<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I have a quick question: Does anyone know the growth rate for first year college students? I assume its increasing, a small but partial reason for the hightened selectivity at most schools.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Are you talking about the increase in the number of apps received? There was a recent Washington</a> Post acticle about that</p>
<p>No, I think slipper is asking about the size of the high school graduating class (and by extension, the size of the total applicant pool). How many students, not how many applications they are submitting. I believe it is still growing slightly but I have been wondering what it looks like 5 years out and 10 years out. There are so many colleges out there, and even now many many schools have to offer steep discounts to achieve full enrollment. I think the application process is going to look a whole lot different 5 or 10 years from now. I think many of the problems, angst and hysteria that exist now in the process are going to solve themselves.</p>
<p>The number of applicants has been increasing steadily for the past 10 years or so. The high school class of 2008 is projected to be the peak, with the class of 2009 only slightly smaller, and then the number is projected to decline.</p>
<p>Of the 1,600 four-year colleges in the U.S. (I think I've got that right), likely 1,300 haven't experienced any increase in selectivity (as measured by the number of students rejected.) Of the so-called top 50-75, much of the increase in rejections stems from the increase in ED applicants, and hence the fact that more students are being rejected ED and then throwing in more applications than they would have previously. Further increases in "selectivity" come from an increase (only for the top 50-75) in international applications.</p>
<p>In other wods, a lot of it is smoke and mirrors.</p>
<p>Mini, I don't buy your ED argument at all. Assume (a) College P gets 2,000 ED applications and accepts 600 of them, (b) without ED, each of the applicants would have applied to an average of 8 colleges (including P), and (c) each rejected ED applicant will apply to an average of 11 colleges (including P). With ED, the PED cohort will be responsible for a total of 16,000 total applications (2,000, plus 1,400 x 10). Without ED, the PED cohort would have been responsible for 16,000 applications (2,000 x 8). Obviously, if you play with those numbers you can make the difference positive or negative, but I think the realistic effect is somewhere in that neighborhood, and in that neighborhood there's not going to be a big difference in the number of total applications.</p>
<p>I think you're right about international applications (and more than at just the top 50-75, probably at most of the places we care about here). But fundamentally, there are more 18-year-olds in the U.S. than there has ever been (about 150% of what there was at the height of the baby boom, thanks in large part to immigration), and more of them are going to college, and more of those are applying to competitive colleges. Those that apply to competitive colleges ARE submitting more applications apiece, but that accounts for only part of the fourfold application increase those schools have seen in the past 30 years, and it's a rational response to increased competition, not something attributable to ED.</p>
<p>Here are some facts, drawn from various reliable sources:</p>
<p>There are 2164 non-profit four year colleges and universities in the U.S.
94% of them accept more applicants than they reject.
Only 6%, or 136 schools, accept less than 50% of applicants.
Only 1.2%, or 25 schools accept less than 25% of applicants.</p>
<p>Contrary to media reports, and popular perception, these numbers have stayed fairly stable for the last FIVE years.</p>
<p>According to a large scale survey of college freshmen conducted every year, 91% are attending either their first choice college (69.3%) or their second choice college (21.2%). This number has also stayed fairly consistent for the last five years.</p>
<p>The same annual survey found that 73.9% applied to less than four schools.</p>
<p>Carolyn, I'm not sure that those figures advance the debate much. First, when we talk about admissions frenzy, etc., we're talking about those 136 schools (and sometimes mainly the 25 schools), and we're talking about kids that apply to more than four schools (if they don't get in ED somewhere). Second, even your 94% of colleges with an acceptance rate of over 50% are not immune -- and there's a big difference to students between, say, an 80% acceptance rate and a 55% acceptance rate.</p>
<p>There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few weeks ago about this. I can't find it to link to it, but it focused on a number of second- and third-tier local institutions (Drexel, Chestnut Hill College). All of them are seeing record application numbers; some have expanded their classes. And all of them expect applications from their traditional applicant pools to drop fairly precipitously after the next few years after a peak in 2008-2009. They are all engaging in various strategies to market themselves more widely, but the demographics are that there are going to be markedly fewer 18-year-olds in the Northeast four or five years from now. And a much higher percentage of the ones there are will speak Spanish at home.</p>
