In today’s Wall St. Journal there was an article about Vermont colleges closing and other colleges struggling in part due to the “shrinking” number of high school graduates. If the bell hit the top and the US is on a decline with regard to the number of people applying to college, why is it now getting harder to get into many colleges. I don’t just mean Ivies. I mean second tier schools. A near perfect ACT or SAT with a good GPA and hard course rigor doesn’t mean an applicant will be admitted. Even 10 years ago, those credentials would be sufficient for most schools other than Ivies. Does anyone have insight into this issue?
Perhaps because strong students who previously would have been satisfied with less selective schools may now be trying for more selective (even if not the most selective) schools.
Also, certain majors like CS have increased in popularity, so competition has increased for them at schools that admit by major.
More students as a percentage of grads pursuing college. More pursuing the same 100. International students from Asia and India. 100mm more Americans than 30 years ago. More non traditional students. And more going to cc not as a terminal degree but to aim towards top 100.
Those are my guesses.
@OP: Winners-take-all attitude, with brand names thriving, and less USNWR “worthy” institutions in decline, especially small and remote ones?
In addition to the reasons offered above, as admissions get tougher people apply to more schools which leads to lower admit rates which leads to people perceiving admissions as getting tougher and so on and so on.
When I graduated from a highly ranked MA public high school in 1980, applying to 4-5 schools was normal and 8 was a lot. D19, who is about to,graduate from a highly ranked NY public school, applied to 10, which seems like a reasonable number these days.
A few things that come to mind:
One issue is more inconsistency in admissions. Way back when I was in high school there were kids who applied to one or two universities. Personally I applied to two. We knew where we were going to get in. When my daughters were in high school I looked at those little scatter plots of who did and who did not get into various schools with various GPA’s and SAT scores. It was exceptionally uneven. If admissions is unpredictable, this forces students to apply to more schools. More applicants makes it more difficult for the universities to predict yield, and leads to yield protection.
I think that there are more students who are thinking of trying to get into the highest ranked schools. A lot of students used to just go to the closest pretty good university.
The other thing is that there are more students with higher GPAs than there used to be. When I graduated high school there was no one in the high school who was even remotely close to having straight A’s. I do not know whether this is grade inflation, or if there are just more strong students. The papers that I saw coming off the printer when my kids were in high school were better than anything that I ever wrote in high school. The papers that got A’s recently would have gotten A’s back when I was in school also.
Computers and the Internet might have actually helped to make students stronger in some dimensions. Certainly many of us write a lot more than we used to. We can also look up historical facts, scientific facts, or mathematical derivations. SAT preparation has increased the number of near perfect scores.
A lot of the recent immigrants to the US are academically very strong (and are excellent co-workers in many cases). Their kids are often also strong students. While many of these are from Asia, many are from other parts of the world.
I think that a big part of this is that a higher percentage of high school students are very strong students today compared to back when I was in high school.