<p>I understand that many see Vanderbilt as a backup to the Ivy League; however, I am here to prove otherwise.</p>
<p>First Vanderbilt released its regular decision results yesterday and the stats are staggering. The admit rate was 10.84%. The middle 50 SAT Verbal was 740- 800 and the middle 50 SAT Math was 750- 800. The middle 50 ACT composite was 33-35. 25% of those accepted to Vanderbilt this year had perfect scores.</p>
<p>Vanderbilt is one of only 6 universities in the country that are fully need blind and meet full demonstrated need with NO loans and no income cap for grants. Every student is able to afford Vanderbilt with their generous need-based aid. </p>
<p>The freshman experience is unparalleled at Vandy. They live in brand new dorms on their own campus and have a seemingly unlimited budget. Freshman have access to faculty, and so far during my freshman year I have been able to build relationships with 5 faculty head of houses, the provost of the university, and the dean of the freshman campus. This attention to freshman is truly amazing.</p>
<p>Finally Vanderbilt's location is frankly 100x better than that of any of the ivies. The weather is great and Nashville may be the best city for a college student to live in. There are countless things to do all within a 5 min cab ride. Vanderbilt also has SEC sports with a 2nd ranked baseball team and a football team that went 9-4 this past season. </p>
<p>In essence, Vanderbilt is the new "it" school, and if you want the school that has the best combination of elite academics, incredible devotion to undergraduate teaching, fantastic location, and state school-esque parties I would suggest coming here.</p>
<p>I assume those SAT and ACT scores are from this year’s class… Take note that these are the stats of admitted students, not of enrolled students. Stats are generally lower for enrolled students. That being said… 10.8 acceptance rate?! That’s an amazing jump! Other than that, I’m pretty sure no one is taking Vandy for granted.</p>
<p>^i support this. There will be a score range after end of enrollment</p>
<p>CR: 680-690~ 770
M:690- 780</p>
<p>because big Ivy decisons are still to come and most of perfect SAT scorer(90+% ) will be at ivy league and 3% will be in duke. So IMO vandy will be able to enroll 50-60 perfect scorers.</p>
<p>The stats he posted are from the Vanderbilt admissions blog, and are the stats for this year’s accepted class. Though I believe the 10.8% is just the regular decision acceptance rate. It’s probably closer to 12-13% overall.</p>
<p>Considering past enrolled student data, I would expect the enrolled class of 2017 to have the following stats:
Middle SAT of 1420-1570
Middle ACT 32-35</p>
<p>Past stats</p>
<p>Admitted class of 2016:
Middle 50% SAT (CR + M): 1470 1590
Middle 50% ACT: 33 35</p>
<p>Enrolled class of 2016:
Middle 50% SAT (CR + M): 1400 1560
Middle 50% ACT: 32 34</p>
<p>Admitted class of 2015:
Middle 50% SAT (CR + M): 1440-1590
Middle 50% ACT: 32-35</p>
<p>Enrolled class of 2015:
Middle 50% SAT (CR + M): 1380 1550
Middle 50% ACT: 31 34</p>
<p>Vandyman, I agree, Vanderbilt has more to offer 18 year old students than the ivies and test scores are reflecting where top student go to college. Equal academics and research and SEC sports, music, Nashville, moderate climate, new dorms vs frozen tundra, crew and water polo, and dinner clubs.
