@tk21769, your analysis is faulty because some people get multiple acceptances (and others get none), so 60K places at 34% yield does not accommodate 175K.
And I don’t find a quarter of the student body being hooked or having major talents that are not captured by GPA and test scores surprising at all. I think it’s safe to say that no Ivy/equivalent is taking someone who is outside the 10% who does not have some major hook/talent.
BTW, I have 16 RU’s and 14 LAC’s as Ivies/equivalents and 8 RU’s and 9 LAC’s as Near-Ivies:
Roughly 25K freshman places in the first group and roughly 40-45K freshman places in the second group (mostly because Cal, UMich, UCLA, UW-Madison, and NYU are massive while UVa isn’t small either).
And that’s not including other highly touted schools like JHU, WashU, Vandy, USC, and UNC. Maybe another 20K-40K seats there depending on how big you make that group.
Roughly a quarter of those seats would be taken by hooks/talents that an average high-stats kid won’t have, however.
It is not just the kids from the large Asian countries that are driving the huge increase in international applications. Here in the UK, the Government is virtually forcing the top Universities to admit more kids from state schools (often irregardless of the socioeconomic make-up of these state school kids). As a result, many of the top “Public” (i.e., private) schools here such as Westminster School are strongly encouraging all of the kids to take the SAT/ACT and apply to a few top US schools. These types of trends collectively drive up the number of international applications.
@tk21769 where did you get that stat about Middlebury’s Freshmen class consisting of students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class? They’ve always been in the range of 84-88% in previous years. That seems like a big and sudden drop for them.
The implied figures in #78 would not be uniformly accurate. With respect to Middlebury, the current USNWR reports that 79% of their students originated from the top 10% of their HS classes. Hamilton, similarly, reports greater than 75% from within this range.
According to Middlebury’s 2013-14 CDS, line C10, 74% of Middlebury’s entering freshmen ranked in their HS top 10%. For subsequent years, line C10 is blank. (http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/administration/planning/mdata/history/cds)
Class rank isn’t submitted for most Middlebury freshmen. So that percentage may be low (or I suppose it may be high). But it is similar to the percentage reported in recent years for Barnard, Carleton, Colgate, CMcK, Emory, Hamilton, Rochester, Wesleyan, and WakeF. The number has been lower (60%-70%) in recent years for Colby, Colorado College, Grinnell, Kenyon, Macalester, Oberlin, and Smith.
Certainly, these schools do make many overlapping offers. “Hooked” applicants may well account for many offers to students whose stats fall below the class medians. But how many is “many”? We don’t have good data for college applicant pools. So we don’t really know how far the top N colleges are, collectively, from having enough places to accommodate all the top students who would be willing and able to claim them.
SIMR (Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program, a high school student summer program) says on their website “The selection process will heavily favor local (Bay Area) students”. What if top schools put this on their website? I was going to apply to SIMR, but then realized the more than minuscule chance of being accepted because I am not from the Bay Area. I think one of the main problems is a lot of lower ranked students don’t understand the chances of being accepted to top ranked schools with such low stats. I would be curious to find out if this would stop people. Maybe something like “The selection process will heavily favor students with X SAT/ACT and Y GPA”.
@Eva12344 If schools wanted to show mercy on students they would simply put SAT/ACT minimum caps on applicants, still allowing them to apply if they wish because people can still be taking more tests beyond the application deadline, just saying blatantly anyone below these figures will not be accepted unless they are a recruited athlete.
^^^^^ @IN4655 , not trying to be argumentative, but don’t they largely do that already?
It would be interesting to see a breakdown to know how many “long shot” apps are sent (money and time wasted).
I really don’t think the problem is too many long-shot applications. The problem is that every single high-achieving student in this enormous nation (and many more from around the world) want to go to the same small handful of elite colleges now.
