<p>Compare Grinnell college in Iowa to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Both are very good LACs. Grinnell has slightly higher entering class stats (1210-1430 middle 50% SAT CR+M at Grinnell, 1190-1390 at Bucknell; 28-32 middle 50% ACT at Grinnell, 28-31 at Bucknell). With a $1.4 billion endowment (#8 among LACs nationally), Grinnell is also a much wealthier school than Bucknell, whose endowment stands at about $600 million. That discrepancy is even greater when you consider that Bucknell has more than twice as many students (3,635, compared to 1,693 at Grinnell), so that Grinnell’s endowment per capita is almost 5 times that of Bucknell ($827,000 per student at Grinnell, compared to $166,000 per student at Bucknell).</p>
<p>Yet Grinnell’s 2011 admit rate of 50.9% was very nearly double that of Bucknell, at 27.6%.</p>
<p>Why the discrepancy? LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. Bucknell is located in the Northeast, a region where a far higher percentage of students attend private colleges and universities, and it draws its student body heavily from nearby population centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-Washington, all 3 hours or less away by car. Lots of students in the Northeast don’t want to leave the Northeast for college, and a fair number of students from other regions want to attend college in the Northeast, or at least will consider it.</p>
<p>Grinnell is located in the Midwest, where public universities are generally stronger and a far smaller percentage of students attend private colleges and universities. Worse for Grinnell, it’s in Iowa, a fairly low-population state without a major city of its own, and even a lot of students from the major population centers of the Midwest (Chicago and Mineapolis-St. Paul are both 4 and a half hours away by car) don’t aspire to go to college in Iowa, while many people from the Coasts wouldn’t dream of it. On top of that, Grinnell is in a small town in Iowa, surrounded by cornfields. Now I happen to like cornfields, but for many people that’s not exactly an idyllic location.</p>
<p>As a consequence, Bucknell gets roughly 3 times as many applicants as Grinnell (7,940 for Bucknell in 2011, compared to 2,613 for Grinnell). And consequently, Bucknell’s acceptance rate is much lower–even though it’s not landing stronger students than Grinnell, in fact that tilts slightly in Grinnell’s favor.</p>
<p>Conclusion: Although across a broad run of schools, there’s a moderately strong correlation between acceptance rate and academic quality, it’s a mistake to take any particular school’s acceptance rate as a proxy for academic quality, because there are many, many factors that go into a school’s acceptance rate that have nothing to do with academic quality. Bucknell and Grinnell are both great schools. Academically, I’d give a definite edge to Grinnell, even though it has a much higher acceptance rate than Bucknell. If Grinnell were located in the Northeast, it would almost certainly have an acceptance rate as low or lower than Bucknell, and many people think it might even crack the top 10 among LACs, not because of a lower acceptance rate per se but because with a larger applicant pool it would probably significantly upgrade its already quite strong entering class stats; and as it moved up the charts, it would attract even more and stronger applicants. As it stands now, though, Grinnell is one of the great admissions “bargains,” a terrific LAC that is much easier to get admitted to than other schools of comparable quality. You just need to not mind the location.</p>