Low acceptance rates at schools with obvious transparent admissions criteria

Parents Forum
1

<p>Looking at the 100 lower acceptance rates for fall 2010 here:
Top</a> 100 - Lowest Acceptance Rates | Rankings | US News
it seems odd that some universities with obvious transparent admissions criteria have low acceptance rates.</p>

<p>For example, CSU East Bay has a 22% acceptance rate, lower than UCLA (23%), USC (24%), Harvey Mudd (25%), Notre Dame (29%), UNC Chapel Hill (32%), Cal Poly SLO (33%), CMU (33%), and Virginia (33%).</p>

<p>CSU East Bay is listed as "not campus impacted" for freshman admission here:
CSU</a> Campus Impaction Information | Student Academic Support | CSU
meaning that meeting minimum CSU eligibility criteria give admittance. This CSU eligibility criteria is shown here in a very transparent fashion (for California residents):
CSUMentor</a> - Plan for College - High School Students - Eligibility Index - California Residents</p>

<p>Given that it is pretty easy for a student and his/her high school guidance counselor to determine whether s/he will be admitted to CSU East Bay, one would expect that the majority of applicants would either know that they would be admitted, or know that they have no chance and do not apply (no guessing about opaque holistic criteria and the like). Only those who are depending on a late SAT or ACT score that subsequently proved insufficient would be getting rejections; it seems odd that that would be 78% of all freshman applicants.</p>

<p>It seems really strange that there are apparently a lot of students and/or high school guidance counselors who do not make use of available information to determine appropriate targets for college applications.</p>

2

<p>There must be something wrong with those numbers. Collegeboard reports a 73% admission rate for CSU East Bay.</p>

3

<p>Still, 73% seems low, given the transparency of the admissions criteria. Using the College Board’s numbers, the non-impacted CSUs have acceptance percentages ranging from 37% (Stanislaus) to 85% (Dominguez Hills).</p>

4

<p>I wonder if high schools get some ranking boost or No Child Left Behind points for the percentage of students who APPLY to college, regardless of qualification of the applicants.</p>

5

<p>No. NCLB doesn’t consider who applies to college.</p>

<p>I suspect it is because many kids who are “close” to meeting the criteria apply just in case…</p>

6

<p>ucbalumnus,
There is something seriously wrong with the numbers you are citing. According to this source (scroll to bottom): [CSUMentor</a> - Explore Campuses - Campus Facts - CSU Stanislaus](<a href=“Cal State Apply | CSU”>Cal State Apply | CSU) , CSU Stanislaus admitted 93% of its freshman applicants last year.</p>

7

<p>Hmmm, seems that every source gives different numbers.</p>

<p>CSU Mentor shows the following:</p>

<p>[Dominguez</a> Hills 58% accepted](<a href=“Cal State Apply | CSU”>Cal State Apply | CSU)
[Monterey</a> Bay 52% accepted](<a href=“Cal State Apply | CSU”>Cal State Apply | CSU)
Admit percentages are not listed there for Bakersfield, Channel Islands, or East Bay.</p>

<p>Still, even at 52% acceptance, it seems like there were a lot of “no chance” applications that could have been known beforehand were “no chance”.</p>

<p>Regarding “close” applications, that would only be for those who take the SAT or ACT relatively late and do not know their scores from the late test before the application deadline (and those who miss the threshold that they need are the ones rejected). But would that really be about half of the applicants?</p>