It is my belief that if applicants (and their parents) are honest with themselves about academics and tests, do the proper research, and submit reasonable applications - Admittance to college can be predicted with reasonable certainty. Thoughts?
For colleges with less than say a 25% admission rate*, I don’t agree, because there will be candidates that look equally qualified on paper where some will be admitted and some will be rejected. When you get to the elite colleges with single digit rates, the ratio of “looks good to admit on paper” rejects gets even higher, and the colleges themselves will tell you they could make up a perfectly acceptable class out of the reject pile. Also it works the other way too: where you may also get an unhooked 25th percentile candidate offered admission - who presumably according to your post should not have bothered applying?
*25% is kind of an arbitrary number, but a number somewhere below the stat where all equally good candidates score and GPA wise can be admitted.
Obviously the higher the admit rate, the more predictable it becomes. So at some point the answer is yes to your post - but not at every college.
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At the highest level, no. Everything else, maybe (someone always has to be on the margin). One of the issues is that very few people actually see many full application packages of successful applicants. Most are trying to compare a subset.
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I agree with the two above posts…not predictable for schools that are reaches for most candidates, whether that’s less than 20% acceptance rate or however one cares to define it.
With the highly selective schools, the building and shaping of the classes isn’t even consistent from year to year at a given school, so unless one is privy to that, accurate predictability is not possible for most students.
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I agree with a lot of what you say, but consider that in most other life categories where people are judged - there are people who can tell the difference between the top 1% and the true top.
I believe it is predictable for all schools but harder for the most competitive… like 10 of them. Even for those, it can be done.
true about lack of visibility… also dishonesty from people who share confuses things as well…
I assume you are talking about predictability for unhooked applicants…is that correct?
I do understand your point, but fundamentally there are so few unhooked slots (then divide those by half by gender) at the most selective schools, with zero visibility to the rest of the unhooked applicant pool, that predictability will be difficult. Sure for a US Presidential scholar, Intel winners, or other high level math/science students results might be more easy to predict…but I would consider those students to be hooked.
Certainly no one should be communicating to an unhooked student that they think their chances are much higher than average at reach schools.
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yes, but the hooked are hooked. and the unhooked, need to be honest that they are not and assess what they offer.
True, and what they offer might be highly similar to other applicants in any given year. We just don’t, and can’t, know (in most cases).
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The pointy headed mathemetician in me says: the easiest predictions should be very low or very high acceptance rate schools. If 10% are accepted, then my “prediction” is everyone is rejected and I will be right with 90% accuracy. You’d have to work hard to get that kind of accuracy at a 50% acceptance school.
The parent in me says: I want my kid to get in an elite school and damn the odds!
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Here’s a more practical version of the question. Most people understand their position in admissions well enough that they get into 1+ school they applied to (possibly a “safety” school). How many kids are completely wrong about their self-assessment, and are rejected from every school they apply to?
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less than 1%
Ok, let me give you a concrete example I know about. Two unhooked kids, same year at same high school, applying to same college (selective but outside the T20, much less the T10 you mention). One is 25th percentile ACT, GPA a bit below median for the school, decent but not best rigor, decent but not fabulous ECs. The other has an ACT just under that given as 75th percentile, GPA above the median for the school, even higher weighted GPA because of more AP classes, objectively better ECs. So why did the first get an admit and the second a reject? We have to assume it’s some combination of essays, letters of rec or some other factor that the school was looking at in making up its class, but none of those are going to be obvious in the kind of analysis that a parent or student can do on what they know. (Fun fact 1: the rejected student was admitted to another college that is actually in the T20. Fun fact 2: the admitted student knows a number of people in her year at college with very similar stats to her rejected classmate.) Yes I know anecdote is not data, but this is a clear example of not being able to predict the outcome outside a T10 just by some kind of objective analysis.
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Varies depending on the college.
For the most selective colleges, predictability is lower, although some people have more access to information that allows for more predictability (e.g. dedicated college counseling staff at a prep school with a long history of applications and admissions to the college).
For other colleges, predictability can depend on how much transparency about the admission process they provide publicly. For example, San Jose State University has provided more historical admissions data about frosh admissions than San Diego State University, so admission to San Jose State University is more predictable (although the COVID-19-based policy change to being test-blind makes it more difficult due to the change in the admission formula).
Obviously, for open admission community colleges, admission is predictable.
Some students get a financial shut out in that they did not ensure that their “safeties” were affordable, so they get to April with a bunch of admissions that are all too expensive.
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My S21 and I have taken the time to really do the research and understand his chances. Even before he was a senior I paid attention to what was happening with friends and families who had kids who were older. I saw many seemingly qualified kids get rejected from schools that would have appeared shoo ins. I’ve also seen kids who surprised themselves, getting into schools that seemed a long shot. We are in California and I’m most familiar with UC and CSU, perhaps those are more unpredictable than the average.
Id say most of the time 75% of the decisions go as one could predict. The other 25% are completely unpredictable.
Other things that are often overlooked:
- Different levels of selectivity based on division or major.
- College uses “level of applicant’s interest” to reject or waitlist “overqualified” applicants who are unlikely to matriculate (yield protection).
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In this particular instance:
- both had applied to same school within the college, and admittance is to the school not by major
- the reason i mentioned the number of other students of similar profile to the rejected applicant was to indicate that yield protection was not a factor (this is not a school that is thought to practice yield protection anyway) - the outlier in the school profile was the admitted student, not the rejected one. (Why the rejection then? I’d think, simply because the school has an admit rate in the teens, which makes it unpredictable.)
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Both UCs and CSUs could be more transparent about admission.
CSUs use an admissions point system based on stats (GPA and/or subcomponents; used to be GPA and SAT or ACT) and preference aspects like local area or veteran (CPSLO has additional factors). What they should do is be transparent like SJSU and publish past admission thresholds like this: Freshmen Impaction Results | Admissions . Unfortunately, most CSUs publish much less than that.
UCs publish frosh admit rates by GPA band (3.00-3.39, 3.40-3.79, 3.80-4.19, 4.20+). However, the bands are probably wider than they should be for best information to applicants, and they are not published by major or division, which can have a large effect on admission selectivity.
One probably-common mistake that students and parents make with UCs and CSUs is comparing their high school weighted GPA to the (usually lower) weighted-capped GPA found on most UC web sites. This can make them overconfident in their chances when they think that (for example) their 4.4 weighted GPA is above the 4.1 median GPA for a UC, not realizing that recalculating their GPA by the UC weighted-capped method produces something like 3.7.
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It depends how knowledgeable the parent or student made themselves about the admissions process… some people go pretty far. It also depends on objectivity. To me, it is less about which one got in - which I think would be quite easy if we had the facts and applications side-by-side. I think the question is whether one could have predicted the outcome of each with a completed package in front of them. I say yes.