Here are some colleges sorted by selectivity as measured by SAT midpoint (Math plus Critical Reading). This could help identify reaches, matches, and safeties. Schools were also sorted by grad rate within SAT levels. I also included the graduation rate which is highly correlated with SATs and is a good indication of college quality. The SATs are from 2014 unless the school is SAT optional in which case the SATs are from a prior year.
1550 92 California Institute of Technology
1518 93 University of Chicago
1505 98 Harvard University
1505 96 Yale University
1505 93 Vanderbilt University
1500 97 Princeton University
1495 95 Washington University in St Louis
1495 91 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1494 90 Harvey Mudd College
1475 95 Stanford University
1475 93 Northwestern University
1470 91 Rice University
1460 93 Pomona College
1455 96 University of Pennsylvania
1455 95 Dartmouth College
1455 95 Williams College
1450 94 Swarthmore College
1449 94 Amherst College
1440 96 Brown University
1440 92 Tufts University
1440 88 Carnegie Mellon University
1435 93 Johns Hopkins University
1435 90 Claremont McKenna College
1430 96 University of Notre Dame
1420 95 Georgetown University
1420 93 Cornell University
1420 82 Northeastern University
1415 93 Carleton College
1410 94 Haverford College
1405 92 Vassar College
1400 82 Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
1395 89 Grinnell College
1395 82 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
1390 91 Hamilton College
1390 88 Washington and Lee University
1385 91 Wellesley College
1385 79 Reed College
1380 91 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
1380 91 University of Southern California
1375 92 Colgate University
1370 91 Emory University
1370 91 University of California-Berkeley
1370 90 College of William and Mary
1370 81 Case Western Reserve University
1368 90 Macalester College
1365 93 Wesleyan University
1365 91 Boston College
1365 91 Brandeis University
1360 93 Bowdoin College
1360 87 Scripps College
1355 94 University of Virginia-Main Campus
1355 88 Oberlin College
1345 89 Barnard College
1345 82 New York University
1335 93 Davidson College
1335 88 Bates College
1330 90 Colby College
1325 91 University of California-Los Angeles
1325 89 Kenyon College
1325 84 University of Richmond
1325 72 St John’s College
1320 90 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1320 87 Lehigh University
1320 83 Tulane University of Louisiana
1320 82 Bryn Mawr College
1320 81 University of Miami
1315 87 Whitman College
1315 85 University of Maryland-College Park
1315 84 University of Rochester
1315 76 Colorado School of Mines
1310 89 Villanova University
1310 86 University of California-San Diego
1310 77 Southern Methodist University
1308 83 Connecticut College
1305 89 Bucknell University
1305 88 Wake Forest University
1300 90 Lafayette College
1300 89 Wheaton College
1300 85 Occidental College
1300 85 Santa Clara University
1300 85 Boston University
1300 84 United States Air Force Academy
Here is the next set of colleges.
1295 79 George Washington University
1290 81 SUNY at Binghamton
1290 81 The University of Texas at Austin
1290 80 Rhodes College
1285 89 United States Naval Academy
1280 69 New College of Florida
1280 61 Manhattanville College
1275 84 Trinity College
1275 83 Ohio State University-Main Campus
1270 87 Franklin and Marshall College
1270 86 Colorado College
1270 82 University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus
1270 70 University of Tulsa
1270 65 Illinois Institute of Technology
1265 88 University of Florida
1265 87 Smith College
1265 85 Worcester Polytechnic Institute
1265 84 Furman University
1265 81 Trinity University
1265 81 Illinois Wesleyan University
1265 72 Thomas Aquinas College
1264 79 Lewis & Clark College
1260 89 St Olaf College
1255 86 United States Coast Guard Academy
1255 80 Lawrence University
1255 71 The University of Texas at Dallas
1255 63 Missouri University of Science and Technology
1250 80 Fordham University
1250 77 Sarah Lawrence College
1250 69 Stony Brook University
1245 82 American University
1245 82 Clemson University
1245 76 North Carolina State University at Raleigh
1240 88 Bentley University
1240 87 Skidmore College
1240 85 Yeshiva University
1240 81 University of Connecticut
1239 71 Truman State University
1235 84 University of Georgia
1235 84 Dickinson College
1235 81 University of California-Santa Barbara
