Looks like Grinnell Admissions is Going to be a whole lot tougher

<p>Yes, even in the midwest, your “average Joe” generally has not heard of Grinnell. Or Carleton. Or other LACs. But those who have heard of Grinnell almost always seem to know it is extremely rigorous, selective and provides an excellent education. More importantly, grad schools are very familiar with Grinnell’s sterling reputation. But for those who need the ego boost that comes from broad name recognition, don’t attend Grinnell.</p>

<p>and speaking of the benefits of the Social Justice Prize – and whether faculty support it or not – this was just posted on the Prize’s FAcebook page:
“Tilly Woodward will be traveling to Ghana this summer to complete a staff service fellowship with 2011 Prizewinner James Kofi Annan’s organization Challenging Heights. Tilly has served as Faulconer Gallery’s curator of academic and community outreach since 2007. She works to infuse art into the life of the community on and off campus through events and programs built to serve the educational goals of the Faulconer Gallery and partner needs. You can find her organizing an academic panel related to an exhibition or working with children to cover a pickup truck with Elmer’s Glue and glitter. She has a long history of initiating arts outreach projects designed to help communities address specific social issues, foster creativity, build tolerance and compassion, and is well known for her meticulously detailed paintings which have been extensively exhibited and collected.”</p>

<p>“Well, you’re better at math than I am, but I think the currant president has worked at getting the word out internationally and I believe that Grinnell gives better FA offers to international students than many other LACs.”</p>

<p>I’m not sure why Grinnell would be interested in “getting the word out,” if all that means is that int’l apps are driven from 900 (last year) to 1500 this year, when Grinnell knows it is going to admit the same number of int’l applicants and shoot for the same goal of 12% int’l enrollment. I can’t believe that getting 600 more int’l applicants improves the int’l applicant pool in any appreciable way, my guess is you just get 600 more kids with perfect/near perfect SATs, high grades, etc. Seems like nothing more than an effort to pump up their numbers, i.e., lower their admit rate, for rankings purposes. I know many (almost all?) schools do this, but guess I had some idea Grinnell was different.</p>

<p>yeah, not really sure what this is about. The only plus I can see besides ranking is finding greater diversity by students from more countries applying. And I don’t know if that’s so. I would support greater diversity but that’s just me. And my kid was a history major so every student from every state and country was an asset.</p>

<p>I don’t know if it’s so either, and I also think more diversity is better than less. But I would guess that an awful lot of the additional 600 apps are from China and India, because that is what is happening around the country. And it won’t result in more Chinese or Indian kids being at Grinnell, Grinnell (like other colleges in the US) was already getting a disproportionately high (relative to the number of kids that will be accepted) number of apps from those countries. Maybe Grinnell gets one kid from Outer Mongolia that it would not have gotten without the “outreach,” and the school and all of the students there are better off for having the kid from Outer Mongolia there, but I don’t think that’s what this really is about. It’s about driving up apps for ranking purposes. Again, I understand that all schools do this, I am jumping on Grinnell’s practice only because my son is very interested in the school and I have taken the time to drill down a bit on what is happening there. I guess it’s a parent’s frustration with the recognition at how much of a game it all is.</p>

<p>It’a a game Grinnell hasn’t played in the past. I had only one year and limited contact with the current president, so can’t really speak to the present. Maybe someone else can. It is a wonderful school and I don’t think that will change, but each administration has its own take on things.</p>

<p>I really agree with this. I teach at a university and the dean is obsessed with U.S. News rankings, because the Board of Trustees is obsessed with the rankings. It’s crazy that our higher education system is being driven by an idiosyncratic, unreliable (I mrean methodologically), biased ranking system in a mid-level news magazine that will probably not last out the decade. People make life decisions based on this, and you would not believe the ways in which it drives academic decision making processes. Anybody who falls outside the box UNWR has drawn has a really hard time. Grinnell is one of the last hold outs, but I can completely understand why they have to get in the game. It is what it is. But it leads me to wonder - Have we all gone crazy?</p>

