I do feel schools have been much less transparent recently. But it could be because many schools were trumpeting their statistics as PR and they were no longer getting PR from just reporting the facts. In recent years, nearly all schools were getting ever better statistics (better from their point of view = lower admission rate, higher yields, etc), but the trends have not continued for many.
Admission rate can’t approach zero ever faster while remaining positive mathematically, can it?
@1NJParent – or is it? Bahahaha
I love Frank Bruni and I LOVE this column!
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/opinion/college-admissions-shocker.html
@1NJParent Since applications numbers continue to grow, while the number accepted stays about the same, the change in acceptance rates with application numbers can be described with the function Y = X/A, in which the response variable Y is the acceptance rate, the explanatory variable X is the number of applicants, and the constant A is the number of students who are accepted. Y = 0, i.e., acceptance rate is zero, is the asymptote of this function. Since X is a function of time, meaning that application numbers increase as time goes on, acceptance rates will reach 0 when time = infinity.
However, as the number of applicants increases, the amount of time and money required to review applications also increases. So, by the time the acceptance rates drop to 0.1%, the college will be required to allocate all of the colleges resources to reviewing more than 1,000,000 applications in three months. The entire faculty and student body will be recruited to slog through the terrabytes of data in those applications. Temporary workers will be hired by the hundreds and thousands to read through and figure whether applicant #472,784 is, indeed, “Harvard” (or Yale, or Stanford. etc) material. There will be further temp teams hired to make sure that the reviewers are trustworthy and not agents of other top schools, looking to mess up their rival’s applicant pool and yield. Top colleges will compete with retail giants for temp workers during the holiday season. Unemployment in New England will be nonexistent during college application seasons.
The minimum donation for a kid to be even considered will be $500,000,000. Only kids who are the last known member of their ethnic group in the world, or those who are the only person applying from their country will be considered URMs. Sometimes, the last known native speaker of an almost extinct language will be considered, but not if it is only a dialect. Only unhooked kids who have have only received perfect grades since elementary school will be considered, though there is a myth of a kid who was accepted, despite the fact that they missed a day in third grade because they were suffering from a previously unknown, highly infectious disease, but it has not been confirmed*.
In the weeks before applications deadlines, wireless servers across the Northeast will crash under the pressure of millions of applications being submitted to the Ivies. After acceptances notifications come out, entire wealthy neighborhoods will shut down in respect for the mourning of the candidates who were rejected by all Ivies. Safe houses will be established for high schools GCs to protect their lives from parents, and Ivies will hire armed guards for their admissions offices. The names of kids who are accepted to elite schools will be announced on TV, like they do for winners on big lottery tickets.
Kids who wear sweatshirts of elite colleges will be required to produce proof that they are actually attending that college, otherwise the sweatshirt will be torn off by an angry mob. However, any kid who shows a student ID from one of those colleges will be served free drinks at any bar and coffee shop. People will bring them their kids to bless and ask for autographs. Kids will scoff when their grandparents tell them of times when acceptance rates to HYPSM were 5%, and say sarcastically “next you will tell us that you knew somebody who went to Yale”. Shrines will be built at elite high schools, with the logos and mascots of top colleges, and kids will anonymously leave offerings to the Gods Of College Acceptance.
Then the day will come, when the entire USA realizes that it has been at least two years since anybody can remember seeing a student who was on their way to or from any of the top colleges. A congressional committee will be formed, and they will send a delegation to Princeton, where they will find that the entire campus has been dedicated to reviewing applications between October and March and producing and sending promotional material during the rest of the year. Since they will no longer have the room or resources to actually teach students, they will merely accept students, send out acceptance notices, and publish their acceptance statistics. Further investigations will discover that most of the students who are accepted and make a deposit will spend the next four years walking the country in Princeton sweatshirts, living off of the free food a drinks that people offer them. Other delegations will be sent to other top colleges find similar setups.
