<p>I've been curious for a while about all these admissions percentages.</p>
<p>If Harvard's admit rate is 7% then 7/100 applicants are admitted to Harvard (or I really hope it's no more complicated than that). But, I'm sure it would be foolish to say that absolutely everyone who applies has a perfectly random 7% chance at being accepted. If that were the case there would be no need for an "office of admissions;" they'd just need several thousand slips of paper and a hat... a big hat.
So, if there's any justice in the world, Harvard tries as it may to weigh the merits of each applicant and select those who deserve to be accepted. That percentage does not represent an applicant's "chance" of admission at a given school. It merely represents how many among those thousands of applicants are chosen for admission.</p>
<p>All this is simple enough, but I wonder, how many of that 93% of rejected applicants were "qualified" to be a student at Harvard? Be it qualification by intelligence (grades/tests/etc), achievement (awards/honors), activity (ECs, sports, volunteering), or whatever combination it takes to be "qualified".
The implications being that, someone who meets qualification criteria should have a significantly better "chance" at acceptance assuming after a certain point it is indeed a crapshoot. So how much of that 93% consists of unqualified applicants applying to test their chances, to try to fulfill an out-of-reach dream, or just to say they did? And how many of that 93% consists of qualified applicants that simply weren't as awesome as that 7% who were accepted before the admissions quotas were achieved?</p>
<p>The reason I ask is because I'd like to see where I stand at certain schools. I mean, I'm fairly certain I'd be an "unqualified" applicant at Harvard if I applied (I don't plan to), but at other schools I'm looking at and hoping I have a chance I wonder what an adjusted admissions percentage would look like?
Would it be closer to 25% of qualified applicants at Harvard find themselves admitted? Higher? Lower? What about elsewhere such as Brown, UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Duke, etc?</p>
<p>Some of the selective colleges have answered this question and said that between 60-80% (depending on the source and the college) of applicants are “technically” qualified, insofar as they could handle the academics. Some of them have already said that they could drop the freshman class they selected and pick a new freshman class out of the leftovers and suffer no decline in quality – and even do so a few times.</p>
<p>Agree with impetous. Whatever peoples’ opinions are, what will you do with that mish mash of percentages? How much do you think some stranger’s random opinion will do to sate your curiosity/insecurity, etc.?</p>
<p>Any given year, the pool of applicants will be a bell curve. Some shoo-ins, some absolute no-chancers. The rest in the bell. Intuition would tell you that HYPS probably get a bigger share of “dream school but unrealistic applicants”. But so what?</p>
<p>All you can do is polish your file and hope your on the better end of that bell curve. Don’t be like the endless CCers who beg strangers to “chance” them.</p>
<p>Some sort of useful points. Hyps accept about 40 percent or so of those with 2400, most of whom are presumably academically qualified. Harvard says it could fill three classes without any drop in quality. So it appears that a chance for a perfectly fully qualified candidate is between .3 and .4.</p>
<p>One measure of the number of highly qualified applicants is the waiting list. Even for selective colleges the waiting list if often larger than the number who have received an offer. Colleges appear reluctant to reject outright truly qualified candidates, so even though very few (if any) candidates are offered places from the waiting list it provides a metric that sort of answers your question.</p>
<p>Just read these boards, there are many people with no chance applying to top schools.</p>
<p>But it is more complicated…about half of every admitted class is comprised of recruited athletes, URMs, wealthy legacies, children of the rich and powerful and the otherwise hooked. Half the seats are gone before the regular candidates are read.</p>
<p>One non-Ivy-but-Ivy-caliber school (I don’t remember which) representative told me the answer when I asked in an info session. He said 80% were qualified. That seemed high, but as Son didn’t apply to the most famous schools, I guess that makes sense - his schools would have had fewer “why not?” applications.</p>
<p>Geekmom: that “80% qualified” probably means the student is able to do the college coursework. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything otherwise attractive about the applicant, anything that readily identifies him/her as a great contributor to the college community – and therefore, many of these 80% go to the “good” pile and many go to the “bad” pile with little difficulty.</p>
<p>I think you are confusing between qualified and competitive. I would agree that 80% or more could be qualified i.e. meet the minimum criteria. If the SAT score range is say 2100-2400, (I am talking about the lowest and highest and these are just examples not the real range), anyone with over 2100 is qualified by that criteria, but very few with 2100 are competitive. There are exceptions, but those have something else going for them (legacy, athletics, significant achievement)</p>
<p>Based on what I have read, they eliminate over 2/3 of the applicants in the first pass. So most are qualified, a much smaller number are competitive.</p>
<p>You should look at stats on college websites as there are usually breakdowns on things like: “How many percent of those who applied with 2300+/2200+etc. SAT scores did we accept last year?”, “What percentage of valedictorians did we accept last year?”…</p>
<p>I would assume that their are tons of unqualified applicants who apply to a wide variety of schools. Obviously their will be tons of qualified applicants competing for spots at Harvard, but I garuntee you that their will be unqualified apps who just want to take the shot for Harvard. A better example might be some of the UC schools, tons of people in state apply to all the UC schools even though the know their chances are slim.</p>
<p>Very few schools do, but some will publish acceptance rates based on SAT scores. This should give you a slightly better estimate than raw acceptance rate, although still won’t give you a “final” answer.</p>
<p>For example, Stanford accepted:
8-9% of all applications
17% of 800 SAT CR
12% of 800 SAT M
19% of 800 SAT W</p>
<p>And declining percentages below those scores.</p>
<p>@Impetuous and T26E4
I expect exactly what you describe amongst those who try to literally answer the question. I wouldn’t know where to begin in deriving an honest answer to the question.
