<p>schools like University of Chicago, which has accepted more than 1/3 of the people who applied there. Yet, this may cause some people to believe it is much of "piece of cake" to get in there. I have heard stories that disinterested people even applied early there as a semi-safety school just so that they may get in one college by christmas. But that might not be true. I have also heard people getting into HYPS and not even making the waitlist at Chicago. others schools like Carnigie mellon and case western and UIUC have high acceptance rates but high SAT and GPA as well. So I believe what really matters is that each school weighs things differently. Just because school A had a lower acceptance rate than school B, it is not neccessarily a better school. People should consider if school A is a big football school or one that has more 'popular' majors than school B; school A is in a big state like California and New York and school B is in a small state like Montana and Kansas etc. I welcome your comments on my conclusion that acceptance rate alone doesn't neccesary suggest how easy it is to get into one school and more, how much better/worse that school is in comparision to others.</p>
<p>It means that the school is self-selective. people that have low stats won't try for that school (compared to like say Harvard which people try just to say they got rejected from there)</p>
<p>Acceptance rate means nothing. It's all dependent on 1) the stats of those accepted and 2) how self-selective the applicant pool is. In Chicago's case, the applicant pool is very self-selective: unqualified applicants don't apply (at least, a large number of them don't apply, comparatively). But in the case of, say, Stanford, the applicant pool is amazingly un-self-selective, i.e. a very large number of people who ordinarily wouldn't get in will apply, thus lowering the admit rate. You can't gauge how difficult a school is to get into just by its admit rate; you need to look at its average stats and such. You'll also notice that Chicago's and Stanford's average SAT scores are virtually the same.</p>
<p>And quality of student body is not the only indicator of the quality of an institution, though it is part of it. Of course, 'quality' is an entirely subjective measure. Many define Harvard's student body to be high-quality, whereas some random religious college with much lower (objective) stats considers its own student body to be high-quality since they were chosen based on religious commitment. And the quality of an institution is probably the most hotly contested issue in the college world -- how many rankings do we have now? Each claims to know what 'quality' is, and many people will disagree.</p>
<p>I think what you just said is absolutely true.</p>