There seem to be two reasons for that. First, the students are more aware of the elite colleges due to US News rankings, message boards, and so on. Second, those elite schools now provide financial aid to anyone who needs it, and the students are aware of this. Back in the day elite students regularly would have to forego a shot at Harvard in favor of staying home and commuting to the local college, because Harvard tuition cost much, much more and you had to pay for room and board too. Nowadays, unless you are wealthy it is cheaper to go to Harvard than to your local school.
Seems to me that the real complaint here is from the wealthy and upper middle class families who view the elite colleges as their birthright, and don’t like that their kids now have to compete with thousands and thousands of nobodies from Iowa whose only qualification for admission is that they are extraordinary students. Yeah, I’m being a little snarky, but there is something to it I think.
Agreed, @ThankYouforHelp.
If there are 25K spots at Ivies and equivalents, that means less than 1% of HS grads will end up in one of them. And many (actually, probably most) of those who do will have some hook or tremendous talent(s) or applied ED.
Yet so many who are in the top 5% try for them, and many (especially those in the top 1%) don’t apply ED.
@ThankYouforHelp A third reason is the increased difficulty of landing a stable, well paid job after graduation and a perception (rightly or wrongly) that a top school provides a higher percentage of making that happen.
@londondad: Increasing inequality and the spread of winner-take-all economies. Makes intra-elite competition more fierce.
Is not good for society, frankly, as more competition means more breaking of laws and rules by elites.
Not every high-achieving student wants to attend the same small handful of elite colleges.
I wonder if even the majority do.
By my count, the 40 most selective colleges have over 56,000 first-year spots. They may not all be Ivy “equivalents”, but they are fine schools. More than a third of them are very small (LACs, CalTech).
If we include a few large, somewhat less selective state flagships, the number climbs.
The coverage climbs more if we count not only spots but unclaimed top-N offers (i.e. the ones that go to students who choose to attend less selective schools).
Well, let’s see. Brown gives some pretty granular data (https://www.brown.edu/admission/undergraduate/explore/admission-facts):
2,292 applied with a SAT-CR of 800.
3,615 applied with a SAT-Math of 800.
12,059(!) applied with a SAT-Writing of 800.
I don’t have recent data, but in 2009, according to this post: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/967657/how-many-people-score-one-800-on-an-sat-section-two-800s/ :
8,833 scored an 800 on CR,
10,052 scored an 800 on Math, and
4,946 scored an 800 on Writing.
More recent data on how many 800-scorers there are would be appreciated.
And mind you, this is smallish quirky Brown which isn’t a fit for all and not HYPSM (and not nearly as well-known abroad). And this would not include (almost) any of the folks who applied ED to other Ivies/equivalents (or ED to other schools, period) and got in to them. And note that many of the elites fill almost half their class with ED now, so a big chunk of the cream of the crop isn’t counted here.
So based on this data, unless the number of kids getting 800 on a section of the SAT has jumped massively (it may have in SAT-Writing), it seems safe to say that it’s very likely that the majority of kids getting 800 on at least one section of the SAT is applying to at least one Ivy/equivalent.
@Postmodern Its what they practice, I could be wrong but I don’t think they are over completely forthcoming with telling students that you have a 0% chance under this test score.
A Forbes site conveniently lists freshman enrollments at selective (and many not-so-selective) colleges:
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/94/opinions_college08_Americas-Best-Colleges_ClassSize.html
These are 2008 numbers, which presumably are lower on average than current numbers.
From this data, I’ve counted the number of freshman places at 40 of the most selective colleges plus 6 “public Ivies” that aren’t among those top 40. The total number of places I get is over 86,000, based on the following freshman enrollment counts:
7478 Texas
6940 UIUC
5992 Michigan
4564 UCLA
4225 UC Berkeley
3893 UNC
3404 Miami U
3248 UVA
3010 Cornell
2963 USC
2630 GA Tech
2450 Vermont
2385 Penn
1991 Notre Dame
1981 Northwestern
1721 Stanford
1700 Duke
1673 Vanderbilt
1668 Harvard
1582 Georgetown
1479 Brown
1416 Carnegie Mellon
1370 Tufts
1338 Washington U
1333 Columbia
1318 Yale
1300 Chicago
1242 Princeton
1206 JHU
1119 Dartmouth
1067 MIT
742 Rice
733 Wesleyan
644 Middlebury
590 Wellesley
540 Williams
509 Carleton
477 Amherst*
476 Bowdoin
463 W&L
375 Pomona
365 Swarthmore
315 Haverford
268 Claremont McK
231 Cal Tech
196 Harvey Mudd
(* I couldn’t find the Amherst number on the Forbes site, so I used a recent CDS number)
According to College Board data, approximately 64,000 2014 college-bound seniors scored 2100 or above.