*Rumor also has it that the kid recovered fully, and is now attending UCLA, much to the chagrin of their parents, who do not consider public universities to be true universities.
@MWolf ?
I’ve also heard that at some point usnwr will just call it a day and declare a tie for the top 100 and be done with it.
We will then be able to argue on ranking these schools based on strength of their mascots.
The Bisons versus the Wolverines will be an interesting thread.
Admissions will be decided in a “Hunger Games” style competition.
Waitlists will be worse, “The Purge” is a good reference point movie for that process.
Heard that Bates acceptance rate is 12%
UMich freshman student profile has been updated for the Class of 2023.
65,716 applications received
14,949 acceptances
6,995 enrolled
46.79% yield
22.74% acceptance rate
https://admissions.umich.edu/apply/freshmen-applicants/student-profile
Admission numbers for UC System have been released.
https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/ug-admissions/ug-pages/2019-admission.html
Colgate
https://www.colgate.edu/admission-aid/apply/first-year-class-profile
Admit rate dropped to 22.5%. 2244 admits from 9951 applicants with 790 enrolling. Notably 440 out of 790 enrollees are from ED (1 and 2). There were 441 ED admits this year compared to 392 last year.
Tulane - 13.15% admit rate, from 41,253 applicants
https://admission.tulane.edu/apply/getting-into-tulane/new-class-profile
Interestingly despite the difference in admit rate, Colgate and Tulane end up with very similarly qualified students.
The similarity in qualifications between Colgate and Tulane is indicative of what is happening across the entire spectrum of top colleges: namely, there has been a tremendous compression in admission standards so that the spread in standardized test scores, class rank, extracurriculars and other criteria for admission is getting narrower and narrrower between schools ranked in the 20s all the way up beyond 50. There are more applicants chasing the same number of spots, more or less.
Upthread #285-#293 I presented some historical trend data for a group of 65 of the most selective schools.
A lot more applications (and more applicants, although not as many more as the rise in total applications suggests because applicants make a higher number of applications each year)…
a noticeably higher number of spots over time, as a trend, especially from public universities enrollment (small liberal arts colleges may not have the space to grow much, and not easy to get planning permission to build more dorms and facilities)…
but more recently, fewer offers are being made as yields have increased.
@AriBenSion @NJDad68 your point about similarity in qualification has probably led applicants to perceive this large group of schools as homogeneous or substitutable commodities, and caused them to make too many applications to multiple schools in the group. On the other hand, it means no “safety school” is to be found within this group despite its size.
I’m sure a number of students “chance apply” to Tulane because it has no application fee and no compulsory essay. I know my own daughter did this as a “what the heck” after her ED application was done (I only got informed afterwards). So not sure admit stats are directly comparable to a school like Colgate even if final selectivity in terms of scores etc is similar.
Oddly everybody, including the colleges, seem focused on the admit rate. The end result of the quality of the students they net rather than the size of the pool they are selected from is more important.
Regarding Colgate, note that its reported class profile statistics appear to represent admitted rather than enrolling students.
USC is one of the rare colleges that posts average or range stats of all of applicant pool, offers, and enrollment. I posted it before, I think even somewhere in this thread. It would be very interesting if more colleges did that.
That said, a very common theme among colleges is that as their admit rates fall, their classes get increasingly selective, so the bigger pools certainly seem to allow colleges to be more choosy.
^ And getting to be more choosy helps with yield. You can really focus just on those qualified candidates who demonstrate the most enthusiasm and best fit. It’s more than just having a great yield in a given year, however. Colleges very likely know that high yields signal better outcomes down the road - fewer transfers out, higher likelihood to finish on time, better alumnae relations and giving, etc.
There will be a significant difference from the admitted student profiles to the matriculating student profile. Colleges really like to use the admitted student profile in order to achieve higher averages.
Merc81 based on the stats released by Colgate how can you tell the testing info is for all accepted students and not their attending students. Also interestingly about 60% of the class was accepted ED.