Isn't College Admission supposed to be Getting Less Competitive?

Parents Forum
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@TiggerDad, I based my characterization of you position in this debate on your #54, in which you listed stats from The Price of Admission and said that the percentages of hooked applicants are filling up (at least most of) the bottom 25th percentiles (which you doubled down on in #59). I simply argue that you can’t make the claim that hooked applicants fill (at least most of) the 25th percentile, not least because you don’t know the academic stats of the hooked applicant pool. ETA: And since there are a limited number of slots at any given “elite” college, it follows directly from your claims that such hooked students would be filling slots that would otherwise go to other, more highly-qualified students. (And I put “taking away” in quotation marks as scare-quotes, not as a direct quote.)

@roethlisburger, I’ve read Hurwitz’s study, though it was admittedly a good while ago. From my recollection (buttressed by looking it up and giving it a quick re-scan), it makes a lot of common-sense but not necessarily warranted assumptions. (Really, if I were doing a peer review of a study like that, I’d recommend it make it through but not without adding a lot more clear hedges.) Also, as @CaliDad2020 points out, it’s based in what are now rather dated numbers, and so not necessarily entirely useful for a thread that is grounded in a question about recent demographic trends.

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@dfbdfb “hooked” by definition means receiving a boost over “unhooked”. Lets just for simplicity sake assume there are 100 kids in the admits pool and 67 of them being hooked. If you rank the 67 of these hooked kids, for every top 33 of these hooked kid there is an unhooked kid who is ranked higher. So when Tiggerdad said the bottom 25 kids would be mostly or all hooked kids what would be so difficult to understand.

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@dfbdfb

“I based my characterization of you position in this debate on your #54, in which you listed stats from The Price of Admission and said that the percentages of hooked applicants are filling up (at least most of) the bottom 25th percentiles (which you doubled down on in #59). I simply argue that you can’t make the claim that hooked applicants fill (at least most of) the 25th percentile, not least because you don’t know the academic stats of the hooked applicant pool.”

Yes, I made the claim that the 25th percentile is largely made up of hooked applicant based on my knowledge of lower stats recruited athletes, URMs and others bring and how it’s extremely unlikely to see unhooked students with lower stats being able to be admitted at elite schools in enough numbers to make up the majority of that 25th percentile. Sure, this can be a contentious issue and debatable, but for you to make an absolutely false statement that I made the claim that the quoted 60% of hooked students are “taking away” the slots from unhooked students was really twisted. To repeat again, I’m only interested in answering the OP’s original thread question. I DON’T take issues with what’s right or wrong. If elite schools want to accept 60-70% hooked students to make each year’s class, it’s their prerogative. No matter how each student gets in – and no matter with what “low” stats – I say great!

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This thread has gotten sidetracked into a debate about hooked v. unhooked admits. The simplest answer to the OP’s question is to look at the admissions statistics. Yale, for example, had 21,101 applicants a decade ago, in the 2006 application cycle. In 2016 that figure was 31,347—a 48.6% increase. The size of its entering class increased a modest 4.3% over that same period, from 1,315 to 1,371, while Yale’s admit rate shrunk from 8.9% to 6.4%. Interestingly, yield held more or less constant at around 70%. Meanwhile, the academic stats of the entering class, while already very strong a decade ago, bumped up perceptibly. SAT middle 50% increased only modestly, CR from 700-790 to 710-800 and M from 690-790 to 710-800… But the percentage of enrolled freshmen scoring 700+ climbed from 76% in CR and 73% in M a decade ago, to 80% in CR and 81% in M in 2016. And the increases in median ACT scores were quite dramatic, from 29-34 a decade ago to 32-35 in 2016. So yes, it’s gotten harder to gain admission to Yale over the last decade. Year-by-year comparisons are less dramatic, but the overall trend is clear, and appears to be continuing: more applicants, lower admit rates, higher entering class stats.

And the trend lines are similar at other tippy-top schools, in some cases even more dramatic. At Northwestern, for example, applications nearly doubled in a decade, from 18,385 in 2006 to 35,100 in 2016, while the admit rate declined from 29.6% to 10.7%. Meanwhile, middle 50% test scores increased sharply, from 650-740 to 690-760 CR and 670-760 to 710-800 M, and from 29-33 to 32-34 ACT.

