Colleges and their Admit Rates.

Applying to College
1

Hello, I am a senior from MN and want to know some things about college admissions. I have seen that some very Good colleges in the US have very high undergrad acceptance rates. Some examples of the schools that I am looking for right now for engineering are

UIUC 67%
Iowa State 81%
UC Boulder 83%
Virginia Tech 74%
Texas A&M 69%
University of Iowa 78%

Now the first 5 schools that I mentioned are routinely mentioned as some of the top science and engineering schools in America. Most websites mention these schools in their top schools for engineering ranking. my high school advisor also told me to apply to all these schools because their programs are respected across the country by employers. (U Iowa Not for engineering). the first five are also mentioned in Business insider and Wall Street Journals Engineering Rankings and are mentioned in the top 25 programs

Now we look at the GRE scores and grad acceptance rates, Incidentally Iowa State has the highest GRE quantitative average of 167 out of 170 and lowest acceptance rate of 17% for engineering and then UIUC followed by Virginia Tech.
( I am looking for dual undergrad/grad program that’s why I mentioned these, The numbers are from 2017 they might be different for 2018)

how can they be such good schools if they have high acceptance rate. Am I missing out on somethings ? are they very hard schools or what ?

My ACT is 34 and GPA is 3.76 from a good high school. ( Can’t Apply to MIT level Schools that’s why applying to these)

2

You have to look to see if the school publishes engineering acceptance rates because those are typically lower than the overall rate. For example, UIUC does not publish an engineering acceptance rate, but they do show the average profile of those admitted to the engineering school— https://admissions.illinois.edu/Apply/Freshman/profile

If the school doesn’t publish the rate, it is a good reason to reach out to your regional admissions rep.

3

@Mwfan1921 I did, most of them have upwards of 50% acceptance rate for their engineering programs. Texas A&M and UC boulder being exceptions that are actually more than their overall acceptance rate

4

All these schools are state funding public universities and by their state law they have to accept every in state students above certain threshold until the capacity is full, so it looks like their acceptance is very high. But for OOS appliancants, that’s another story (but not you since your stats are not bad). They are all good schools.

5

50 percent used to be Penn Georgetown and cal.

The 5 denied out of the 10 who applied don’t think it’s that easy. Just saying…