1235 80 Emerson College
1235 66 CUNY Bernard M Baruch College
1230 92 College of the Holy Cross
1230 84 University of Washington-Seattle Campus
1230 80 Beloit College
1230 72 Baylor University
1229 41 University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez
1225 86 Union College
1225 84 Pepperdine University
1225 82 Centre College
1225 81 Elon University
1225 79 Miami University-Oxford
1225 77 University of San Diego
1225 75 California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
1224 82 Kalamazoo College
1223 73 Saint Joseph’s University
1220 82 Loyola University Maryland
1220 80 Knox College
1220 79 Sewanee-The University of the South
1220 78 SUNY College at Geneseo
1220 76 University of Puget Sound
1215 87 The College of New Jersey
1215 83 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
1215 80 Rutgers University-New Brunswick
1215 76 University of Massachusetts-Amherst
1215 65 Rochester Institute of Technology
1210 82 Denison University
1210 76 The College of Wooster
1210 73 University of South Carolina-Columbia
1210 66 Ohio Wesleyan University
1210 61 University of Maryland-Baltimore County
1210 57 Kettering University
1208 0 Bard College at Simon’s Rock
1205 84 Pitzer College
1205 83 University of California-Davis
1205 80 Ursinus College
1205 79 Florida State University
1205 76 University of Denver
1205 73 Purdue University-Main Campus
1205 72 Earlham College
1205 59 Marlboro College
1202 83 Grove City College
1200 84 Gettysburg College
1200 78 Loyola Marymount University
1200 77 Willamette University
1200 74 Chapman University
1200 73 Hendrix College
1200 70 University of Dallas
1200 67 Drexel University
1195 83 Gonzaga University
1195 80 University of Portland
1195 79 Marquette University
1195 79 Texas A & M University-College Station
1195 76 Austin College
1195 67 Bennington College
1195 66 Union University
1195 64 University of North Carolina at Asheville
1195 64 Goucher College
1195 56 Milwaukee School of Engineering
1194 81 St Mary’s College of Maryland
This is a gross oversimplification. SAT midpoint alone is not a reliable indicator for selectivity. Many schools have a self-selecting applicant pool that pushes their SAT median higher or lower than other schools with comparable admission acceptance rates.
Nor can graduation rates be considered in isolation, as they do not account for outbound transfers who finish a degree within the timeframe at another school. You also don’t state which timeframe you’re using - 4yr, 5yr, or 6yr graduation rate?
To sum up, this data and more can be found in a more nuanced, interactive, multi-variable way on http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/
Gross oversimplification, indeed. And the whole first post will evaluate holistically.
I don’t understand why bright kids can’t eval themselves holistically, as well, why the primary advice is so often to look for a stats comparison and then, it seems, leap to Submit. For another perspective, look at how Princeton, Brown, and a few others show the number of kids admitted by stats category. Painful.
Gross oversimplification indeed. Middlebury and Wesleyan are test optional, and two top schools. Other great schools are holistic and/or value other aspects of an application over standardized test scores.
Even before one gets to the subjectively graded criteria, the relative importance of SAT or ACT scores versus high school academic record (including GPA and/or rank) varies across different schools.
Colleges Sorted by Selectivity
Or not at all
LOL. Take all the DI recruited athletes out of Stanford’s admissions class and see what the midpoint is for the “normal” applicants!
I can’t explain why Duke was excluded from the list. Wesleyan and Middlebury were excluded because I made a mistake in my selection criteria. The data is from the US Department of Education IPEDS website and is the official data that universities and college report. I used the 6-year grad rate. Acceptance rate is a very poor measure of selectivity. Together, SAT and grad rate comprise the most important 2 criteria for measuring the quality of the student body and the quality of the college. Almost everything else that is good about a college academically is correlated with these two factors including the nebulous “holistic” factors. I did the first 100 on the list over again to correct my mistake. Duke, Middlebury, and Wesleyan should be in this list.