If this is a first approximation for the number of top students seeking places at top colleges, then there would appear to be more than enough places at “top colleges” to accommodate all the “top students” who are willing and able to claim them. Now, maybe 64K isn’t the right number. We should add students who scored, say, 30 or above on the ACT (but who aren’t already included among the high-scoring 64K SAT-takers). But then, we should subtract students who don’t also have high GPAs and at least one or two interesting ECs. We also should subtract students who can’t possibly afford to attend any of the top colleges or who simply aren’t interested in applying.
So I wonder if the pool of available “top students” is even large enough to fill the ~100K freshman places apparently available at the nation’s ~50 “top colleges”. Almost all these schools make many more offers than the number of available seats. True, many of these are overlapping offers (to students who get also get offers from other top-N schools). But let’s say we count (in addition to places) only the non-incestuous offers needed to cover admitted top students who choose not to attend any top school. I don’t know, maybe that number is about equal to the inverse of the HYPSM yield rates? So, 25%? That opens a hole big enough to cover, I should think, most “hooked” students with below-median stats … without displacing very many “top” (high-stats) students who are ready, willing, and able to claim an available spot.
This is not to deny there are “crap shoot” colleges that do reject many excellent students. But if you’re a top student wondering about your chances of being admitted to some top college, I’d say those chances are actually quite high (as long as you widen your focus beyond ~HYPSM).
@tk21769 The numbers make sense but don’t always reflect reality. My D scored 2300 on the SAT (and a 3.9 UW GPA) so among those 64,000 students (and among an even smaller number with her score or higher), applied to 8 “top” colleges from your list and didn’t get into any of them. She ended up at her safety. She’s fine there so all’s well in the end, but my point is, it’s easy for a student to feel like “why did I study/work so hard to get into a school I could have gotten into with a 2100 SAT and 3.7 GPA?” And it’s hard for a parent to have to say, “those are awesome scores/grades! Unfortunately, it’s not enough. You’re basically still gonna need luck to get in.” Now granted, my D would likely have been accepted to most if not all the big publics on your list (except Cal), but with OOS fees and little aid available, they would have been unaffordable, so there was no point.
So unless you’re wealthy enough to not need much aid or you’re both extremely smart and lucky, your choices are limited. And thus - coming back to the shrinking acceptance rates - since so much depends on other factors (luck, hook, something that catches the attention of the admissions officer, etc.), a student with high stats can’t just apply to 3 reaches that meet full need, they need to apply to 10 or 20 to statistically increase their chances that at least one will say yes (ironically creates a vicious cycle where your chances of getting in to each one diminish).
@tk21769, well, Miami U and Vermont aren’t usually seen as the very tippy-top, public Ivies or no, and as @insanedreamer mentioned, OOS publics (besides UVa) aren’t really an option for those who aren’t full-pay (for those who are, options overseas in the UK, Canada, and TCD in Ireland open up as well). Actually, even if you need fin aid, TCD and some degrees and McGill may be affordable.
But for those who require fin aid, their best shot may be through ED at one of those schools with a relatively high ED admit rate. Otherwise, the odds go down.
The main reason is because many of these colleges care a lot about fit and nonacademic factors so may favor top 5% with characteristics they like over top 1%.
And if you expand to top 5%, thats 170K grads or so. 340K in the top 10%.