<p>It is a dumb way to pick a school. My son did not look at the USN rankings at all in making his decision. I was aware of them, but tried not to let them influence my thought process. I really admire how Reed and Sarah Lawrence have resisted this nonsense. Since all of the schools on his list were great academically, he was able to decide based on fit.</p>

<p>Re the discussion above, according to the New York Times Grinnell’s yield this year was 30.1%, down from 35.4% last year, a drop of about 15%, and 60 kids were admitted from the waitlist. This is a larger drop than any other school discussed in the times piece, which included a number of peer schools (Bates, Colby, Middlebury). 30.1% appears to put Grinnell at the low end of its peer group, which seems to run 36 or 37% up into the low 40’s. Next year it could be even harder to get it right–in addition to kids applying to more schools because of the common app and the increase in international apps, this year’s senior class in the US is the smallest in years.</p>

<p>Maybe it will be tougher, maybe it won’t. I was very disappointed to see the drop in test score range of 2011 freshmen vs 2010 freshmen. If they are being more demanding, why the drop in scores of admitted? Any suspicions?</p>

<p>[Common</a> Data Set - Institutional Research | Grinnell College](<a href=“http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/institutionalresearch/CDS]Common”>http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/institutionalresearch/CDS)</p>

<p>2010-2011 Reading Math
700-800 44.25% 42.48%
600-699 35.84% 36.28%
500-599 15.93% 15.49%
400-499 3.54% 5.75%
300-399 0.44% 0.00%</p>

<p>2011-2012/Reading/Math
700-800 37.10% 32.10%
600-699 38.40% 47.30%
500-599 21.40% 17.00%
400-499 3.10% 3.60%</p>

<p>1bie, those are not the statistics for the incoming class. This year, the admissions department developed a new recruiting strategy to broaden and strengthen the pool of applicants. So, they got many more applicants this year, with increases from all regions of the country. We will have to wait for the Common Data Set to see the credentials of that class. But, whatever the case, I’m sure the story is more than SAT scores…</p>

<p>Regarding the yield: I read something by Dr. Kington (college president) that they expected a drop in yield this year because of the change in admissions recruiting.</p>

<p>And, when Grinnell talks about expanding its applicant pool, it is also working to increase diversity. That is an important part of its mission, and while it is more diverse than most LACs, it is something the school continues to work hard on.</p>

<p>Well, I posted the statistics for the class that I care about, Class of 2015, and my post was how the CDS 2011-12 compared to the CDS 2010-11. The percentiles trended down, for some logical reason. The 2010-11 CDS was the one that I analyzed for bunches of LACs, back when it was our turn in the hopper. </p>

<p>Yield is a marketing number that is of course very important to the colleges, but is not particularly important to applicants. However I would care about the test score ranges, and would look at those trends if we had to go through this again, God forbid, because they could be an indicator of admission priorities, and therefore the school’s future academic reputation.</p>

<p>Yield says something about whether a school is a first choice for the applicant, or at least the first choice of the schools an applicant is admitted to. A drop in yield of 15% is significant, and I think goes to the points made above. A school’s applications don’t go up 50% in one year because something great has happened at the school, or all of the sudden a bunch of kids have figured out they really want to go there. When we visited, Grinnell made much of the jump in applications. The admissions counselor at the info session said that the jump was due to “improved search terms,” whatever that means. But, I think what has happened is there was a conscious decision there to drive applications up, for what purpose other than rankings I don’t know. Whether this increased applicant pool leads to an improved student body I think is the important question. Grinnell may end up losing kids who otherwsie would have gone there–my older son and a number of his friends chose to attend lower ranked schools they were accepted at over schools they were wait listed and then accepted, they wanted to go to a school that “really wanted them,” and once these 18 year old brains think they know what they are doing it’s not so easy to get them to change course–for the sake of getting more apps from kids who probably never would go there.</p>

