I got into Northeastern as an RD applicant about a week ago and was just wondering how selective the school really is and whether or not it has a reputable name. Any input would be greatly appreciated!
It is probably one of if not the hottest school in the northeast right now. They’ve become very selective and have worked the ratings game to become more attractive. Those efforts are paying off.
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/
I agree that Northeastern has become the hottest school in the northeast, just as Tulane has become the hottest school in the southeast:) To provide you some historical perspective and context, it has come a long way from 40 years ago when it was basically open admissions, not highly ranked, and had limited regional appeal. But it has reinvented and transformed itself tremendously since then by expanding, purchasing lots of property around the campus, building, building and more building! It has hired excellent professors and become very selective in admissions seeking high stat students with great credentials. And, as the poster above noted, increased its ranking by knowing how to excel in meeting the criteria used by US News &WoekdReport to rank colleges. It now has a national reputation because of the strength of its academic programs, great location in Boston area and especially because of it’s co-op program which, along with Drexel, are two of the best such coop programs in the country. Sometimes it is confused —due to similar sounding names, with Northwestern, which is ranked #10 in the USNews&World Report national university listing. Northeastern is ranked #44 in the national universities of USNews&World Report.
@uw0tm8 Did you consider posting on the College Search and Selection forum? Likely to get more input and varied responses over there. There is also a Northeastern forum, but Search and Selection will give you different answers from a wider group people if you are looking for a broader opinion.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/northeastern-university/
I think the move up in rankings has more to do with the popularity of there Co-op programs that they center the university around then “gaming” the rankings. You really do have to offer something that applicants want and get results from (better employment prospects). People always assume that something is nefarious when your just offering a better product that is fairly unique.
The acceptance rate last year was 19%. That’s pretty selective.
I’m confused at to why you would apply to a school you know so little about. A school’s reputation and its selectivity should absolutely be one of the main data points when choosing a school. That being said, last year and this year Northeastern had over 62,000 applications for 2,800 slots in its freshman class with a 2018 acceptance rate of 19%. This year’s number is projected to be lower with nothing official released at this time. I urge you to spend some time reading the Northeastern College Confidential forum, especially the RD and EA decision threads. There you will see the amazing credentials of both students accepted and denied admission. Many are top tier students who could also be contenders for Ivy’s.
Northeastern is an ascending university…as others have noted, one of the great success stories of the past 20 years. However, be aware that the selectivity #s (e.g. 19% accepted) and the reported SAT/ACT #s are significantly distorted because of the NU.in program, which allows Northeastern to exclude much of the bottom 20 % of the freshman class from statistical reporting. There are close to 1000 freshman in the NU.in program that are not counted as “enrolled freshman” on the common data set reporting. The SAT scores of students in the NU.in program are likewise excluded from the middle 50% statistics cited by the NU admissions office. When NU.in is included, the acceptance rate is closer to 35%
@dtrain1027 If you skim through the decision thread the stats of students offered NUIn are not in the bottom 20%.
@TomSrOfBoston, as you know better than most, the decision thread on this site is anecdotal and has a sample bias in favor of higher stats applicants. . The Northeastern website concedes that NU.in is for students who are not otherwise admissible…“ The N.U.in Program offers well-qualified applicants—to whom we were not able to offer admission in the fall—the opportunity to join our community”. The applicants admitted in the NU.in program are not included in the USNews ranking data or the common data set. The NU.in program makes Northeastern appear much more selective than it actually is.
While there absolutly is a US News stats component to it, I have been collecting the numbers from this year’s admissions cycles (so far only EA has been processed) and while it is unlikely you will be offered NU.in for certain high stat levels (only 3 NU.in acceptances with ACT over 33), NU.in decisions are very mixed together from other ranges below that on particular line. I’m going to be releasing a lot more synthesis later, but for now, I’d note that there are NU.in acceptances that have both higher ACT/GPA than over 1/3rd of the posted admits on CC that are also in the middle 50% for both GPA and ACT.
While there’s absolutely reporting bias from collecting data from CC, I’m not sure how much that bias would affect comparing NU.in vs traditional acceptances. It would absolutely show through in admit rate (which EA has at over 50% for example) and likely in the profiles of rejected students, but the acceptance data should be relatively balanced IMO.
Based on that, the data basically showed that if you are at a 32 ACT/4.5W GPA or lower and are accepted, it’s a 50/50 chance you get NU.in and that chance doesn’t actually increase with lower stat ranges. We’ll have to also see about RD but that’s held for EA. A 32ACT is under the middle 50% but 4.5W GPA is above the top 75%. So as one would expect, since US News only officially pays attention to test scores, NU.in acceptances are most often high GPA applicants with relatively lower test scores. Still though, there is no hard line based on ACT/GPA that defines an NU.in admit vs a Fall admit.
It’s also worth noting that the stats of NU.in admits are not staggeringly lower than fall admits - The average NU.in acceptance for EA was 31.3ACT/4.19W GPA compared to a CC reported fall acceptance profile of 33.75ACT/4.28W GPA. The closeness of that acceptance profile to that reported to US News seems to validate the lack of bias in this particular view of the data as well.