There are many reasons for this, many already mentioned in this thread: more international applicants, a higher percentage of each age cohort attending college, more applications per applicant, and more “flight to quality” in what has been a very difficult job market for millennials. So despite the fact that the number of new HS graduates has plateaued or even declined in some places, it continues ot get more difficult to gain admission to the most attractive colleges. Interestingly, though, these trends at the top private schools have not come at the expense of state flagships, many (or most?) of which are experiencing parallel trends, probably because they, too, are perceived as being on the plus side of the educational quality divide. At my state flagship (Minnesota), for example, applications more than doubled from 24,660 in 2006 to 49,129 in 2016, while ACT medians jumped from 23-28 to 26-31 over the same period.

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The state flagships may also be attracting more students who see the private schools’ higher costs as undesirable. Of course, the losers are likely to be the private schools which are expensive, but not seen as being any better than a comparably-selective in-state public school.

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@bclintonk just for clarity, since 2007 or so the % of US 18-24’s attending college has been essentially flat.

@ucbalumnus UCLA topped 100k applicants a few years ago, a 1st for UCs

The unanswered question in all this is whether these applicants are serious and competitive.

I would guess a good % of the increased applicants are neither serious nor competitive. Having not watched a few graduation years of neices, nephews and kids go through this, is that schools are marketing much more aggressively, and therefore encouraging more applications (perhaps cynically to lower admit %? And then some yield protect from those increased admissions to also maintain high USNews scores.) My own recent applicant got a surprising volume of marketing materials from a couple of very low % admissions Universities, despite having shown only the most passing of interest or barely any interest at all.

One would want to somehow tease out some of the stats for these applicant polls to see if the pool of quality applicants has increased and how many are cross-applicants. Did good students in 2000 apply to one or two “select” schools and would the same applicant today apply to 5 or 6 “select” schools? I don’t know the answer to any of this, but it seems that the numbrer of unique US 18-24 year olds apply to colleges has not increased in the past 10 years, so the increased applications are due to either: international applicants, more “cross-applicants,” effective marketing by competitive schools, more US students applying to more schools or at least more of the “selective” schools.

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“…so the increased applications are due to either: international applicants, more “cross-applicants,” effective marketing by competitive schools, more US students applying to more schools or at least more of the “selective” schools.”

To this I’d add the fear factor that’s gripping prospective college applicants and their parents. They feel that the chances of being admitted to the most selective colleges is now like a lottery, and like lottery, people feel that their chances are better by buying more lottery tickets. That’s the candidate who sent out applications to 15-20 schools. Given this year’s record-setting (again) selectivity rates at the most selective schools, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the growth in that 15-20 club. So while “the % of US 18-24’s attending college has been essentially flat,” I don’t see the number of applications diminishing anytime soon. Fear feeds frenzy.

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As a college degree has gotten more common, there’s a flight to quality – putting more of a premium on getting into a top school.

Increasing apps to top schools probably isn’t coming from unqualified kids tossing darts. But those apps don’t make the market more competitive although they would drive down the admit rate. Just noise.

More likely it has been coming from more qualified kids entering the pool to compete for a spot at a top school. That would increase competition because it would reflect more qualified unique applicants entering that market for the same number of seats. The fact that ENROLLED student stats keep increasing suggests that is what is going on. New qualified internationals jumping into the pool would do the same thing. My guess is that these two phenomena are played out. And so you won’t see continued increases in enrolled student stats.

The number of apps is also being driven by qualified candidates submitting more apps per applicant. My guess is that this is being driven a lot by ED, which drives up yields and therefore drives down admits rates in the RD rounds. But this is just noise too. Since the competitiveness of the market is really driven by only one thing – how many qualified applicants are chasing how many seats at the top schools.

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Check out this video beginning at about the 5:30 mark. Best summary I’ve seen on actually describing how the market works.

There’s about 50k HS kids per year who are in the top 1% as measured by grades and/or test scores.

The top 15 schools enroll about 25k students per year. About one-third of that enrollment is for kids getting enrolled without top 1% stats. That’s the hooks – athletes, URMs, etc.

So there’s only about 15k seats available to the 50k kids in the top 1%. That’s the real measure of the competitiveness of the market. Because of that competitiveness, those top 1% put in an average of 10 apps per kid. That 10 average number will probably continue to grow, although it really doesn’t change the fundamental ratio of 50k kids chasing 15k seats.

