I noticed the admission rate didn’t drop this year and is still at 29%. How come?
UNC-Chapel Hill’s admission rate dropped to 26% and is far more selective.
If UVA doesn’t lower its admission rate it will not remain competitive with its peers.
Your comment is only true if you believe that encouraging more kids to apply who will not get in equates to a better quality education. UVA will remain a great place whether they admit 29%, 26%, or even 32%. I guess you believe that lowering the rate will make UVA great again. You have spent too much time reading US News, and not what is important…Gaming one companies system, does not make a school better than it’s peers…
Ah but the school that teaches the difference between company’s and companies will be considered the best. 
What is important is how well a university will meet your needs and fit your interests.
UNC-CH unfortunately has its own problems with a Legislature that thinks they are a bastion of liberalism, and has been slashing their funding. In any case, by most measures, UVa is still more selective than UNC-CH, although both offer similar opportunities…
As noted above, there are some colleges that play games with statistics to raise their US News rankings. There are some colleges that actively encourage thousands of students to apply who have no chance of admittance, just so they appear to be more selective. There are some universities that have much larger marketing budgets than UVa. There are many colleges that try to buy students with the highest test scores with large merit aid offers. There are some colleges that place a much greater emphasis on SAT scores in admission so they can appear more selective. UVa does not offer admission to many students with extremely high SAT scores because they place more emphasis on academic achievements in high school.
There is such a huge self select out of applying to UVa (although I have to admit I do not know if that is also true of UNC-CH), that the acceptance rate I feel is higher than you’d expect. I know so many kids who would love to go there, but given the data that are so readily available nowadays, they just know they have no shot at their state flagship. It’s kind of sad for those kids, but true. Virginia also has so many great state colleges that many - after that initial, oh crap I’ll never get in to UVa thought - move on to more likely chances and don’t bother applying. And honestly, they seem to be very happy at those schools that are probably better matches to them. (proud JMU alum here - with one who got in to UVa and chose W&M last year and one who hopefully will end up at UVa - we will find out in another month).
Admissions rate is not indicative of quality.
By student profile based on standardized scoring, UVa, 56th in the below analysis, would appear to be comfortably positioned compared to both its regional and national peers:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-610-smartest-colleges-in-america-2015-9
(List not updated since 2015.)
A well-rounded admissions program looks at much more than standardized test scores. UVa officials have said that high school performance in demanding AP-level classes is a better indicator of college success than SAT scores.
In any case, we often get too caught up in measuring universities by their inputs (admittance difficulty) instead of their outputs (such as numbers of students admitted to med school or top law schools, or who are employed in their intended field, etc.).
@Charliesch : Post #6 was intended as a response to the assertion in the original post that UNC-CH (88th in the BI analysis) “is far more selective” than UVa (#56). The introduction of entering factors (even if limited ones) appears necessary to address that point.
UNC and UVA are both great schools and very similar to each other in many respects.
Admit rates are influenced by many different factors and don’t tell you much by itself.
For example, UNC is only about 19% out-of-state as compared to UVA’s 33%. Yield on OOS offers is a lot lower than IS offers. So if UVA is filling almost twice as many OOS seats as UNC does, then you might expect UVA to have to make comparatively more admit offers than UNC. Which would translate into a higher admit rate at UVA. Or it could be due to a hundred other things.
More important is who actually enrolls and attends the school. UVA’s middle 50% on ACT is 29-33. UNC reports 28-32. And USNWR ranks UVA at tied for #24, while UNC limps in at a lowly #30. : )
Oh the Tar Heel shame!!!
UVa’s yield rate is much higher for accepted in-state students than accepted OOS because: 1) UVa is more affordable to Va. residents, and 2) it is within a 1.5 to 3 hour drive for most Virginians, which is considered an optimum distance by many young people (not too close and not too far away).
Meanwhile, the average successful OOS applicant will have a larger number of quality colleges to choose from, including colleges that are offering them large amounts of merit aid or less work study hours.