Is there any place where you can view statistics on people who were rejected by colleges?
All colleges have their common data sets and it is useful, but even if Harvard admits have an average GPA of 3.95 and SAT of 2350, does that really say much? The rejects could have had an average GPA of 3.94 and SAT of 2360. I’ve been trying to use their data to ascertain whether certain colleges are safeties/matches/reaches, but I figured just because you’re in the average range of admits doesn’t mean much, after all you could also be in the average range for people who get rejected.
The average stats of the rejection pool can be heavily skewed by who applies. The more popular a school is the lower its rejection stats will be by default because more applications will cause the application pool to regress to the mean. I doubt there’s a repository but some schools report stratified admissions statistics so you can see admission rates for various groups (and thus also rejection rates). Here is brown’s: http://www.brown.edu/admission/undergraduate/explore/admission-facts you could try and do weighted averages but I don’t think that info is as helpful as the way brown presents it.
Just using the first one as an example: the valedictorian admission rate for brown is 18.5%. That means over 80% of valedictorians don’t get in. That’s still better odds than the general pool (roughly double), but as you can see, an overwhelming majority of vals are still being shut out. That info seems far more valuable to me than the cumulative average of rejected students.
I’ll add in that there was a Reddit AMA by a Cornell admissions officer turned consultant where he said what many posters on here have intuited. Cornell admits about 10% of its applicants, but only 60% of the applicants are genuinely unqualified for Cornell. What separates that 10% from the next 30% isn’t going to be captured in admissions stats anyway. It’s all the subjective/character stuff, or as he called it “the awesomeness” of the applicant.
As you know, the averages are the average of people accepted. Considering the SAT, a school may have average scores of math: 700, reading: 700, and writing: 700, but the combined is only 1980. Same thing could be said for the gpa and SAT scores, the separate averages added up may be more than the actual combined average (I hope that makes sense).
Harvard and the like are reach schools for everybody, unless you have 4.0 and 2400, but hypothetically you could still be denied for ECs. Anyways, i’d say that if both the SAT and gpa are within the average and above. 50-100%, not 25-75%, i would say that’s a good match.
A website I’ve been using ALOT is Parchment. If you fill in your stats and add what schools you’re applying to they show you your percentage of getting in. It’s really helpful! Also if you click more info on one of the schools they show you a graph of where you are and other people who applied. You can also go in depth on other people statistics where else they applied. They said I had 98% chance of getting into Washington state and I got the acceptance letter the other day.
^^^There’s a website called “college data” that does the same thing. It’s interesting to see that stats for past years and where they ultimately attended.