I expect further discussion, perhaps analysis of implications that I couldn’t think of, generalizations about colleges, sharing of personal experiences, or other such responses from everyone else.
I’m not so worried as to need to see my “chance” at admission at a given school but my curiosity stretches in other directions. In either case I’m honestly interested, and is it really so bad of an idea to try to instigate discussion?</p>
<p>@MazeWanderer
I may very well have made a poor choice in words. Though… thinking on it, I’m not sure I meant competitive so much. Perhaps just using subjective data it would be easier to see. I wondered whether a student who had the exact median test score/GPA/class rank as the freshman profile at a given school really has a 9% shot at school XX and 12% at YY, etc. Or whether a notable percentage of denied applicants don’t fit the profile of the students entering the school.</p>
<p>Hmmm… oh, right, so is this alright? I mean the idea that one can be perfectly prepared to handle the difficulties of the workload and education at schools but still have such a poor chance of admission? I’m not suggesting things should be different or that this is a terrible system (though I suppose I’m a bit disgruntled but that’s terribly off topic). I’m perfectly aware what happens when there are so many more qualified (competitive?) applicants than there are spots for enrollment. This is how things are. But I can’t help but dislike it. Though… I suppose I don’t mean for this to be a rant so I don’t quite know what I mean by this. Oh well.</p>
<p>Redroses, the question the OP asked was how many unqualified students apply to top schools, not how many slots are available after hooked applicants are accounted for. Hooked applicants are “qualified” by elite schools standards, for example the AI used for recruited athletes. I too have seen the statistics that PG made in her post and believe that to be a good number.</p>
<p>Just trying to give insight into the full picture. What kids here routinely miss is that average stats for the school won’t usually get an unhooked candidate into a top college.</p>
<p>quote]I may very well have made a poor choice in words. Though… thinking on it, I’m not sure I meant competitive so much. Perhaps just using subjective data it would be easier to see. I wondered whether a student who had the exact median test score/GPA/class rank as the freshman profile at a given school really has a 9% shot at school XX and 12% at YY, etc. Or whether a notable percentage of denied applicants don’t fit the profile of the students entering the school.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There is a difference between qualitative and quantitative data. I can compare SAT scores, they are numbers. But it is not that simple. Even within SAT scores is two students with 750, 750,750 the same as one who has 800, 800, 650. What if the 650 is writing and the student is one whose first language is not English?</p>
<p>The second issue is comparing EC’s, recommendations. Does a student who won a top math prize be considered better than a student who goes to a school in a poor neighborhood who started a program to tutor classmates?</p>
<p>So there is a subjective factor. You may think one class mate is unqualified, but he or she may be a first generation student and hence gets in as the ad comm is very impressed by the essay and the circumstances.</p>
<p>If you are unhooked, as pointed by Pizzagirl and others, you are competitive if you are in the upper half of the range. Right wrong, that is what it is.</p>
<p>"[MIT deferees] were deferred because your application was already strong enough to make you a contender in the Regular Action round.</p>
<p>Therefore, the amount of students rejected in the EA round should give an approximate esitmate of the amount of people who are unqualified in admissions (other factors that need to be accounted for: MIT is not on common app so most likely higher for common app schools, especially Harvard; this is the EA round so more self selecting than RD, more I can’t think of)</p>
<p>Based off this data, approx. (5683 - (590 + 3916))/(5683) * 100% or 20.7 %.</p>
<p>Also interesting to note, is that besides the URM hook, many other hooks are more downplayed at MIT than other schools (no legacies, a smaller athletic bump, etc.)</p>