I mean for highly selective schools like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale and other similar ones. All have really low acceptance rates, which continue to decline just about every year. I was wondering if you think this trend will continue or do you think the ‘bubble’ might burst.
There is no bubble.
Yeah, probably wasn’t the best term to use.
They certainly won’t come back up unless the average number of applications per applicant comes back down. It might plateau soon because there’s presumably some maximum number that people will generally see as worth sending out from both a time and a money perspective, but maybe not. The two kind of feed into themselves: as the rates go down people feel more compelled to apply to more schools but by applying to more schools they are driving the rates down.
Yes. It will continue to decline due to the fact how easy it is to apply using common app.
Do you know what the admit rate measures? Admits divided by applications. As long as more people apply year after year, the admit rate declines. The numerator is relatively static.
Yeah, sorry for not making myself clear but by mentioning the admit rate i was asking if people thought the number of people applying would continue to rise and so therefore the admit rate would continue to go down.
I thik the # of apps will depend in part on what happens with the new college application coalition that is supposed to be rolled out , maybe next year. They’ve hit bumps in the road and litigation from developers, so that may be stalled
T26E6 put it best. These schools are not adding seats, so they will be admitting roughly the same number. If their yield numbers go up, then the number may decrease slightly.
The denominator may grow (more applications) but no one knows the quality of these additional applications.
Agreed. Most of the schools arent looking to grow in size. Yale increased its undergrad enrollment by 15% https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/2136/yale-college-to-expand-enrollment-by-15-percent and is in the process of building new residential colleges http://newresidentialcolleges.yale.edu/
Rice did this several years back as well , with a 30% increase in size. https://professor.rice.edu/images/professor/size1.pdf This takes a lot of infrastructure changes (dorms, classrooms, faculty, staff, etc) so is not an easy undertaking.
The number of students graduating from U.S. high schools peaked a few years ago, so that is pulling the numerator down a little, but the common app and increasing numbers of foreign applicants is pushing the numerator up much more significantly.
The number of highly qualified applicants will probably increase as well. More and more people learn how to play this college coaching game.
Hi @sherpa! I think that the sheer # of applicants (domestic and international) and the increase in # of schools many students are applying to may keep that numerator up high.
Trees don’t grow to the sky, and at some point college admissions will level off. Whether that’s two years from now or twenty, who can say. I think it will be interesting to see what happens when Yale adds seats to their class next year. A couple hundred new admissions to HYPSM may not be much but maybe there will be an effect down the line. The increased supply of colleges being built in HK Dubai Cina and Singapore may also siphon off the masses of applications from foreign students, the primary growth of applications to US colleges these days.
For those who don’t know, law schools had their bubble burst during the Great Recession and it showed that at some economic breaking point the high expense of education can’t be rationalized and a collapse occurs. Universities shouldn’t think they are immune from that.
The T14 law schools will still command lots of applications from top students, and its likely those grads, or most of those grads, will fare just fine. The lower level law schools have not seen the same result, as the field of law has changed dramatically and many grads cannot find jobs or get hourly jobs with no benefits. Sad.
I agree with jym, @spayurpets . The topmost schools may plateau or even shrink a tiny bit but your analogy about the law school bubble comparison isn’t appropriate IMHO.
I might be wrong, but don’t people have to pay a fee to apply to more schools? Assuming it’s about $30 per school, a kid who applies to 20 schools is spending $600 on college application fees. That cost seems like it would prevent the majority of students from applying to more than 10ish. And the richer kids have always applied to top tier universities in droves. Because of this, application numbers might level out… I suppose that the influx in international students will continue to drive it up though.
If an admit rate “improves” from 6% to 8%, is that meaningfully any different?
The low admit rates are somewhat artificial-fueled by schools that are soliciting applications from applicants they know they won’t admit. A few schools don’t do that (like Harvard and MIT) but most do. And they do that so their admit rate looks very low.
@T26E4 I’m not sanguine about the college admissions growth over time, as the gap between tuition growth and post graduate job prospects widens. There are barriers to entry that make the elite colleges fairly well protected from competition but at some point I believe in market forces. The colleges dilute their own brand with Yale NUS and NYU Dubai at the same time US college age population shrinks. The international students will wise up and stop flooding us colleges with apps. Some school will crack and do something radially different with admissions which will cause HYPSM to act. Who knows what that is, but you can’t stop it. This will catch up with you just as it did for law schools.
As for the law schools, don’t you think the top schools are worried about the decline in average quality of the students they are accepting, their lower enrollments and applications? Even NYU Duke and Michigan are feeling the effects of the bubble burst and Yale and Harvard can’t sit still, thinking hat they are above it all. That said, I don’t think a bubble burst is a bad thing; it’s a natural occurrence that the colleges are just pushing off into the future.