Does anyone know of a website with the colleges ranked purely by selectivity? Can anyone do this out of personal knowledge? I think this type of ranking using %admitted gives a much better picture of how elite a college is when compared to the US News & World Report ranking.
<p><a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankingDetails.asp?requireReg=1&CategoryID=1&TopicID=10%5B/url%5D">http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankingDetails.asp?requireReg=1&CategoryID=1&TopicID=10</a> lists the top 20 "hardest" schools to get in to based on average stats, including LACs (you have to be logged in to see past the top 5). It doesn't factor in pure admit % as much, though. Doing this would screw over schools like UChicago and Harvey Mudd (the later of which is actually on the list), which statistically are very strong but have a rather self-selecting applicant pool, so the admit % is higher.</p>
<p>Admit rate isn't a very good indicator. Most any school can increase its application pool easily by making it relatively easy to apply, major marketing campaign, or even free to apply. Additionally the ED or EA admit rates might be many times higher than the RD admit rate. Also you don't know what the financial incentives are at different schools. offer generous merit aid and you will up your application pool, or offer "need based" aid but interpret need somewhat generously.</p>
<p>Yield might be a better indicator - number of admited who enroll. But again this is subject to manipulation too and affected by aid offers.</p>
<p>No probably the best indicator of selectivity is the overall quality of the entering class - standardized test scores, class rank, gpa, national merit Scholars, ratio of private to public school admits.</p>
<p>So no one has ever ranked based purely on admit rate. I would like to see that list, seems to be the most objective.</p>
<p>Go to collegeboard.com, and in the "Matchmaker" go to the admissions page and select "below 50% acceptence rate". Then click "Alphabetical" once the results come up and change it to % Admitted, Ascending. </p>
<p>Needless to say, it isn't exactly a great measure of the "best" schools.</p>
<p>Again which admit rate brennen. Columbia admits 11% overall but 24% ED. Additionally all selective schools whether the publicly admit it or not admit based on categories. The acceptance rate depends which category you are being considered under. The categories could be schools, departments, legacy, URM, athelete, politicians offspring, etc. The fact is nobody competes against the entire pool of applicants. That is why you have to have a handle.</p>
<p>There is also the issue of the wait list. Some schools round out their class and fill up their freshmen dorms with kids off of the wait list. Georgetown is one school that does this routinely - i.e. they purposely underadmit during RD to see what the yield will be. They have a legit problem with dorm space and the DC government and they cannot afford to wind up with more freshmen than dorm rooms. Once they know who they have they fill up the rest of the dorm space off of the waitlist. This has the added benefit of making them look more selective since these summer admits don't make the statistics. </p>
<p>Anyway if pure selectivity is your criteria then it is probably the military academies.</p>
<p>This is a few years old. My guess is you never heard of the Curtis Institute of Music or College of the Ozarks and you won't buy that the Coast Guard Academy is more selective than Harvard but if that is your criteria for the best have fun with it.:</p>
<p>A NEW RANKING OF AMERICAN COLLEGES
ON LAISSEZ-FAIRE PRINCIPLES, 1999-2000
Third Annual Edition, Revised</p>
<p>The 55 colleges with toughest acceptance rates</p>
<p>6% Curtis Inst. of Music
7% U.S. Coast Guard Academy
8% Juilliard
12% Harvard
13% Cooper Union, Princeton, Stanford, U.S. Military Academy
14% College of the Ozarks, Columbia Univ.
16% U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Naval Academy
17% Brown
18% Caltech, Yale
19% Swarthmore
21% Dartmouth
22% MIT
23% Amherst
24% Georgetown, Rice
25% Mason Gross School of the Arts
26% Williams
27% Eastman School of Music (previous year)
28% Claremont McKenna, Duke, California--Berkeley
29% Univ. of Pennsylvania
30% Columbia--Fu Foundation School of Engineering
31% Bowdoin
32% Middlebury, Pomona, Wesleyan Univ.
33% Northwestern, Tufts, UCLA, Washington and Lee
34% Colby, Cornell Univ., Univ. of Virginia
35% Berea, NYU, North Carolina--Chapel Hill
36% Barnard, Haverford
37% Cleveland Inst. of Music, Davidson, Washington Univ.
38% Bates, Cal Poly--San Luis Obispo,
New England Conservatory, Rhode Island School of Design
40% Boston College, Hamilton, Manhattan School of Music</p>
<p>I'd suggest this might be a better list. It is from the same source as the above.</p>
<p>The 54 colleges with highest sum of
25th and 75th percentile SAT scores
(*Test scores not required)</p>
<p>2990 Caltech
2980 Harvard
2960 MIT
2920 Harvey Mudd
2900 Princeton, Stanford, Yale
2870 Dartmouth
2850 Swarthmore
2840 Pomona, Rice
2800 Amherst, Williams
2790 Brown, Duke
2780 Columbia Univ., Univ. of Pennsylvania
2770 Johns Hopkins, *Middlebury (53% submitted scores)
2750 Cooper Union, Haverford
2740 Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern
2730 Emory
2720 Carleton
2710 Cornell Univ., Georgetown, Univ. of Chicago,
Columbia Univ.--Fu Foundation School of Engineering
2700 Grinnell
2690 Claremont McKenna
2680 California--Berkeley, Reed, Washington and Lee
2670 Macalester, New College (Fla.), Tufts, Washington Univ.
2660 *Bowdoin (82% submitted scores), Davidson,
Wellesley, Wesleyan Univ.
2650 Vanderbilt, Vassar
2640 Barnard, Notre Dame
2630 *Bates (62% submitted scores), Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, NYU
2620 Colby, Georgia Tech, U.S. Naval Academy, Univ. of Virginia</p>
<p>Here's a recent ranking based on selectivity alone:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thickenvelope.com/top50.aspx%5B/url%5D">http://www.thickenvelope.com/top50.aspx</a></p>
<p>That list seems a little off. Carnegie Mellon, Vassar, W&M and others should be higher. Others like NYU and USC should be lower I think. Also some are missing, i.e. Occidental College, U. of Chicago.</p>
<p>(the list that arcadia posted)</p>
<p>Since this post started by stating that the US News "rankings" are not suitable for their purposes, I hope they realize that the US News results can be re-sorted by any listed parameter....and selectivity and % admit happen to be among them.</p>