Hey guys,
Does anyone know the exact metric for this year? With 19,845 applicants this year, I don’t honestly believe the acceptance rate stayed at 42% (which is from 2015 and the most commonly reported number).
Also, is Computer Science more difficult to get into than other programs on campus?
Thanks!
https://poly.rpi.edu/2017/04/05/rpi_receives_record_number_of_applications/
It depends on the class size, but probably between 39% and 41%. It could even be lower (like 35%) if they also take a bunch of transfers in the fall.
The CS and engineering programs are the most difficult to get into for sure.
Typically, the ComSci degree is the harder field to get into in any college. The best CompSci degree you can get is probably from Carnegie Mellon, RPI is somewhere very close behind. RPI is renown for Engineering. Some may even argue more so than even Carnegie Mellon.
@reformedman so where would I be able to find estimates for those acceptance rates? I like data, I’m curious about it. Also RPI is looking more and more like the school I’m going to be attending 
You can find the exact numbers by going into the common data set. Every good school has one. There is no way to know the 2017 yet because they don’t have the numbers until after May.
Google ‘common data set rensellaer’ and you can pick the year from the list. Then do a ctrl-F to search the word admitted for the section having to do with the rate. I’d link you to it but I’m on the phone traveling at the moment.
I don’t think RPI accepts by major. Once you are in, you can pick or transfer to any major you would like. My info. Is old, so please verify.
Close. On accepted students day they covered that very question and said there are limited amounts of people that can transfer. By majority all transfers are permitted but in the rare case that one gets overflowed by an unexpected large amount of class size, they will limit by qualifications. One of the qualifications mentioned is major. The example they gave was that it is easier to transfer from CompSci to Engineering and harder from Engineering to CompSci. But to answer your question in general, all transfers are permitted as long as there are no unusual situations. Another example of a time where a transfer would be rejected is if a person is in whatever major and is getting a low gpa, and he wants to transfer to something that might require better stats; they can rule to deny on the premonition that the person may not flourish with the transfer of majors.
@cvanderloo No statistics are given by-major, but overall the acceptance rate was anywhere between 38% and 41% for the year - with acceptance rates being lowest for CS, ITWS, and Engineering (I’d say below 30%). To elaborate on what @reformedman said, you can switch majors as long as you have an extremely low GPA. It’s really just filling out a sheet, but you adviser can choose to not approve a major transfer if you really are struggling and you want to switch to a harder major.
Typo: I meant “as long as you don’t have.” Also, forgot to mention that the 2016-2017 common data set is for the Class of 2020, not the Class of 2021. I’d reference the article from above (which I’ll also link here) for info on the Class of 2021.
URL: https://poly.rpi.edu/2017/04/05/rpi_receives_record_number_of_applications/
I honestly don’t understand how colleges calculate their acceptance rate. Reading the URL @joedoe post, I believe RPI received 19,485 students and admitted around 1,650 students. 1650/19485 clearly doesn’t equal to 39% to 41%, how did they come up with that acceptance rate?
@Shelly9909
Number of accepted divided by number of applicants. Multiply by 100.
Note, number of accepted is your numerator, number of enrolled should not be involved in this equation.
@Shelly9909
Don’t confuse the terms Accepted/Admitted with Enrolled. There is also another term called the Yield Rate which I will also explain below.
The number of accepted students is the Acceptance Rate times the total number of applicants.
Rounding the numbers from @joedoe to 20,000 applicants and a 40% Acceptance Rate and you would come up with 8,000 accepted.
However, not all 8,000 will choose to enroll at RPI because they would have other choices. So if 1,650 of the 8,000 accepted students decide to enroll at RPI, you would end up with a Yield Rate of 20.625% (1,650 divided by 8,000).
Statistically speaking, a school’s Yield Rate remains fairly consistent in the most recent few years, or would show a trend of some sort (tending up or trending down). So if a school wants to target a specific number of students to enroll for an upcoming class year, they would use the Yield Rate to determine how many students to accept/admit. The number of students a school could accommodate is limited by the number of beds available and the number of students they could educate based on the staff and classrooms available. Let’s say RPI wishes to enroll 1,500 students next year and have a traditional Yield Rate of 20%, they would have to accept/admit 7,500 students (1,500 divided by 0.20) to meet that target. So in essence, the number of accepted/admitted students for the incoming class could have been determined before receiving even one application. The Acceptance Rate, however, is a result of how many ultimately apply. A school could boost the number of applicants, and drive down the Acceptance Rate, by aggressively recruiting students to apply.
IMHO, while the Acceptance Rate tells you how difficult it is to get in to a school, using it as a means to rank the quality or prestige of a college is oversimplifying things. Schools with a high Yield Rate know that a majority of their applicants will enroll if accepted, so they don’t have to accept too many above their target number, meaning they will end up with a low Acceptance Rate. Schools with a low Yield Rate, on the other hand, must accept/admit many times over their target number in order to enroll the number they need to enroll, and would naturally have a very high Acceptance Rate.
@newjerseydad888 I’ll have to agree with you on that. Queens College, a city school in NYC, has an acceptance rate below 30%. That doesn’t mean it’s better than RPI… that just means that everyone in the city applies to go to the city school. When comparing schools, it’s more beneficial to look at rankings (to determine prestige), class metrics (to determine the quality of the student body), rigor, and starting salaries out of college (shows results).
Yup, agree. The pool of candidates applying to RPI is self-selecting anyways, so people apply only if they are seriously interested in a school like RPI.
For the record, here is how it worked for RPI for their entering class in Fall 2016, based on their Common Data Set:
18,524 applications were submitted to RPI.
8,215 of those applications were accepted by RPI.
So the acceptance rate was 8215 / 18524 x 100, or 44.3 %.
1,691 of those accepted students actually enrolled at RPI.
So the yield rate was 1691 / 8215 x 100, or 20.6 %.
Another way to look at it:
RPI got about 11 applications for each spot in the freshman class.
RPI accepted about 5 of the 11 applications for each spot.
About 4 of the 5 accepted students turned down RPI’s offer.
That leaves 1 of the 5 accepted students who ended up enrolling at RPI.
So the initial pool of 11 applicants for each spot got whittled down to 1 enrolled student for that spot.
A 20% yield rate may seem low, but it’s actually not unusual in the current admissions environment. Northeastern’s yield, for example, was only 18% last year.
I’m curious to see the average SAT’s and specific info for the computer science department
@cvanderloo Schools aren’t required to release admissions data with that level of detail. It’s possible that the RPI administration or CS dept. collects such info for internal use, but you would have to ask them for it. Even if they have it, they might not necessarily care to provide it.