There was a story on NPR a couple weeks ago about the big increase in the number of people put on waiting lists by many universities. Some are accepting fewer students in the regular cycle and depending upon waiting lists to a greater extent. That allows the universities to claim an artificially low acceptance rate, and allows them to enroll a student from all 50 states. Also, the people on the wait lists often do not expect much financial aid.
@charlieschm Students accepted off the waitlist count in the final acceptance rate.
CSU Long Beach and SDSU have become difficult admissions.
Not shocked, but the college that my son attended ~20 years ago has become a lot more selective. When he applied to UChicago about 35% of applicants were accepted. Now it’s 9%. When my son applied, the adcom at Uof C wasn’t aggressive in pursuing applicants, though it was highly selective in the kinds of students it admitted. In recent years, the adcom has taken a very aggressive approach in encouraging early admission. My son didn’t apply early anywhere.
My son’s stats then are toward the top end of the range of enrolled students now. I knew he was well suited to UofC’s academic culture. But he didn’t know enough about Chicago to apply early action. I was the one who put it on his shopping list. He only visited it for the first time after he was admitted.
Now it’s a different world.
True, but many schools will call students on the waitlist and ask if they’d accept if offered, then offer only if the answer is affirmative. They get close to 100% yield on those admitted from the waitlist, which could affect their total admit rate. And a school that fills 50% of its class in the ED round with, say, a 95% yield, and another 10% of its class from the waitlist with a 100% yield, could quite dramatically reduce its overall admit rate through such shenanigans. If it was so inclined.
Any cal state colleges, I had no idea that some are competitive now.
@gallentjill Most schools are need blind. At most schools the admissions folks have no clue what your financial need is when they consider your application for admission.
But yes, at some need aware schools, being full pay is helpful when they review your application. Of ots between you as full pay…and someone who needs a lot of aid, you might get the edge,
So how much of this can be attributed to grade inflation in high school? Are kids really that much smarter?
One HS classmate who got into Harvard, Yale and MIT and is now a respected MD did not have the highest GPA in our class and certainly did not have a 100 average. Our grades were letters, and the highest GPA was 4.0 (no extra credit for AP classes etc).
My kids HS transcripts now show number grades and I see many kids (due to my job) with As that are 97 or 98. I KNOW that the tip top kids back in the day did not all have 98s for A’s.
So it follows that with so many kids having GPAs north of 4.0, it is much harder to gauge where you will get admitted.
A B or B- student in today’s HS is in some ways equivalent to a C student in 1980s HS.
Lots of high schools apparently now primarily use weighted GPAs, often with exaggerated weightings (e.g. 5.x and 6.x weighted GPAs are not unheard of).
One likely cause of overreach is comparing one’s high school weighted GPA with that of college admissions stats. For example, a student may look at the 4.15-4.30 middle 50% GPA at UCB (see http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses/berkeley/freshman-profile/ ) and assume that his/her 4.5 weighted GPA makes UCB a “safety”, even though the weighted-capped GPA on UC web sites is calculated in a way that exaggerates the weighting much less (the highest possible is around 4.3-4.4 off an unweighted 4.0 in the hardest courses). So if his/her 4.5 weighted GPA is from a 3.5 unweighted GPA, giving a 3.8-3.9 weighted-capped GPA for UC purposes, UCB would be a reach rather than a safety for such a student.