College Admissions Statistics Class of 2023

@privatebanker Understood, and the effort is appreciated. Hoping someone might catch something I miss, that is all.

@JanieWalker Ok. Just making it clear the thread wasn’t ignoring those great schools at all! LOL!

Lehigh - 3716 admits from 15647 (24%). Note that Lehigh has admitted about 300 more applicants because the class size is planned to increase from 1275 to 1425.

https://thebrownandwhite.com/2019/03/31/admissions-class-of-2023-decrease-in-selectivity/

“Lehigh - 3716 admits from 15647 (24%).”

So Lehigh’s acceptance rate actually went up (it was 22% last year). That seems like a rarity this admission cycle.

UChicago 5.9% https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/4/1/uchicago-acceptance-rate-drops-record-low/

@bronze2: I used these announcements for Grinnell and Colgate for total class of 2023 applications, then cross-referenced with either IPEDS or CDS data, whichever appeared more recent, for an estimation of acceptances:

http://magazine.grinnell.edu/news/best-qualified-pool-applicants

http://news.colgate.edu/2019/01/colgate-receives-record-number-of-applications.html/

Here’s why Chicago’s lack of transparency on admissions figures and non-publication of a common data set leave doubts and questions. The 5.9% of 35,000 (or just under 35000) means 2065 or so admits.

Last year, Chicago enrolled 1806, and the year before it enrolled 1736.

Assuming enrollment is about these levels, it is hard to believe that Chicago gets a yield of 85-90%. Harvard and Stanford are at 80-82% as REA/SCEA schools. If Chicago draws 1000 admits from ED, that still leaves about 750-800 spots to be filled from 1065 EA/RD admits for a non-ED yield of 75-80%. No school gets near that.

It’s possible that Chicago draws more heavily on ED admits to fill its class (which is a coercive strategy), or else it draws on the waiting list heavily (which means the admit rate is actually higher than the March/April announcement). Both these alternatives lead to a yield of close to 100%. But none of these numbers is disclosed.

Chicago is a great school and can follow whatever admission strategy it needs to, but transparency would help applicants enormously.

Agree 100% that UChicago among others should either be more transparent with their numbers or go Stanford’s route and not release any numbers.

However, I don’t doubt these numbers. They were over enrolled last year w/yield in high 70s. Chicago was aiming for a class size closer to 1700 this year so the numbers work espe if they include a couple dozen enforced gap year kids from last year’s waitlist joining this year’s class. Other schools that over enrolled last year are planning on relying more on their waitlist this year (for example, Amherst which admitted 100 fewer this cycle). Likely Chicago will do the same rather than risk over enrolling again. It will be interesting to see if more colleges in the top tier rely more on their waitlist than in previous years.

@TheBigChef
Lehigh’s increase in application acceptance percentage was planned and is acknowledged by the office of admissions in the article. If you look further into the numbers, you will see that number of total applications increased over the previous then-record year:

15,623 for class of ‘22
15,647 for class of ‘23

@bronze2 presumably with both and ED1 and ED2, chicago is drawing more of their class ED than harvard/stanford with REA. So the number they need to yield a high amount on is not as high as stanford or harvard. Of course I fully expect Chicago to not be transparent if they aren’t really giving a boost to ED applicants. Chicago is likely getting a 98% yield on their ED classes, but then only needs like a 45% yield on the rest to look just like Harvard/Stanford to USNWR, which is Chicago’s top goal - to keep top10USNWR ranking.

The last thing Chicago wants is to look like they yield less than HYPS since ranking is key to them, and we can argue about what is in USNWR but “perception” is! If Chicago takes 60% of their class ED they can try to get above Harvard’s yield with a 65% yield on non-ED kids.

Does anyone know the admit rate for UCLA and UC Berkeley this year?

@anon145 USNews no longer factors in yield or acceptance rates into its college rankings.

“U.S. News dropped acceptance rate – which previously had a weight of 1.25 percent – from the Best Colleges methodology altogether to give more weight to outcome measures. This follows the earlier change of dropping yield rate in the 2004 edition.”

@lloyddobler85 they haven’t dropped reputation and perception, which are impacted by acceptance/rejection/yield rates.

“Expert Opinion (20 percent, down from 22.5 percent in 2018)”“Academic reputation” " The high school counselor assessment survey" and other perceptions are effected by rejecting a lot, accepting few, and yielding many - especially for high school counselors at public schools who aren’t following the latest innovations in undergraduate teaching methods. (snark)

Social Mobility - is ~5% of the ranking of USNWR and as someone else previously linked, students just under the pell grant amount are relatively over-represented, but families making 1$ more than pell grant eligible are one of the most under-represented groups at elite colleges since they don’t help with usNWR rankings and can’t pay tuition either. The chart here is amazing; student enrollment/student pool for incomes goes up and up until you hit the magic UNSWR pell grant level and then 1$ above pell grants the students at elite colleges plummets to the same level as destitute students. It’s one of the few graphs that doesn’t linearly track income and elite admissions/test scores so what could possibly be causing student enrollment for folks 1$ over pell grant to crash. Anything touted in a press release from elite colleges is more often than not done to help with reputation/perception.

https://robertkelchen.com/2019/01/28/some-thoughts-on-using-pell-enrollment-for-accountability/

^ You can’t sustain reputation and prestige by tweaking your ED pool LOL. Otherwise, every school would have tried that already. Anyway, UChicago has admitted about 60% of its class ED for the past three application cycles now, so nothing really has changed there. This is hardly the first year of ED at UChicago. You will need to find another reason why their yield this year might be north of 80%.

Curious, when did UChicago start the ED1, ED 2 and EA combo?

^ 2016-17 application cycle.

@JBStillFlying chicago added test optional this year too. So if they have strong URMs that apply that route who happen to have bad test scores it’s likely none-of the test required (HYPMS/top LAC schools would offer. So yield from that pool would be very high. (I’m sort of assuming Chicago is not truly test optional for white/asian kids from well off families/schools - but who knows it’s not transparent)

However, I have no idea of knowing how exactly chicago will implement test optional. I do know test optional and ED2 help selectivity - see Bowdoin and Colby and single digit acceptances compared to Amherst/Williams. So excuse me if I think Chicago is yet again gaming the selectivity/rankings game.

@JBStillFlying Colby has about twice the selectivity of Williams; I’d argue that’s purely ED2 and test optional jacking up applications and increasing rejects/improving yield

There is no selectivity game to be gamed. Neither yield nor selectivity are a factor in rankings and it’s laughable to think an admissions counselor - even one from the backwater public schools you’re so dismissive of - would be notably more “impressed” with a 5.9 vs a 7.1 or any similar admissions score. Below a certain %, they’re all just “highly selective”.

The people wearing the tinfoil hats are out in droves again… it’s all a plot. Stand still and they’ll tell you how and why even though it makes no logical sense.

To the rankings-obsessed every admissions policy looks like it’s driven by that obsession. ED has been debated many times on the Chicago board. Many believe the policy is designed to pierce through the numbers to find the true Chicago-specific student. Its implementation certainly hasn’t come at the expense of recruiting the very best: average test score levels and every other measure of excellence have risen during this period and are among the highest at the elite schools. The raison d’etre of the policy is that it assists the University to identify those applicants who have demonstrably understood and embraced the special brand of education the University of Chicago offers.