<p>@SDonCC,
The college newspaper said that the test scores were up considerably (it said 29-33 ACT, don’t remember if it said the SAT range).</p>

<p>@nepop,
Grinnell’s yield has never been fantastic, since it’s out in the middle of Nowhere, Iowa. Naturally, if they market themselves to more prospective students, their yield will go down, since there’s less self-selection going on in determining who applies to the college. Even with the reduced yield, the class of 2016 is probably the strongest class Grinnell has had in a long time, since they had so many more people to choose from.</p>

<p>About the SAT range posted earlier: Yes, it is from the incoming class. The Common Data Set says: “Percent and number of first-time, first-year (freshman) students enrolled in Fall 2011 who submitted national standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores.”</p>

<p>Enrolled is different from applied.</p>

<p>But I don’t doubt that this year’s class is definitely a strong one, since the test scores are not always the best indicator of the strength of the applicants. Perhaps the students attributing to the lower range had other excellent qualities.</p>

<p>I’m sure we’ve all read Colleges That Change Lives. It’s not about the test scores going in. It’s about the students that come out on the other end. My son did have the test scores and could have chosen a USN higher ranked school. He only paid attention to how this place felt to him and how it felt was right. It took me a while to understand his decision but once I got it, I really did. These are all really smart kids who can do the work and they are incredibly diverse and unconventional thinkers who want to learn. They have all these wacky parties and great things to do on the weekends but my son often said that his favorite thing was just hanging out with friends and talking…about ideas.</p>

<p>No big mystery. The main reason for the huge increase in applications, the increase in ACT scores, and paradoxically the yield going down this year was the fact that this is the first year that Grinnell joined the Quest Scholar network via the QUestbridge scholarship match program.</p>

<p>Questbridge prequalifies students as Ivy and Top LAC ready, the student finalists then select which of the partner schools they want their applications sent out to. The partner schools then have several thousand prequalified top students added to their application total. however, these are top students with compelling stories, great grades and high test scores and so many Ivys snap them up as well as Grinnell and other small LACs, the students may be admitted to Grinnell but also Yale, Williams, Swarthmore, Amherst, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, U of Chicago, Reed, Pomona, Rice, UPenn etc and the student accepted at Grinnell and several other partner schools will then typically have a hard choice to make and may not choose Grinnell. </p>

<p>If you have a question, why don’t you just call the admissions office and ask? :)</p>

<p>Well, I spoke to a person in the admissions office while visiting, and, while she made much of the 50% jump in applications, she did not even mention Questbridge. So, maybe it depends on who picks up the phone at the admissions office when you just call and ask. And while Questbridge may have had some impact, I don’t think you are correct that the main reason for the huge increase in applications is Questbridge. 40%, from 900 to 1500 (the total jumped from 3000 to 4500), of the increase was in international applications, which has nothing to do with Questbridge. I don’t know, but I would be surprised if Grinnell received more than a few hundred applications from Questbridge, if that. And Questbridge does not “prequalify” kids as Ivy Lweague and top LAC ready. The goal of Questbridge is to connect high achieving kids who might not have the resources to find some of the top schools with such schools. They go through the same application process as any other applicant.</p>

<p>Does anyone actually know the acceptance rate (not including internationals) for 2011? I wondering in terms of early decision, regular decision, and overall. I know 2010 was 43 percent overall. What about ACT test scores? I would really like to go in and I would love to have a better feel for my chances just based on the statistics.</p>

<p>The Fall 2011 overall acceptance rate was 50.9%. The ED acceptance rate was 50.3%. Regular decision was 50.97%. Hard to puzzle out what the domestic acceptance rates were. If you back out the international applicants, I believe that you end up with approx. 1200 admits overall out of approx. 1800 applicants overall, so 65% +/-. Don’t know on domestic ED. Per some of the posts above, quite a bit more competitive for this year’s freshman class.</p>