a team’s list is pretty significant.
Zatoro, again, I do not have the exact numbers as I do NOT compile the numbers of specialty schools. Not dissing the school as it is remarkable, but simply considering it not comparable.
In terms of data, here’s what is commonly available but also two years old. Your numbers should show up in a few months.
PROFILE OF FALL ADMISSION
Overall Admission Rate
17% of 753 applicants were admitted
Women
40% of 192 applicants were admitted
Men
10% of 561 applicants were admitted
Students Enrolled
86 (66%) of 130 admitted students enrolled
Women
47 (62%) of 76 admitted students enrolled
Men
39 (72%) of 54 admitted students enrolled
Students Offered Wait List
46
Students Accepting Wait List Position
29
Students Admitted From Wait List
3
The Class of 2018 must have been substantially different from its previous year. I admit to still not understanding the WL/GapYear Admit you described in your first post.
@purpletitan and @xiggi I think @skyoverme had a good point about UChicago and fit. It may have been prestigious, but potential applicants were not feeling at home in the bootcamp/where fun comes to die environment there. They have backed off from that somewhat to improve their applicant pool.
@xiggi, I agree with you in that its admissions process is not comparable to more traditional schools. Like I said, I just wanted to provide some more accurate information since some incorrect assumptions were being made in this thread (and not necessarily by you). The class of 2018 data can be found at https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/franklin-olin-college-of-engineering. After Olin cut its automatic full tuition scholarship to 50%, the number of applicants dropped in the year immediately following that cut (as one would expect). However, since then, the applicant pool has been growing year over year, and finally eclipsed their previous high with the class of 2019. This has brought the acceptance rate back down to the levels it was at before the scholarship cut, and explains why the statistics for the classes of 2018 and 2019 look a bit different than those from 2-3 years ago.
The gap year program is relatively straightforward. If you get waitlisted, you have the option to take a gap year with guaranteed admission the following year. For admissions statistics, the gap year students are counted as both applicants and acceptances for the year that they actually enroll.