The 16-30 schools enroll another 38k kids per year fwiw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DQOPx1EGE8

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You’re right, @northwesty, that there’s been a flight to quality (though I’d amend that to “a flight to perceived quality”), but we’d all do well to remember that that flight to quality has been happening in a rather narrow slice of the college-bound population. The part of the population that CC generally draws from isn’t representative of the population as a whole, and we’d all do well to keep that in mind when having these discussions.

This leads back to the OP’s original question, because given that the number of college-oriented students who are completely shut out of going to college for non-financial reasons is incredibly small (reference: the Department of Education’s own numbers on college-bound students and college attendance), the answer to that question must simply be “no”.

For those who think “college” means only HYPSM or WASP? Quite certainly, given their admit percentage trends, the answer is “yes”—but that’s not college admission, that’s admission to specific schools. That’s an incredibly different issue.

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@TiggerDad But at the end of the day, to the extent that a kid who used to apply to 2 Ivies is now applying to 8, this should not really make much difference in the competitiveness, just in the appearance of competitiveness (assuming, of course, said applicant would have gotten into one of the 2 Ivies on his original list, thus rendering the other 6 as “safties” the student didn’t attend.) Each kid can still only go to one school.

If @northwesty numbers are correct, for the top US 1-30 ranked schools there are enough seats to take all 50k “top 1% for grades and test scores.” (Depending on how you count 1-15 National U’s just gets you all 8 Ivies - Brown/Cornell = 15 [and leaves out ND, Vandy, WashUSTL, Cal, UCLA etc] Top 15 LACs gets you to Haverford…). (BTW, the Ivies, MIT and Stanford alone admit 26,000 students each year… so I’m not so confident about that 25k for the top 15 number, or, if correct, it excludes Cornell and Brown and probably JHU in favor of Williams, Amherst and Colby or similar small schools.)

So the reality probably is that for the past 8 or so years, since the % of US 18-24’s attending schools has flatlined, the increase in competitiveness, to the extent it exists, has been fueled by international applicants.

If current politics depress or stagnate the international application pool, then competitiveness will most certainly inch down, but probably not so much that HS seniors notice!

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“Having not watched a few graduation years of neices, nephews and kids go through this, is that schools are marketing much more aggressively, and therefore encouraging more applications (perhaps cynically to lower admit %? And then some yield protect from those increased admissions to also maintain high USNews scores.)”

Yes agree on all this but, UC’s don’t market themselves that aggressively at least to in-states. My son got like 30 marketing pieces from Chicago, WUSTL, NYU, but like 1 or 2 from the UCs, if any. Now it’s possible that they aggressively market to out of staters, but I kind of doubt it - they may not have the money to and they really don’t need to if they’re getting 80K apps on average.

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@theloniusmonk yes. we are in state, very little from UCs, but Ivies and other “top 20” schools sent stuff like they had open seats they were desperate to fill.

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@northwesty, there are about 3.5 million high school graduates annually in the U.S., so 35,000 would be in the top 1%. But I’d dispute your claim that only the top 1% by grades and/or test scores are competitive for unhooked admission to the “top 15” schools. That may be true at HYP, but not so just a rung below that.

An ACT composite of 33+ puts you in the top 1% of test-takers. But published Common Data Sets suggest that half or more of the entering class at some “top 15” schools (as ranked by US News) are below that level. Middle 50% ACT at Duke is 31-34, Brown 31-34, Cornell 31-34, Dartmouth 30-34.

Similarly with SAT scores. You’d need to score 740+ to be in the top 1% on CR. Some middle 50% SAT CR scores from top schools: Dartmouth 670-780, JHU 670-750, Duke 680-770, Brown 680-780, Cornell 650-750, Northwestern 690-750: And you need to score 790+ to be in the top 1% on M. Some middle 50% M scores: Dartmouth 680-780, JHU 690-780, Duke 770-800, Brown 690-780, Cornell 680-780, Northwestern 710-800.

Also note that the percentile ranks drop pretty sharply after the top 1%. A 32 ACT, which puts you right around the middle of the class at some of these schools, is 97th percentile. A 730 SAT CR is also 97th percentile, but that puts you at or above the middle of the class at some of these schools. A 740 SAT M is 97th percentile, but that also puts you at or above the middle of the class at a number of them.

