<p>Hi all, I am just wondering why Georgia Tech has a relatively high admission rate (good for me!). For a highly ranked school as and with a good reputation as Georgia Tech, I would expect the admission rate to be lower. Any insight? Thanks.</p>
<p>It’s a public school. It has an incentive to take a lot of in-state students, same as with most highly ranked publics.</p>
<p>It’s a public engineering school.</p>
<p>Look at the other public schools. Tech is similar to Illinois, Michigan, etc. The best in-state school in every state has an artificially high admission rate because it is the financial safety for the top students in that state. </p>
<p>In addition, engineering schools tend to have higher admission rates than non-engineering schools. Schools like Harvard receive tons of applications from clearly unqualified students who haven’t done their research. They’ve always been told that they are “good students” and they know that “good students go to Harvard”, so they apply despite the 1700 SAT and 3.6 GPA (admittedly good qualifications). That doesn’t happen at engineering schools. People who are interested in engineering tend to have done their homework on their field and school so you don’t see as many frivolous applications.</p>
<p>Don’t focus on the admission rate, focus on the average SAT scores and GPA.</p>
<p>To sum it up:</p>
<ol>
<li>State schools are larger, and they don’t receive as many applications from out of state.</li>
<li>Liberal arts is not very big here, with only a dozen or so majors. So even within the state, they don’t get as many applications. Art History majors have to settle for UGA. Poor unfortunate souls they are.</li>
<li>Engineering schools don’t receive as many “W.T.F?” applicants.</li>
</ol>
<p>Tech is the only school that has all three of those issues (Michigan has a large LSA school, and MIT is private, so people outside of Massachusetts aren’t discouraged from applying).</p>
<p>Thanks for all the insight. Being a “little” obsessive & compulsive, I checked out the above input for why Georgia Tech has a relatively high acceptance rate. I picked UCLA, a large well-known state school, to look at and I eliminated all the other majors except for engineering. From the website of the UCLA School of Engineering, in 2011 there were 11,357 applicants for the different engineering majors. 2811 applicants were offered admission to the School of Engineering, for an admission rate of 24.8% which mirrored almost exactly the admission rate for all UCLA applicants, regardless of majors. Interesting.
Well, just for fun bantering only. Georgia Tech is one of my top choices.</p>
<p>You can’t use the top UC’s as comparables. There are so many California students that pretty much automatically apply (regardless of qualifications) Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, etc. that they always have low acceptance rates. For better comparisons, look at Illinois (67%), Michigan (51%), UT-Austin (47%). Georgia Tech at 52% fits in the middle.</p>