I’m talking about stats like test scores, GPA, class rank, and other “quantifiable” metrics.
The first school that jumps to mind is Georgia Tech. The stats to get into GT in recent years have shot way up in the last few years. Vanderbilt University also appears to be very stats-conscious about standardized test scores.
What other schools appear to be emphasizing stats to a huge degree in selecting their class?
Texas public universities appear to admit most of their students under automatic admission criteria based on class rank only or class rank and test scores.
CSUs in California calculate an eligibility index from GPA and test scores to rank order applicants to each campus and major.
Many publics in the US, UK, and Canada.
Among elite privates, maybe only Vandy and WashU.
Caltech is infamous for focusing on stats. Factors like legacy status, affirmative action, recruited athlete status, etc. play a very limited role. There was an outcry when I was in high school because Caltech did not have a single black student in its freshman class, and Caltech currently has only 14 black students out of 979 undergraduates.
Test scores seem to track very closely with admissions results at Chicago. It’s one factor that has helped it climb in the rankings (test scores are ~8% of the ranking).
Just because they list higher stats doesn’t mean that is what they are basing admissions on. If you review the GT thread this year, many perfect “stats” kids got rejected.
I think what you are seeing is that top schools attract top students. When stats rise, rank rises, so more higher stats kids apply, which raises the stats, and on and on, like a vicious cycle. What I see is that schools who are now attracting better and better students are turning to a more holistic review of applications.
There are those that like to give their scholarships to those top stats students, but I’m not sure if that’s just because they happen to be the top students - who get top scores. Vandy comes to mind for this, and WashU as stated above.
Vanderbilt, yes. But I would sort of disagree on Ga Tech…there were lots of kids in the accepted threads this year with SATs in the high 1300s, low 1400s and many outright denied with mid-to-high 1500s. They have an extraordinary group of candidates to choose from and they’re becoming even more holistic than they used to be (my opinion).
Colleges that want to game the USNWR rankings are likely to overemphasize test scores over other academic criteria, due to the importance of test scores in the selectivity measures of the USNWR rankings:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
08.125% SAT/ACT scores
03.125% percentage in top 10% of HS class
01.250% admission rate
Other factors correlated to general admission selectivity:
18.000% graduation rate
04.500% frosh retention rate
Note that raw graduation rate at 18% is more important than graduation rate performance (relative to predicted graduation rate based on entering class characteristics) at 7.5%, even though graduation rate performance may be more reflective of the quality of the college, rather than the quality of its students.
This may not be relevant to OP, but BYU is a mid-ranked private that admits students very objectively and really values high stats.
@GeronimoAlpaca
It’s not perfectly clear (to me anyway) what it means to “overemphasize” stats.
You might be able to answer your own question, in your own way, if you express the problem in terms of specific data and procedures for measuring the apparent overemphasis.
For example, using CDS data you could rank colleges (1) by admission rates, then (2) by average test scores, then (3) by the percentage of entering students who ranked in their HS top 10%; then measure the ranking boost a college would get from a ranking based only on the average of ranks 2 and 3 (“stats”) vs. admission rates alone. I did this based on some numbers I had on hand in a spreadsheet for the USNWR ~T75 colleges. For example, the “47” in column 1 for GA Tech, below, means its rank would be 47 positions higher (39th vs. 86th) if we ranked based only on those 2 stats instead of only on admission rates.
BOOST … COLLEGE
47 … GA Tech
40 … Rensselaer
38 … Case Western
37 … UC Davis
34 … UCSB
34 … UCSD
32 … UIUC
27 … Harvey Mudd
25 … Whitman
23 … UMiami
23 … Scripps
23 … Smith
22 … Haverford
22 … Mt Holyoke
20 … W&M
20 … Rochester
20 … Bryn Mawr
20 … Wellesley
19 … UVA
19 … Brandeis
16 … Boston C
16 … Gettysburg
15 … Notre Dame
15 … Washington U
15 … Carnegie Mellon
15 … Wake Forest
13 … Kenyon
13 … Tufts
13 … Michigan
11 … Cal Tech
8 … Wisconsin
6 … Union
5 … Chicago
3 … MIT
-57 … US Air Force Academy
-83 … US Military Academy
-85 … US Naval Academy
Vanderbilt would be listed if test scores were the only “stat” we considered. Its test score rank is high relative to its admit rate rank; however, its rank by class standing (students in T10%) is lower than its test score or admission rate ranks. On the other hand, some of the UCs would not be on this list if we considered only test scores vs. admit rates (and ignored reported class rank). So your “boost” numbers might be very different from mine if you use different data or procedures. My data is from CDS files that are several years old, too.