<p>Here is the nces graph of the projected # of students graduating. YOu will see it peaks in 2009 <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_21.gif&a=highschool%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_21.gif&a=highschool</a></p>
<p>*** graduating HS, that is.</p>
<p>Here are some additional tables from the nces (national center of education statistics)</p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_04.gif&a=elmsec%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_04.gif&a=elmsec</a> (attendance rates,by grade)
<strong>EDIT</strong>* Note: the peak # of students in grade 8 4 yrs ago is now the peak # in grade 12)</p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_23.gif&a=highschool%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_23.gif&a=highschool</a> ( percent change, by state)</p>
<p><a href="http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_22.gif&a=highschool%5B/url%5D">http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/ImageDisplay.asp?id=fig_22.gif&a=highschool</a> pub/priv (public/private school projected graduation rates)</p>
<p>
[quote]
The number of applicants has been increasing steadily for the past 10 years or so. The high school class of 2008 is projected to be the peak
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I've seen figures from the federal Projections of Educational Statistics site that may vary by a year or two as to which high school graduating class in the United States will be the largest in the "echo Baby Boom." I thought it was 2010, but whatever. </p>
<p>More to the issue of when college applications will stop increasing is what happens to </p>
<p>a) the percentage of the high school graduates who apply to college, </p>
<p>and </p>
<p>b) the number of high school graduates in countries other than the United States. </p>
<p>Growth in the above two categories, irrespective of trends in the number of high school students in the United States, lead many scholars to predict that college applications will continue to be more and more competitive at the top schools through at least 2015. That's how I would plan, if I wanted to be prudent.</p>
<p>Thanks to jym for those tables. </p>
<p>It occurs to me that, as with most projections, there are politics in the numbers. Carolyn briefly posted USDOEd projections of four-year college enrollments that were increasing at a steady rate well beyond 2009. All of these projections depend on assumptions about the percentage of kids who will graduate from high school, and the percentage of those kids who will go on to four-year college, and the rates of change in both numbers. Understandably, the USDOEd may be more sanguine about some of those percentages than other researchers (since we have so definitively stopped leaving children behind an all), but being more sanguine doesn't necessarily mean being wrong. And tokenadult is also doubtless correct that foreign applications are also relevant, and may well increase regardless of domestic population trends. (Although the U.S. government is doing its darndest right now, albeit unintentionally, to make coming here to study less attractive to many foreign students.)</p>
<p>It is also worth pointing out, as jym's linked graphics make clear, that demographic changes are not going to be uniform across regions and ethnic groups.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I thought it was 2010, but whatever.
[/quote]
And I'd read in the NYT a few yrs back that the peak would be the class of 2009, so I guess we have 2008,9 and 10 all covered. Whichever it is, it seems that the next few years will be even bigger nailbiters than past years. My fear is that this will cause more people to apply to a ridiculously high # of schools, which even worsens the frenzy and competition for admission. Take for example the girl referenced in this week's USNews and World Report's article "Is there any Room for Me?? I will not post her full name here (though it is on pgs 73 and 76 of the magazine). They call her Clair "Baskin Robbins" <<last name="" here="">> because she applied to 31 colleges. THIRTY-ONE! (And as she lives on the east coast, I doubt this is explained by applying to the UC schools). They attribute it in part to the ease of applying via the common app. Perhaps the common app. should have some sort of system in its program that allows schools using it to see how many other schools a particular application is being sent to. If it isn't right to release which schools, at least if a student knew the schools to which he/she was applying would all know they were sending out 31 applications, that might make them rethink this strategy. </last></p>
