does anyone know a general % of applicants who receive at least one rejection out of the colleges they apply to-- i’ve been looking online for a statistic for a bit but can’t find any. thanks!
<p>I've never seen such a number, but it's going to depend on what caliber of applicant you survey. </p>
<p>When you consider people who apply to the top universities and LAC's, almost everyone is going to receive a rejection or two. Then you also have students who are shooting for a different level of college and only apply to a couple of places where they are guaranteed acceptance because of SAT scores, GPA, rank etc.</p>
<p>I would say that it is dependant upon the difficulty of the college applied to and the number of colleges applicants apply to. For the most part, I would believe it is accepted everyone gets rejected from somewhere. If you haven't you just haven't applied enough places :) . However, I could see it also that you don't send in admissions after being accepted to an EA at HYPS as some people I know.</p>
<p>Let's be truthful here: there's probably very few if any research statistics out there on the total number of American applicants getting either completely rejected or completey accepted. It IS safe to say that the vast majority of applicants get at least ONE rejection. Of course there are exceptions-- like for instance, a kid might get rejected by all their colleges, while another might get accepted by all their colleges.</p>
<p>But there is no real stat out there of the percentage of rejected students in the total applicant pool.</p>
<p>Here's a fact: most of the kids who apply to an Ivy, or Duke or Northwestern etc get denied. Even when you get up to certain STATE schools, the majority of applicants get denied. Even when you get up into the third tier US News and World Report-wise, a percentage of those colleges' applicants got denied.</p>
<p>Practically everyone gets denied. Just wait for some kid to post on this thread in response, saying that they got denied nowhere. I'm sure it happens (reasons range from being a qualified applicant who applied to all "safety" schools, to being a qualified applicant who actually made all reaches and safeties, to being just a total liar). </p>
<p>But those are few. If you want to peg the rejection percentage, it'd probably be incredibly high.</p>
<p>Most who apply ED are never rejected. </p>
<p>Also, many students have their hearts set on their (affordable) state university, where admissions rates are high and the students' statistics are competitive. Students may apply to only that university or perhaps to two or three lesser ones just in case they are rejected by their state university. Many are rejected from none. </p>
<p>Are these students failing to reach high enough? Not necessarily. They may want to stay close to home and attend a college they can afford. That's a very reasonable decision for a student to make. You won't find students like these on CC, but there are hundreds of thousands of them out there.</p>
<p>Two days ago, at the local high school I had an opportunity of looking at all the colleges where seniors will be attending in the fall. All but one were in state and all but two were public. That's not atypical for seniors at many schools. </p>
<p>While just about everyone has heard of Harvard, it will probably shock many CCers to know that lots of kids in mid-America have never heard of MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Swarthmore, Wellesley, etc.</p>
<p>I am shocked, but maybe that's a good thing. There are 1.2 million high school graduates each year. The extremely selective schools can only take about 50,000 freshmen. All things considered, the education you get elsewhere isn't that much inferior (if at all), and I don't think we need the top 5 kids from every high school in the country applying to the Ivy League.</p>