1550 92 California Institute of Technology
1518 93 University of Chicago
1505 98 Harvard University
1505 96 Yale University
1505 93 Vanderbilt University
1500 97 Princeton University
1495 95 Washington University in St Louis
1495 91 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1494 90 Harvey Mudd College
1480 95 Columbia University in the City of New York
1475 95 Stanford University
1475 93 Northwestern University
1470 91 Rice University
1460 95 Duke University
1460 93 Pomona College
1455 96 University of Pennsylvania
1455 95 Dartmouth College
1455 95 Williams College
1450 94 Swarthmore College
1449 94 Amherst College
1440 96 Brown University
1440 92 Tufts University
1440 88 Carnegie Mellon University
1435 93 Johns Hopkins University
1435 90 Claremont McKenna College
1430 96 University of Notre Dame
1420 95 Georgetown University
1420 93 Cornell University
1420 82 Northeastern University
1415 93 Carleton College
1410 94 Haverford College
1405 92 Vassar College
1400 82 Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus
1395 89 Grinnell College
1395 82 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
1390 91 Hamilton College
1390 88 Washington and Lee University
1385 91 Wellesley College
1385 84 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1385 79 Reed College
1380 91 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
1380 91 University of Southern California
1375 92 Colgate University
1375 83 Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
1370 91 Emory University
1370 91 University of California-Berkeley
1370 90 College of William and Mary
1370 81 Case Western Reserve University
1368 90 Macalester College
1365 94 Middlebury College
1365 93 Wesleyan University
1365 91 Boston College
1365 91 Brandeis University
1360 93 Bowdoin College
1360 87 Scripps College
1355 94 University of Virginia-Main Campus
1355 88 Oberlin College
1345 89 Barnard College
1345 82 New York University
1340 82 Stevens Institute of Technology
1335 93 Davidson College
1335 88 Bates College
1330 90 Colby College
1325 91 University of California-Los Angeles
1325 89 Kenyon College
1325 84 University of Richmond
1325 72 St John’s College
1320 90 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1320 87 Lehigh University
1320 83 Tulane University of Louisiana
1320 82 Bryn Mawr College
1320 81 University of Miami
1315 87 Whitman College
1315 85 University of Maryland-College Park
1315 84 University of Rochester
1315 76 Colorado School of Mines
1310 89 Villanova University
1310 86 University of California-San Diego
1310 78 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
1310 77 Southern Methodist University
1308 83 Connecticut College
1305 89 Bucknell University
1305 88 Wake Forest University
1300 90 Lafayette College
1300 89 Wheaton College
1300 85 Boston University
1300 85 Occidental College
1300 85 Santa Clara University
1300 84 United States Air Force Academy
1295 79 George Washington University
1290 84 University of Wisconsin-Madison
1290 81 SUNY at Binghamton
1290 81 The University of Texas at Austin
1290 80 Rhodes College
1285 89 United States Naval Academy
1280 69 New College of Florida
1280 61 Manhattanville College
1275 84 Trinity College
1275 83 Ohio State University-Main Campus
1275 80 United States Military Academy
How old are the SAT scores for test optional schools?
Olin? Webb Institute? Jewish Theological Seminary? Rose-Hulman? Brigham Young?
Your methodology seems very error-prone, even if we were to stipulate that it’s an accurate representation of selectivity.
I will stipulate “Acceptance rate is a poor measure of selectivity”, adding “when considered in isolation”. That does not diminish my prior assertion that the median SAT is also a poor measure of selectivity in isolation. Which you seem to have realized, because now you’re pivoting to “quality”, which is a completely different concept.
Take Reed for example. For many years it had a high median SAT despite a very high acceptance rate, because it was a self-selecting pool of applicants. To use your terms without conflating them, it had quality (if we take median SAT as an acceptable indicator of that quality) despite its low selectivity. That has changed in recent years as applications have increased - the quality remains, but they can be more selective from their pool of applicants than the 93% they were accepting in 1983.
I continue to see no compelling need for this thread when the site I mentioned earlier enables interactive slicing and dicing of the IPEDS data by many more variables. This list doesn’t even serve your stated purpose - “help identify reaches, matches, and safeties” if it only includes the top 200. Few are the students for whom a safety exists in the top 200.
OP what’s your interest in this? How do you account for kids who slip in with lower scores, based on other remarkable qualities and the immense competition, at some of these schools, among high edge STEM kids? And what about the effect of institutional criteria on selections? This feels like another attempt to justify a lean on stats. Saying, “Almost everything else that is good about a college academically is correlated with these two factors” leaves many issues/factors unrecognized.
And not even the stats that typically matter most in both admission to college and predicting how successful one will be in college.
I agree that a prospective student should take many factors into account such as “Does this school offer my major?”. I simply listed two of the most important pieces of data for identifying reaches, matches, safeties. I agree that SATs and grad rates should not be considered in isolation.
All the talk about self-selection is just a distraction. Acceptance rates and yield rates are very idiosyncratic. What matters is the bottom line: the students who make up the freshman class.
SATs and grad rates ARE correlated with just about everything that is academically good about a school. This is a generally true statement.
Selectivity and quality ARE closely related because better students help create higher quality and, conversely, better students are attracted to higher quality.
SATs are an excellent predictor of success in college. If the admissions office does not consider SATs, then so much the worse for the college. High school gpa is a good predictor, too, but not as good as SATs because standards vary from high school to high school whereas SATs are standardized and provide a “level playing field” for comparing applicants.
The SATs for the test optional schools are from 2001-2002. Median SATs don’t change much. I wanted to capture SATs for schools who went test optional in the last 15 years.
I agree that the top 100 schools would not provide reaches, matches, safeties for all students. My spreadsheet has over 1600 schools in it. I can’t post all of them. But, here is the next 100.
