<p>Hi, everyone, </p>
<p>I'm trying to find a succinct article about how many colleges around the country admit most of their applicants and don't set a particularly high bar on admission test scores for admission. I recall that Carolyn commented in a thread about such an article a couple years, and perhaps posted the link to the article in the first place. Every once in a while, someone comes along and publishes an article showing that most United States colleges admit most applicants, but we don't usually talk about that here on CC ;) so I don't have any links on that issue at hand. Anyone who can jump in here with a Web link or a citation of a print article would really be helping me out, and I would much appreciate the information.</p>
<p>I've been doing Google searches meanwhile, but I've not yet come up with the best keywords for finding a writing that makes the point that most colleges are not particularly difficult to get into. My congratulations to any researcher who finds something like that.</p>
<p>Go to collegeboard.com and use their matchmaker module. You can set the criteria to give you schools that accept over 75% or more of its applicants.</p>
<p>I also put in co-ed. The search spit out about 500 colleges.</p>
<p>You can refine the search by specifying cost, location, size of school,testing requirements, etc.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Yeah, thanks, that's actually the first way I picked up that the test scores aren't deal-breakers at lots of colleges. </p>
<p><a href="http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/index.jsp%5B/url%5D">http://apps.collegeboard.com/search/index.jsp</a></p>
<p>Utilizing that criterion alone, there are over 524 such colleges. This does not take into account, of course, such things as geography, public or private, availability of a major, size or any qualitative factors whatsoever. Still, that means nearly one-quarter of the four year schools in this country admit that high a percentage of applicants.</p>
<p>Just for the heck of it, I threw in medium sized school (under 15,000), coed, with student government and a yearbook. It's down to 121, and that's before things like cost and location, let alone quality.</p>
<p>With 121 applications, you should be able to get into at least one.</p>
<p>This may be the one that you were thinking of; it's the article with the quote about the really selective colleges being the "fly on the tip of the iceberg."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-08-college-acceptance-usat_x.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-08-college-acceptance-usat_x.htm</a></p>
<p>
[quote]
Using data that colleges reported to the U.S. Department of Education, Hawkins crunched application and acceptance numbers for 857 four-year, not-for-profit colleges in the country that accepted more than 1,000 students in 2004. In his chart, only 2.6% of the schools accepted fewer than 25% of their applicants, while 82.5% accepted more than half.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Tokenadult,
Found some info from NASCAC --
<a href="http://www.nacacnet.org/NR/rdonlyres/4B4C0DF4-BF0A-4B10-89F4-A3D631061305/0/06StateofCollegeAdmissionpdf.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.nacacnet.org/NR/rdonlyres/4B4C0DF4-BF0A-4B10-89F4-A3D631061305/0/06StateofCollegeAdmissionpdf.pdf</a>
See Tables 7-10 in Chapter 2 (esp. Tables 9 & 10).
The footnotes reference an IPEDS report, but that is not available to the public. Hope this gets you closer to what you're looking for!</p>