<p>In the past six years, Northeastern University has vaulted 42 spots in the powerful U.S. News & World Report college rankings. And not merely because it added programs, hired superstar faculty or built fancy facilities.</p>
<p>The private school in Boston also has made an all-out effort to increase the number of applicants for admission, dispatching its 30-person recruiting staff across the country and sending hundreds of thousands of personalized letters and emails to high-school students. It persuaded more than 44,000 students to apply for one of the 2,800 spots in its fall 2012 freshman class—up from about 30,000 in 2007—a move that boosted the school's selectivity, illustrating a growing trend in college marketing.</p>
<p>Schools nationwide are intensifying efforts to amass ever-larger pools of applicants to improve geographic diversity and attract higher-caliber students and wealthier families. Armed with granular data about high-school seniors, they are making frequent, personal appeals, visiting more campuses and making it easier and less expensive to apply. The possible payoffs range from improved institutional reputations and higher alumni-giving rates to more revenues. Being more selective is a benefit, too, though it determines just 15% of the U.S. News ranking, a fraction of which is determined by sheer application volume.</p>
<p>This is only marginally related to the topic at hand, but in the 1970s, when even the best schools accepted a large percentage of all applicants, and elite public Us like Berkeley, U Mich, etc accepted the overwhelming majority of applicants, did people look at acceptance rate as a measure of prestige/ quality? If not, how did the average applicant thi decide which schools, beyond the obvious HYPSM, were “good”?</p>
<p>I have an old Cass and Birnbaum guide from those days. They also use “selectivity” as a marker of quality, basically stating that the quality of the student body is one of the most important markers of institutional quality and also prestige. They split schools into groups - Most Selective, Highly Selective, Very + Selective, Very Selective, Selective. These groups made up about 300 schools. There are another 1500 or so school listed as non selective. They also break them out by various schools within schools (eg Columbia College, Barnard, Columbia Engineering). Although there’s been considerable movement on the margins, a lot remains the same. </p>
<p>But you’re right. Schools like Berkeley accepted 90% of applicants, and were still considered “Very + Selective”. Harvey Mudd accepted nearly 80% (or some high number around this) and was “Most Selective”. MIT and Caltech had high admission rates (around 50% or higher IIRC) along with SAT scores similar to those they have today. Some schools with lower rates were not even in the top few tiers. </p>
<p>They use SAT scores, percentages, and some other stuff they aren’t so clear about to assign “Selectivity.” But the authors point out clearly that the acceptance percentage was a very small factor and could be very misleading in those days.</p>
<p>^^I think back in the 70s/80s, applicants did a lot more self-selecting. So Berkeley or MIT etc would end up with a (relatively) higher % admission, because only kids with SATs or GPAs in the accepted range would end up applying.</p>
<p>Now due to the rankings and the focus on selectivity, colleges are doing what this article says, recruiting warm bodies to apply, just to turn them down. They are gaming the system.</p>
<p>Does anyone think Northeastern didn’t have sufficient applicants for itself 10 years ago? So why the focus on drawing in even more applicants? To inflate the numbers.</p>
<p>It’s too bad, really. And it’s a vicious cycle. As exstudent says, the students (and parents) are part of the problem, however, if students didn’t feel like they were competing against thousands of students who probably don’t even REALLY want to go to that school, perhaps they wouldn’t feel so much pressure to apply to SO many schools. My daughter is applying to 3 (maybe 4) - carefully selected, where she is fairly certain of acceptance (and merit aid), and knows she can be happy. Applying to 8, 10, 12 schools should not be necessary, and is, IMO, part of this ‘rankings’ problem. I’d certainly rather see the schools put all those resources elsewhere.</p>
<p>I think it must have had more to do with added programs, superstar faculty, and fancy facilities than the article cares to admit. This is simply because acceptance rate doesn’t comprise all that big of a chunk of the of the USNews score. According to the methodology:</p>
<p>Overall selectivity, which includes things like SAT/ACT scores, etc., makes up only 15% of the overall score. And of that 15% only 10% of it is based on acceptance rate. Thus, acceptance rate makes up only 1.5% of the total USNews ranking score. Arithmetic tells us that 98.5% of the ranking score is derived from other factors.</p>
<p>With that minuscule percentage coming from acceptance rate I don’t see how you can move up 42 places - even if you mail a filled-out application to every kid in America and thus totally peg the needle on the ol’ Accept-O-Meter.</p>
<p>Well, considering how much Northeastern has specifically improved programs, facilities and student support- and gotten the word out- it’s a bit lame to pretend they rose because more kids were attracted to them. The buzz on NE is pretty good- well beyond their USNews ranking.</p>
<p>I suspect that the WSJ article was written by a Boston University alumnus </p>
<p>Anyone familiar with Northeastern is fully aware of the changes that have occurred at the school in the past 20 years. As lookingforward states, All of Northeastern’s stats have risen in the USNews rankings. Northeastern has risen more than any other national university in the ranking. I guess that is why the author tried to provide a simplistic "analysis’ to explain the climb.</p>
<p>10 years ago, NEU was already much more selective than they were 10 years previous. Sometime in the mid-late '90s, they increased admissions requirements, eliminated most remedial admission programs like AFY*, and reduced incoming class sizes. </p>
<p>According to several NEU alums who were students back in the late '80s/early '90s, admissions were more like those of some state universities: easy to get in, hard to graduate from. </p>
<p>This was underscored at their orientation spiel where they were told, “Look to your left, look to your right, 1/3 - 1/2 of you won’t be here when graduation comes in 5 years(5 year program including Co-op”. </p>
<p>By 2002, all of that was already in NEU’s not too distant past. </p>
<p>*A Boston area friend was admitted under that program in the early '90s even though he ended up taking regular college-level courses…just in a much smaller setting. He did tell me many other AFY students were taking courses such as learning to multiply/divide fractions or basic grammar/sentence structure that we learned in elementary/middle school.</p>
<p>Northeastern had a 95.5% freshman retention rate this year, pretty impressive!. Twenty years ago, the freshman retention rate was probably 50%. </p>
<p>Why is it when a school tries to improve itself there are those who have to try and diminish that effort by doing some superficial “research” on published stats.</p>
<p>Which means that many of the applicants have no chance of being accepted, and so the very low admission percentages at some schools give a misleading impression about how hard it is to be admitted. For example, only 1 out of every 15 may be accepted at Harvard, but how many of those 15 actually are competitive members of the pool, and how many are just Harvard “wanna be’s”? </p>
<p>I am curious – what does the Cass and Birnbaum guide say about the percentage of Stanford applicants who were admitted back in the old days?</p>
<p>US students rank number one in the world on self-esteem. I think that a lot of kids are not self-selecting because of this inflated esteem.</p>
<p>Nobody ever really said no to a lot of kids and their parents were always there to fight for them and boost them back up whenever they heard no.</p>
<p>I believe that Northeastern has jumped in the rankings due to the tough economy and their very successful coop program. Kids that graduate from Northeastern average 3 coops for a total of 18 months professional experience when they hit the market for their first job. Most kids have some type of global experience and are employed upon graduation…and with great jobs.</p>
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