1270 87 Franklin and Marshall College
1270 86 Colorado College
1270 82 University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus
1270 70 University of Tulsa
1270 65 Illinois Institute of Technology
1265 88 University of Florida
1265 87 Smith College
1265 85 Worcester Polytechnic Institute
1265 84 Furman University
1265 81 Illinois Wesleyan University
1265 81 Trinity University
1265 72 Thomas Aquinas College
1264 79 Lewis & Clark College
1260 89 St Olaf College
1260 79 Brigham Young University-Provo
1257 72 Concordia College at Moorhead
1255 86 United States Coast Guard Academy
1255 80 Lawrence University
1255 71 The University of Texas at Dallas
1255 63 Missouri University of Science and Technology
1250 80 Fordham University
1250 77 Sarah Lawrence College
1250 69 Stony Brook University
1245 82 American University
1245 82 Clemson University
1245 76 North Carolina State University at Raleigh
1240 88 Bentley University
1240 87 Skidmore College
1240 85 Yeshiva University
1240 81 University of Connecticut
1239 71 Truman State University
1235 84 University of Georgia
1235 84 Dickinson College
1235 81 University of California-Santa Barbara
1235 80 Emerson College
1235 66 CUNY Bernard M Baruch College
1230 92 College of the Holy Cross
1230 84 University of Washington-Seattle Campus
1230 80 Beloit College
1230 79 Soka University of America
1230 72 Baylor University
1229 41 University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez
1227 64 Michigan Technological University
1225 86 Union College
1225 84 Pepperdine University
1225 82 Centre College
1225 81 Elon University
1225 79 Miami University-Oxford
1225 77 University of San Diego
1225 75 California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
1224 82 Kalamazoo College
1223 73 Saint Joseph’s University
1220 82 Loyola University Maryland
1220 80 Knox College
1220 79 Sewanee-The University of the South
1220 78 SUNY College at Geneseo
1220 76 University of Puget Sound
1215 87 The College of New Jersey
1215 83 Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
1215 80 Rutgers University-New Brunswick
1215 76 University of Massachusetts-Amherst
1215 65 Rochester Institute of Technology
1215 45 New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
1210 82 Denison University
1210 76 The College of Wooster
1210 73 University of South Carolina-Columbia
1210 66 Ohio Wesleyan University
1210 61 University of Maryland-Baltimore County
1210 57 Kettering University
1208 0 Bard College at Simon’s Rock
1205 84 Pitzer College
1205 83 University of California-Davis
1205 80 Ursinus College
1205 79 Florida State University
1205 76 University of Denver
1205 73 Purdue University-Main Campus
1205 72 Saint Louis University
1205 72 Earlham College
1205 59 Marlboro College
1202 83 Grove City College
1200 84 Gettysburg College
1200 78 Loyola Marymount University
1200 77 Willamette University
1200 74 Chapman University
1200 73 Hendrix College
1200 70 University of Dallas
1200 67 Drexel University
1200 67 University of Oklahoma-Norman Campus
1195 83 Gonzaga University
1195 80 DePauw University
1195 80 University of Portland
1195 79 Marquette University
1195 79 Texas A & M University-College Station
1195 76 Austin College
1195 67 Bennington College
1195 66 Union University
1195 64 University of North Carolina at Asheville
1195 64 Goucher College
1195 56 Milwaukee School of Engineering
1194 81 St Mary’s College of Maryland
1190 86 Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
1190 81 University of Delaware
1190 71 Clarkson University
1190 71 University of North Carolina Wilmington
1190 70 Cedarville University
1190 63 Mercer University
Are you looking at SAT scores for accepted students or enrolled students?
These SATs and grad rates are for first-time, full-time, enrolled freshmen.
Do they exclude first time freshman who did not enroll in the fall?
Every college has a “census date” about 3 weeks into the semester. If a student dropped out before the census date, they are excluded even though they may have paid a deposit. Yes, the data excludes students who didn’t enroll in the fall.
It’s still far from a whole picture of what makes a college strong. It’s much more than them having your major. Just relying on stats and assumptions about quality, can mislead students who need guidance.
Eg, if “SATs and grad rates ARE correlated with just about everything that is academically good about a school,” there wouldn’t be a surging test optional movement.
The general consensus, among what we traditionally see as top or elite schools, is rigor and grades in rigorous classes is what shows student potential- not a standardized test.
I get the impression you missed the whole point of holistic. Where this list might help some kids is to take a look at colleges that do select based on stats and admit top-down or all comers based on minimums. Might start conversation on one state school vs another. Even so, grad rates depend on more, for state U’s, serving many purposes.