A high “boost” doesn’t necessarily mean a college cares more about stats than ECs and other “holistic” factors. It may mean it is a “self selecting” school to which relatively few low-stats students even apply. The service academies have low admission rates, but wouldn’t rank quite so highly by average test scores or class rank alone (due to some combination of their applicant pool characteristics and the admission criteria they most value.)
@tk21769 I like the way you’ve tried to put something of a quantitative methodology around the issue. I don’t think my question was rooted in anything specific, just more of a gut feeling that certain schools are emphasizing certain “selectivity metrics” more than others, most likely in an attempt to check the boxes that US News weights most heavily.
For example, another poster noted the weights that US News puts on standardized test scores and admissions selectivity, and Vanderbilt immediately jumped to mind given its high mid-50% test scores and the lowish 11-12% admit rate in recent years. Georgia Tech just announced that it accepted only 26% of its early action applicants, with a mid-50% ACT of 32-35. That mid-50% range is right up there with Vandy and some of the Ivies, and Georgia Tech was a school that up until recent years probably accepted close to 50% of its applicants.
UC’s look ridiculously competitive on admissions rate, and % of students in top-10% of their HS class, but then the UC average mid-50% scores are not so high, perhaps reflecting the diversity of the applicant pool that these large public California universities attract.
I was just trying to get a sense for general consensus about which schools value the quantifiable admissions metrics most, but again, nothing hard and fast in the way I’ve approached the question.
The reason GT’s numbers admit rates have plummeted are due to the explosion in applicants since 2012 or so but with no real increase in class size. GT had 14,124 applicants in 2011 and 35,600 this year. Class size is the same so naturally admit rates are plummeting. The causes for this invite argument, but I think the relative value of GT vs other OOS engineering programs and equivalently prestigious privates have been a huge driver.
It is also the result of deliberate policy decisions to favor HS GPA more than SAT/ACT scores within the realm of academic criteria in admissions. This is the result of (a) its own research suggesting the HS GPA is significantly better predictor of college GPA than SAT/ACT scores, and (b) its holding to the mission of offering opportunity widely within the state population, including to those from low SES backgrounds (SAT/ACT scores correlate fairly strongly to SES). So, for the USNWR criteria, the UCs should do well for the percentage of students in the top 10% (largely correlated to HS GPA, even though HS class rank is not explicitly used), but less well in SAT/ACT scores.
It also means that applicants who are heavier in one or the other of HS GPA and SAT/ACT scores may see differing results among schools which, at first glance, appear to be selectivity peers. For example, UCLA and USC are typically seen as selectivity peers. But UCLA favors HS GPA, while USC favors SAT/ACT scores (this is noticeable when looking at each school’s frosh profile from their own web sites), so that a HS GPA heavy applicant has a better chance at UCLA, while an SAT/ACT score heavy applicant has a better chance at USC.
For many colleges and universities, the academic criteria are the most important, with other criteria like extracurriculars and essays becoming important mainly near the borderline (if they are considered). However, at the most selective colleges and universities, this “borderline” is the zone at the top of the scale for academic criteria. At these schools, top end academic credentials merely get the applicant into the borderline zone where extracurriculars, essays, etc. then become the determining factor.
Vandy appears to be holistic AFTER one meets the benchmark of near perfect scores.
@ucbalumnus Interesting, thank you. How is it determined that UCLA and USC are “selectivity peers?” What with UCLA getting over 110,000 applications last year – a number that boggles the mind – it makes sense that the adcoms have to have some sort of strict cutoff stats-wise, just to get through the applications (minus the athletic recruits). Does USC have similar issues with having to cut down on a massive amount of applications? I’m sure no other school comes close to UCLA’s in terms of sheer numbers but perhaps they have more manpower as well.
In terms of UCLA’s 110,000 applications, the UC admissions reading system is designed for scalability by having two readers score each application (with a third senior reader also reading it if the first two scores are too far apart). Then they are rank-ordered by the reading score within buckets defined by major or division. If the cut-point for the number of admits is within a group with the same score, there are designated tie-breaking procedures. The key difference between this method and that used in other holistic reading colleges is that there is no central admissions committee reading every application and therefore being the bottleneck when application volume gets huge. The process is scalable because they can just hire more admission readers to handle the greater application load in parallel.
In terms of being selectivity peers, both UCLA and USC are widely seen as selective enough that top end academic stats are needed to be competitive, but they are not as competitive as Stanford for those who do have top end academic stats (though UCLA engineering majors are more competitive than UCLA generally). But the nuance of HS GPA versus SAT/ACT scores is often not noticed, even though “unbalanced” applicants can be significantly affected.
Note that it was not always this way. USC used to be seen as a much less selective school before it made the push to climb the USNWR rankings (during that push to climb the rankings, it was very generous with National Merit Finalists – a great way to attract high-SAT students).