I’m shocked by all of it! When I went to college, Brandeis was my safety. New York University and Boston University were safeties. Barnard was an easy back door into Columbia. A kid with an A average and high SATs could almost guarantee admission to at least one IVY. It was a completely surprise to me when we started college hunting with D1.
Boston University as recently as 2002 had a 70% acceptance rate per their website. Now it is 22%, excluding the CGS January-London students.
When my son applied to college more than 20 years ago, as a white male he was at a slight disadvantage. I was surprised to learn that the tables have turned as there is now an overabundance of women applicants.
At schools that try to maintain an even male-female ratio, often the admit rate for women is lower. Depending on the school, the gender gap may be in either direction.
Try explaining all of this to the grandparents! I tell my parents how tough college admissions has become and they don’t get it. They often pooh-pooh colleges that are much harder to get into now, because they still think of them as easy admits. They just don’t get that former safeties are now reaches. “Why is Susie applying to ABC University? They take everyone–she can do better!” Glad I’m done!
Much of this phenomenon is related to mobility. College admissions used to be a regional affair. You applied to schools within 1 to 4 hours driving distance. 5-7 hours if you were adventurous. I did not know one person who applied to a college that required air transportation. It would have been unheard of. And I attended HS in a relatively affluent area on the east coast.
Now applying to college is a national exercise. Geographic limits have disappeared.
I have to disagree with the above. I grew up in NY and had classmates that went all over the country (30 years ago). Certainly not the majority but seemingly similar numbers to what I’m seeing in my daughter’s school in OH.
@momofsenior1 I graduated HS 41 years ago. I think those 11 years make a difference. I do notice that.
I graduated from high school 40 years ago. Grew up in CT and went to college an airplane ride away in the Midwest. My randomly assigned roommate was also from CT. There were lots of people from the east coast there.
@eastcoast101 You took the words right out of my brain! There is no way to make the grandparents understand how the landscape has changed.
@momofsenior1 Was your high school in a high income area?
@TomSrOfBoston - I grew up on Long Island, NY
Northeastern. I spent most of the 1970s in Massachusetts, It’s surreal to see current high schoolers starting discussions along the lines of “Help me decide: UCLA, Vanderbilt, or Northeastern.”
VT has grown up and is no longer a “cow college” …
@eastcoast101 and @gallentjill , my mother read an article in the local magazine that listed how many kids applied and got into which colleges from our area. That really opened her eyes (she’d been good about it before, not saying anything negative about my statements that it was much harder to get into college now, but when she read the article, she said to me she’d had no idea how much more competitive it was).
@brantly I went to college in the mid-late 80’s. Most of my friends chose to travel out of state for college, and in fact all of my close friends went off to schools requiring a plane ride. I grew up in New England. Kids went to Berkeley, Tulane, Miami, UGA, Tennessee, Arizona, Notre Dame, etc. I think that were plenty of kids that stuck to NE schools, but most kids did not want to go to the state flagship.
I got into Northeastern and I thought it was a dump! I refused to consider it. Now, my son goes there and I’d have zero shot at admissions.
Seems that every year, someone suggests American University as a “safety” for some student…
I notice that almost everyone who says that kids they knew ~40 years ago went an airplane ride away for college are all from the northeast/new england. Having grown up in the southeast, I really knew no one, affluent or not who did that at that time.
I respectfully disagree. The vast majority of college students still enroll in schools relatively close to home—and not just commuter schools. Nearly three times as many students attend public institutions as privates, and most students at public institutions are in-state. Most private institutions also draw a primarily local or regional student body. Even the most elite institutions have a decidedly regional tilt. In 2014 Princeton drew 45% of its freshmen from the Northeast corridor, a region with 18% of the nation’s population. That same year, Stanford drew 50% of its entering class from California, a state with 12% of the nation’s population. Drop down a notch in selectivity and the percentages are almost invariably much higher. In 2014 Lehigh drew 63% of its entering class from just 3 states, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey; add in the rest of the Northeast corridor and it’s 83%.
Here’s what the Chronicle of Higher Education concluded in 2016 based on a detailed examination of enrollment statistics:
To be sure, there is some geographic mobility and it probably has increased over time. But it’s far from the uniform national market that many on CC suppose.
My parents (90 now) were surprised that Kenyon isn’t a safety now. Apparently it was a hard partying (all male) school back in their day that didn’t require good grades for admission.
There is a recent thread here on CC in which a high school junior with good but not exceptional stats considered Boston College to be a safety. I set him straight.