<p>I compared acceptance rates of the top 25 universities and LACs from the 1994 US News best Colleges with acceptance rates from the 2006 US News Best Colleges. On average, acceptance rates have gone down over 10% in 13 years. </p>
<p>How much of this decrease in acceptance rates is due to:
larger pool of applicants?
a higher percent of students applying?
applicants applying to more schools?
better quality applicants?
convenience of web-based applications?
more effective marketing?
something else? </p>
<p>very interesting, thanks! you wouldnt happen to have data to extend for top 50 schools, would you? i'm just very curious about many of them that are frequently debated on this site.</p>
<p>a higher percent of students applying?
more effective marketing?
something else? </p>
<p>One reason is definitely a bigger applicant pool because every year more people are being born. Also, applicants are definitely applying to more colleges these days both with the participation of now I believe 299 colleges in the common app as well as the ease of the computer-based application. Quality pretty much can't be measured since it is such a subjective quality, and generally you would expect quality to remain the same except for the fact that todays' applicants are much more educated on the college admissions process then they were ten years ago. The others I really don't know if they would, sure getting a nice little postcard from a certain school would be nice and would perhaps get you interested but when what, applicants today are receiving [at least personally] about thirty or forty pieces of college mail a week for two months straight, you just seem to not care after the first week. So yeah, though I think the key to the higher level of competitiveness is largely due to the common app and more people, but that's just a personal view without any concrete numbers to back up, though I think it's mostly logical.</p>
<p>here's my guess on why admit rates have gone down:</p>
<p>larger pool of applicants? there is certainly a larger pool of applicants applying to top schools. It seems like every year you'll hear "Harvard apps up 8%, Columbia also jumps 9%." I'm guessing that this is one of the main reasons, but this is due to people applying to more schools, and more effective marketing (my brother received mail from harvard and yale before he even took SATs or PSATs as a sophmore). The common application has certainly made it a breeze for students to apply to more than one elite school.</p>
<p>Also, I think that colleges are in a very heated competition among each other, which is most attributed to Yale which before had been left in the dust by Princeton and Harvard, but then got tougher on applicants and is now approaching single digit acceptance rates.</p>
<p>I would agree that it's mostly the top three reasons you gave. In theory, the avg SAT nationwide shouldn't be going up at all, but instead remaining a constant. I think that a larger pool of applicants and a higher percent of students applying is what is contributing to
applicants applying to more schools. The 1994-> 2006 drop is even more pronouced than you show because knowing a couple of the more recent figures it looks like you've cited 2004 rates instead of 2006 rates because I recognize that numbers for at least Princeton, Dartmouth, UChicago, Cornell, Brown, Middlebury, Colgate, Trinity were all lower for 2005 & 2006 than the figures you've listed.</p>
<ol>
<li> More high school graduates.</li>
<li> Most highly selective colleges aren't expanding the undergrad class.</li>
<li> As there are the same number of slots for more high school grads with top stats, admissions rates decline.</li>
<li> As admissions rates decline, kids apply to more schools because it becomes harder to predict admission.</li>
<li> Applying to more schools increases the number of apps, further pushing acceptances down.</li>
<li> The common app facilitates the process of applying to more colleges.</li>
<li> Marketing tends to benefit some schools at the expense of others. Note the difference between Wash. U (-43), which has an egregious reputation for over-the-top marketing and the results for Rice which, apparently, does little marketing.</li>
</ol>
<p>I think that the population growth naturally makes it harder to get into ANY school, obviously including the top ones. For example, a 100 years ago, it was much easier to get into Harvard because our population was much smaller.</p>
<p>The US News 2006 edition of America's Best Colleges uses acceptance rates from 2004. Maybe I will update this when US News updates their data. I know the Cornell acceptance rate went down but it is not reflected yet in the US News.</p>
<p>Not all of the increased admit rates can be attributed to a decrease in quality, selectivity (weird as it seems), or so forth. Mudd, for example, appears to have had a pretty significant increase, but it's also been rapidly growing in size of student body, maintaining a pretty special-interest, self-selected pool of applicants.</p>