It’s worth noting that the profile for NU.in is pretty tight. On CC with about 200 data points there were 14 acceptances with ACT’s under 31. Of those only 6 were NU.in, making up less than 5% of the admitted student pool from CC. If you extrapolate the data above, here is a more accurate profile including NU.in (focusing on SAT over GPA given the variance in that data and the lesser correlation of it with NU.in acceptances:
Acceptance Rate:
- 19% acceptance rate from 2018
- 62K applicants this year
- assuming the same yield in both pools given lack of data
Estimate: 24.5%
ACT Range:
- Percentage of acceptances estimate: 25%ish = (1000ish/yield)/(3800/yield) = 1000ish/3800
- assume a 25% yield (about the number needed to make last years acceptance rate/applicant number work)
- Using approximate distribution of NU.in acceptances based on 2019 EA data
- 10% of top 50% and 40% of bottom 50% = 25% of total acceptances
- assuming somewhat even distribution of middle 50% given that no one here has that data
If 80% of NU.in students are bottom 50% (based on EA data that means 30-33.75) we add 3200 students to that bottom 50% and add 800 students to the top 50%.
New Top 50% number: 6400
New Bottom 50% number: 8800
New Denominator: 15200
The 4000 mark is about the 75th percentile, so that would put it 2/3rd’s the way through the top 50% (36-33.75). We know that distribution will be lower than even, so I think 34.5 is a fair guess. For the 25th percentile, we’re looking at 11,500ish for the line. That puts it right in the middle of the bottom 50% at about 31.9.
Adjusted Middle 50% Accepted ACT Range: 34.5-31.9
So, if we use that, let’s compare to the reported numbers:
Reported: 19%, 35-33
NU.in Adjusted: 24.5%, 34.5-31.9 (would be reported as 35-32 or 34-32)
After all this, the selectivity and student profile really doesn’t change much - certainly not to an almost doubled acceptance rate. The idea that NU.in is a hard line that drags down the middle 50% drastically really doesn’t check out. You have to remember that US News is a game of inches and while those profile differences may help with US News test score ranges, it doesn’t mean they have to be drastic differences.
This is all just a preview of future data to come though as I’m hoping to get a lot more interesting data once I add RD and look at factors such as major and if you apply for FA 
Note: I used ACT to standardize the data between SAT and ACT with the least loss/assumption of data, so it made sense to standardize to the least granular, ACT. There are also absolutely assumptions made in this data in an attempt to standardize many GPA formats and to estimate conclusions where insufficient data is present. While I had the data parsed, much of the calculations are ad-hoc and subject to rounding / error
@PengPhils, I appreciate the effort you have made here, but extrapolating based on a very small sample of self reported gpas and test scores of college confidential posters has virtually no value. Northeastern has decided not to disclose the number of admitted students who are offered NU.in (likely in the 4500-5500 range) or the percentage of freshman enrolled in NU.in (likely in the 15-25% range). The thousands of applicants admitted to the NU.in program are not included in the 19% admit rate you cite. Northeastern also refuses to list the number of applicants waitlisted or the number of waitlisted students who are subsequently admitted and enrolled (almost every other school in the USN top 50 provides this information as part of the common data set). Withholding this information is Northeastern’s right as an institution, but it’s also important to note that the reported admissions data makes NU seem more selective than it actually is.
@dtrain1027 I agree generally that the reported numbers are absolutely lower when you count NU.in (as is the case now with an increasing number of private schools in the top of the rankings), but I don’t think that using the numbers you cited in an estimation has no value at all. And regardless, throwing out a number like 35% without any estimation at all (as you did in your original post) is still much worse than trying to do the actual estimation. I’m not saying the numbers above are perfect but they are a lot better than anything else we have given the lack of disclosure. I don’t see how you can entirely discount a well-reasoned estimation (using the same numbers you guess/estimate) but then claim an entirely different number without backing or even an explanation of where the number came from.
Our Naviance shows ~50 applications per year. 29% acceptance rate - 4.02/1440 averages.Pretty hard line of 3.8 minimum for acceptance.
My nephew is a Jr. there and absolutely loves it. The oppotunities he’s had have been tremendous.
Our Naviance (good suburban public HS in NY) shows roughly 43% acceptance (60/141) to Northeastern over the past three years. 2018 was 18/43. For applicants with an UW average of 93 or better along with either SAT of 1380 or better/ACT of 31 or better admit rate was 90% (27 out of 30). Almost none of these applicants were URMs or otherwise hooked. Northeastern is a terrific school, with many great opportunities for students. There is no need to be secretive or mysterious in the way it reports its admissions data.
The acceptance rate from my daughter’s high school, over the last three years is 82%. It’s an early college public STEM residential school. So the kids had to apply to get in, with ACT scores, grades, ECs, etc. Our accepted average ACT is 33 and unweighted GPA is 3.84. I suggested at one point that Northeastern is a fan of my daughter’s high school and someone mentioned that very well could be. Coming from Kentucky, it’s fairly rare for a student to leave the state for college, but we’ve got several students from her high school there at NEU now.
Someone needs to stop this playing around with admissions seems BostonU and USC play that game too. I was shocked that USC excepts a huge transfer class… NEU has taught BU a bad habit … ship them overseas!
@airway1 I don’t know why BU is doing it but it seems that NEU is doing it at least partly to account for the vacancies created at the school during co-ops, thereby keeping the campus and coffers full year round. Also, it sounds like many if not most of the kids who participate in these programs report high levels of satisfaction with their experience and assimilate well upon their return to Boston (NEU). Just a thought.
@vpa2019 they are satisfied because they badly wanted to go to NEU… just watch all the posts on USC drives these kids crazy when rejected and offered transfer options…
At NEU they always had coop and always have no issues on campus… just info in 1992 NEU had 40k students this has become a game to get to the Harvard and MIT level… forgetting their core principles for ranking
At most colleges Co-op is called internships
At both schools it dovetails with their policy of urging students to have an international experience.