<p>Because I was comparing some Cali schools... And I looked at SDSU's acceptance rate and it's around 32-38 percent every year.
Where as UCSB has around 40-50 percent acceptance rate every year.
But uc's are normally always harder to get into than state schools (except cal poly and sdsu)</p>
<p>Is this because more students who aren't "bright" apply to sdsu, and the school has to reject more of those types of students?
Or is it because they actually ARE as strict as UCLA, or UCSB in their admissions process?</p>
<p>What is strict? Admissions rate is no. of slots divided by no. of applicants. SDSU obviously gets more apps per open slots than those others. Now why is that? That’s the greater question.</p>
<p>Low acceptance rate simply means that the school is popular with applicants. But it does not necessarily mean that the threshold for acceptance is higher or lower than that of a school with a higher acceptance rate.</p>
<p>So it’s not necessarily how smart the applicant is, it is basically picking the best applicants from a large group of applicants?
And since sdsu gets so many applicants per year, their acceptance rate is lower?</p>
<p>Acceptance rates don’t indicate how strong your application needs to be to be accepted, because they don’t say anything about how strong all the rest of the applications are.</p>
<p>However, it’s generally true that the more selective the school, the lower the acceptance rate.</p>
<p>If a school’s applicant population tends to self-select (in that the people who aren’t likely to be accepted are also not likely to apply), it could still be selective in that it expects a lot from its applicants, but have a high acceptance rate in that a lot of those who apply are qualified.</p>
<p>Harvard, for example, is both highly selective and inundated with applications that probably don’t have a chance (because people think “Oh, it’s Harvard, it’s worth a shot!” and apply).</p>
<p>^ this is also the same with popular sports schools, like USC. SDSU may be very popular locally because of this, although I don’t know that it’s a very famous sports school.</p>
<p>^
On that note, a similar effect inflates ED acceptance rates at schools that recruit a lot of athletes, since recruited athletes tend to apply ED and are accepted.</p>