A likelier estimate is that an unhooked applicant probably needs to be in the top 2 or 3% to be truly competitive at “top 15” schools, perhaps a bit higher at HYPSM. That’s still a pretty exalted level, but it doubles or triples the size of the competitive applicant pool. But you also need to consider that not everyone in that top 2 to 3%–or even the top 1%— even applies to the top private schools. Many top-stats applicants are perfectly happy to attend their state flagship., especially at the better flagships. Fully a quarter of the entering class at Michigan have ACT scores that put them in the top 1% of ACT takers. Some of these are OOS, and many applied to Ivies and other top private schools, but many–especially Michigan residents—didn’t. The evidence suggests that very few Michigan residents apply to or attend top private schools, relative to the size of the college-bound cohort.

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It’s not only at the top private schools that college admissions has become more competitive. Many state flagships are experiencing the same “flight to quality,” albeit at a slightly lower level of selectivity… Applications have gone through the roof in the last 10 years at each of the 9 Midwestern publics that form the traditional core of the Big Ten: Michigan up 115%, Illinois up 165%, Ohio State up 145%, Minnesota up 99%, Iowa up 99%, Purdue up 88%, Michigan State up 61%, Wisconsin up 51%, Indiana up 35%.

And with bigger applicant pools, entering class stats have also moved sharply higher at most of these schools. In 2006, Michigan’s middle 50% ACT was 27-31; in 2016 it was 29-33, and they’re reporting 30-34 for the 2017 admissions cycle. Illinois saw an even bigger jump, from 23-27 to 26-32. Minnesota, 23-28 to 26-31. Ohio State, 24-29 to 27-31. Purdue 23-28 to 25-31. Michigan State 22-27 to 24-29. Indiana 22-27 to 24-30.

Keep in mind that this is a region where population growth has been very slow, in some cases even negative, and with aging populations the annual number of HS grads has been steady or declining. But I think many students who in the past would have been content to attend a lower-tier public or private college are seeking out quality, and in many cases that means the state flagship.

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BC – those numbers are right from the head of admissions at Notre Dame. Watch his presentation before flyspecking, OK?

I’m thinking he wouldn’t put that out there publicly if his numbers were made up.

Note that he said (and therefore I said) top 1% by test scores AND/OR GRADES. Which is different than top 1% by test scores alone. Sheesh…

: )

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Well, not only that—there are plenty of top-stats applicants who have utterly no desire to attend an “elite” college at all, including high-end state flagships.

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FWIW, here’s actual recent (rounded) numbers of acceptances at 20 USNEWS top schools - 8 Ivies, MIT, Stanford, UChicago, JHU, Duke, Top 5 LACs, 2 top publics: (class of 2020 or 21)

Harvard - 2100
Cornell - 5900
Columbia - 2200
Penn - 3700
Princeton - 1900
Dartmouth - 2100
Yale - 2250
Brown - 2700
Mit - 1450
Stanford - 2050
Williams - 1200
Amherst - 1100
Wellesley - 1200
Middlebury - 1700
Swarthmore - 1000
UChicago - 2400
Duke - 3400
JHU - 3250
Cal - 12,000
Mich - 16,000

That’s ~70000 offers of “elite” admission offered (not 70k unique students as many/most are probably multiple cross-admits. Could probably figure a close number by comparing to actual acceptances). This doesn’t account for internationals (probably <10%) and obviously leaves out any number of schools still considered elite (including ND, WashUStl, Gerogetown etc.)

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Agreed. But the data suggest that many more high-stats applicants are choosing state flagships than in the relatively recent past. And at least here in the Midwest we hear from a lot of loyal alums of the state flagships who say they couldn’t get in under today’s admission standards, and they worry about their kids who may have similar stats to the parents and in the past would have been shoo-ins for admission to “the U” but now are at best borderline applicants. They say it with a mixture of bewilderment, pride in their alma mater, and genuine worry and frustration over what it means for their kids’ future.

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Yeah, it’s tough! My grandmother, aunt, uncle, parents, and I all graduated from UT-Austin. Not one kid in the next generation will, and it wasn’t because they weren’t interested in attending (my oldest matriculated but had to withdraw for medical reasons).