<p>My boys' HS allow them to apply to no more than 6 schools. Thats it. they wont do the paperwork for more than that. Forces the students to do their HW and apply smartly. Oh, and the HS has a 100% acceptance rate to 4 yr colleges. Yes, it is a private school, but that doesnt mean every student is a strong studnet. Yet 100% acceptance to 4 yr colleges. Perhaps if students focused on quality, not qwuantity in the applicatio process, this craziness could slow significantly.</p>
<p>My son and I met a girl (and her father) on one college tour who had applied to 22 colleges and been accepted at 17 of them. To their credit, she was sheepish about it, and in her defense they live in southern CA and she hadn't visited any of the 15 East Coast schools prior to the acceptances. Still, that was pretty ridiculous, given that she was obviously a very strong student (her decision was basically coming down to Princeton vs. Stanford vs. full merit ride at USC).</p>
<p>Honestly, 6 schools seems too few for me, though. Lots of kids only apply to one or two, and that's fine, but any kid who has legitimate ambitions at the supercompetitive level almost has to plan on applying to 7-8 schools, even if he or she is very thoughtful and diligent in selecting which ones. And that may be even more true for kids just below that level -- say an educationally ambitious kid with a 3.5 GPA at a good school and 2100 SATs. I think 4-5 "reaches", 2 "matches" and 1 "safety" is a minimum, and that's clearly not enough if financial aid packages are going to be an important consideration.</p>
<p>"Mini, I don't buy your ED argument at all."</p>
<p>If the ED acceptance rate goes down (that is, colleges are not accepting more students ED while at the same time more students are applying ED), each additional ED rejection generates 6-10 additional applications. The Princeton reject ends up applying to Lafayette, Lehigh, Gettysburg, Swarthmore, Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth, and Amherst, etc. Now, granted, had they not applied ED, they could have just have tacked another application (i.e. Princeton) on to the list. But the frantic nature of the additional applications likely adds anywhere from 3-6 applications above what the student might have done otherwise.</p>
<p>The real conundrum, however, is that, at some point (and I think the so-called top colleges reached that point several years ago), with the exception of H. and a few others, rejecting more applicants does not make the college more "selective"; as yield goes down, the chance that any particular institution gets the student they actually want goes DOWN, not up. More perfectly qualified students end up at their second, third, or fourth choices, in very fine institutions where, however, the fit is not as great as it otherwise might be. Neither the colleges nor the students benefit from this so-called "greater selectivity".</p>
<p>Mini, just what do you mean by "yield" in this thread?</p>
<p>Mini, I still don't buy it. Of course, I'm dealing only with a combination of anecdotal evidence and simple game theory, but I would submit that (a) the population of ED applicants is relatively sophisticated, wealthy, and well advised (that's the biggest problem with ED), (b) most or all of them use ED to maximize their chances some sort of "reach" first-choice school, (c) most of them are aware that they may be rejected or deferred, (d) all of them are aware that the timing of the ED notification and the RD application deadline means that they have to work on their RD applications before the ED notification, and (e) the vast majority have a list of applications they plan to file in mind long before ED notification. I certainly don't know of any kid who applied in panic to 3 additional schools (i.e., schools where they hadn't already planned to apply), much less 6, after being rejected by an ED school. One of my daughter's best friends was deferred by the ED school that her counselors considered a near safety, and even she didn't modify her list at all in response to that (a mistake, since it turned out that for some reason she was a much less attractive candidate everywhere than everyone thought, but not a fatal mistake since she was accepted by her ED school in the RD round).</p>
<p>There's lots to criticize about ED, but I don't think it increases the net total number of applications a whisker.</p>
<p>You're welcome, JHS. I had a tough time finding those tables when I was looking for them previously- so fortunately I had them bookmarked.</p>
<p>You are also quite right about the focus on increasing international students to US colleges and universities. There was a lot of press about this, and the Bush's intitiatives, in January. Heres one article <a href="http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2006/Jan/09-891566.html%5B/url%5D">http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2006/Jan/09-891566.html</a> . So even if domestic applications decline (which won't happen for the top tier schools), the impetus to bring in more international students just keep that ol' supply/demand thing a crankin' . I do suspect that the smaller, lower tier schools will be affected by drops in the population of US HS grads in the coming years. That would be a shame.</p>