Why are acceptance rates getting lower and lower for many universities? Many places are constantly becoming more and more selective, but from what I understand the general population is not increasing at an exponential rate. Are there any reasons?
Applications per applicant keep rising, even as the number of HS graduates slowly drop.
Also, more international applications at many schools.
-More kids going to college as a % of high school graduates
-Services like the Common App make it easy for a student to apply to 10 or 15 or 30 colleges if he/she wants to. Same number of kids will result in 2-3x as many applications as in years past.
—Subpoint: many colleges are trying to lower their acceptance rates by sending all sorts of junk mail/spam to kids who might apply. So there are kids with 1800 SATs who throw in an application to (insert Ivy here) because “you never know.” Or kids who apply to all 8 Ivies, Stanford, UChicago, MIT, Duke, etc. because “With that many applications, I’ll get in somewhere, right?”
-More international students coming to study in the US
There are other factors, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind.
And it easily could get worse.
Harvard has 37,000 applicants. Why couldn’t it double that number if UCLA receives 99,000?
admit rate = admit offers ÷ applications. As applications go up (see above discussions), admit rate declines (since the # of slots offered remains stable year to year)
The Common App has brought about a multitude of applications from the typical kid. Before, most kids applied to 1-2 schools. Many still do. But you’ve got a subsection that apply to 7-8 schools routinely. Plus the international applicants. This was not the case even 7-8 years ago.
A lot of this was recently discussed in this thread:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1845314-do-you-think-the-acceptance-rates-at-top-tier-universities-will-continue-to-decline-p1.html
I think that students have less power in deciding which school they will attend than in years past. Before the days of the common app. students would be more likely to consider the merits of specific universities as filling out separate applications for each school was a rather arduous task. The students themselves were self selecting. With the advent of the common app far fewer students have any real motivation to do serious consideration of which schools to send an application to. Many students send out as many application as they can, find out where they’ll be accepted to, and only then investigate the merits of the school. Those that have done the work and seriously considered the schools they wish to attend can find themselves less competitive as they’re competing against many students who frankly don’t really care. (They’ll still become indignant when they don’t get accepted) Your application is not nearly as indicative of your interest in the school as it was pre common app.
I wonder how these changes affect who gets accepted into which college. One would think that for most schools the yield rate would drop because in the end you can only attend one school. I suspect that there are more students going to schools that were not their preferred schools and many for whom the school that might be their best fit didn’t accept them.
Agree for the most part with #6, and I think the increasing use of ED/REA programs at the Ivies (and their peer schools) is largely the colleges attempting to counteract those trends.