I have been creating a list of colleges recently, and a few of them have emailed me saying that I’m considered a priority applicant to their school. How much does this increase my chance of acceptance into the college?
Schools that send out “priority applications” tend to have very high acceptance rates.
@TomSrOfBoston not true. Just looking through my emails of schools who have either notified me of priority/candidate/presidential applicant status or waived my app fee based on merit…
Washington & Lee - 20%
Babson - 28%
Wake Forest - 34%
RPI - 38%
Case Western - 38%
SMU - 52%
Those are pretty high acceptance rates in my opinion. I would take those odds for many schools on my list.
With 2000 colleges/universities in the US and these mostly ranked in the top 100, these are not, by any means, “very high acceptance rates”.
I assume you took the SAT/ACT/PSAT/PLAN/PSSS and ticked the box allowing colleges to send you information? That’s usually how schools get your contact details. They presumably have some idea of your scores-many schools can ask the test administrators for contact information for all students above a certain score, in return for a fee.
Offering “priority” status generally means one of two things:
- The school is a for-profit or isn't selective, and is just looking to fill its freshman class and thus balance the books.
- The school is hoping for an extra 5,000 or 10,000 applications to bring their acceptance rate down.
- You're better than the average applicant to these schools by several orders of magnitude, and they'd like to have you in order to improve their academics.
If #1 or #2 is the case, letters from the schools in question say nothing useful about your chances. If it’s #3, admission is practically guaranteed, but the school is likely one where you’d be bored out of your mind.