The Stats are crazy. About 1/2 send SAT and 1/2 ACT’s. About 10k have a 800 math score and 10K have a 800 reading score. The same 2,000 kids bump the upper end range at all the top 20 schools (they apply to 12 on average) and they will be split up and the enrolled scores will dip a bit.</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, in the admissions presentation the counselor said Vanderbilt superstores ACT for admissions purposes (as does U Chicago, UGA and others). If a student has taken both tests, then the highest is/are considered (to superscore). Thus, one would expect a very high middle 50% range and many “perfect” scores.</p>
<p>Nice. Looks like another school that has been out beating the bushes to increase applicants regardless of whether the applicants stand a chance of being admitted. Then they reject the vest majority of those they encouraged to apply. Is that what we want our institutions of higher learning to be doing? Yes it helps bolster ratings/ranks. Consider the last movie you saw. Now consider the reviewers ratings of that movie. If the producer had convinced the critics to improve their reviews, would the movie have gotten better?</p>
<p>Also, this post was written by the PR department. It is an excellent school. I am not suggesting otherwise. I am trying to encourage schools to stop the ratings nonsense because it is ruining the educational system in this country.</p>
<p>That post was actually written by a freshman student, he actually happens to live just across the hall from my room last year.</p>
<p>I don’t think Vanderbilt is “beating out the bushes” to increase applicants. I think Vandy’s reputation is on the rise, and it is just bringing more applications. In my experience anyway, I received an absurd amount of mail and advertising from top colleges, including an entire application packet from Harvard, when they had no information about my GPA/test scores. I received nothing from Vandy until I expressed interest by sending them my PSAT score. </p>
<p>I’m certain Vanderbilt cares about admission statistics and acceptance rate, but these things just rise naturally when you’re a top ranked institution; more kids are applying to more schools, so more applications are submitted and more are turned away. There’s much more that goes into ranking anyway-- academic quality, retention, faculty resources, financial resources, job placement, published research, alumni donation, etc. These things all directly benefit the students, not just the university’s reputation. An improved reputation is just a side-effect of providing a better education. More applicants and a lower acceptance rate are also a side-effect of continually improving the education offered here. If anything, the rating system encourages schools to improve in all these measures.</p>
<p>I do agree that selectivity should be given less weight in ranking, as selectivity should increase simply as a result of all the other factors, and it’s useless to incentivize increasing selectivity unnaturally, though I don’t it’s ruining the educational system…</p>
<p>I’m not sure that your analogy makes any sense.</p>
<p>The point is this-Robert Morse’s college ratings include % rejected as a component. That figure is enhanced (and therefore ratings/rank are improved) when colleges round up as many applicants as possible with the goal of rejecting most, especially if they do so by buying lists for the College Boards to help recruit students with scores that are too high or low for their target population. The fact that the % admitted falls as a result (and therefor elevates the school on rank relative to others) does not reflect an increase in the quality of the school. Initially % accepted or selectivity was intended as a measure of how desirable students found the school. Desirability was based on measures reflecting the quality of the school (such as how well students liked it, job or grad school placement, etc). But changes in the proportion of students admitted due to rapid increases in the number of students nabbed by their wide nets is no longer a result of improved quality of the school-it is due to excessive PR attempts to capture more applicants. So it is not a valid index of school quality anymore. Back to the analogy. Increasing rank by increasing % rejected due to enticing students to apply (with fancy brochures and praises about how that student would be such a great fit to the school) is similar to begging critics of movies to improve their ratings of a movie. It is impacting on the variable which should be the dependent variable but is being manipulated to make it appear to be the independent variable.</p>
<p>“Every student is able to afford Vanderbilt” is a bit of an overstatement, especially in comparison to the Ivies or other top privates. Sure the campus and its culture might be nice, but having a larger donut hole than other schools might prevent Vandy’s ranking (and potentially perception) from rising as much as the OP might hope.</p>
<p>“That post was actually written by a freshman student, he actually happens to live just across the hall from my room last year.”</p>
<p>I’m inclined to believe that the op has a relationship with admissions one way or the other. If the op were a freshman, how was he/she living across the hall last year? She/He’d have been a high school senior waiting to hear from colleges. Luckily he/she would know exactly when the decisions would be released for all but Vanderbilt and a few others not yet able to send material electronically.</p>
<p>The other way I know that to be the case is that it would be odd for a sophomore (or freshman) to set up a brand new account to post stats about Vanderbilt’s incoming class. Why would someone do that? Either they have continued their relationship with CC from their application days or they were on CC for other reasons but what would propel a student to start an account to boast scores for Vanderbilt? It is not a bad thing that admissions officers from Vanderbilt are posting here particularly because there seems to be a lot of angst expressed here by applicants-those that eventually are accepted and those denied. An attentive thoughtful admissions officer may consider making process changes for next year. That would be a very good, humane thing to do.</p>
<p>Ah., Pancaked, you too are an admissions officer! I think that is great and there is no reason to hide it. You’ve provided specific information about courses, roommates, etc. I am sure people have found it very helpful. I am a parent with a few kids so I’m pretty good at differentiating among kidspeak, PRspeak and parentspeak. Kids should know though, when the information they are getting is coming from a representative of the college versus a more objective, detached source. Knowing where your information comes from is essential for evaluating the veracity of the statements. Never-the-less, Vanderbilt is a great school in its own right and does not need to compare itself to Ivy league schools.</p>
<p>All schools market their university. Increasing the net to get unqualified students to apply does not explain what’s happening at Vanderbilt. It does not explain the increased academic profile of Vanderbilt students. Vandy students now have higher test scores than students at Stanford, Duke, UPenn, Cornell, JHU, Brown, Dartmouth, Cal-B… It’s not due to casting a wider net. It reflects the growth and positive changes happening at Vanderbilt under it’s administration and the fact Vanderbilt can offer 18 year olds more of what they want in their college experience.</p>