<p>I don't believe that schools are fundamentally more selective. A short-term demographic blip has temporarily increased selectivity, just as colleges appeared more selective during the first baby-boom. However, that will soon return to normal.</p>
<p>Beyond that, merit aid discounting creates the illusion of higher median SAT scores than it really takes to get accepted. And, on-line filing of the Common App creates the illusion of mass numbers of applicants, when there is little or no self-selection. A more telling stat would be the number of serious applications.</p>
<p>Difficulty of admissions at elite schools has probably increased in real terms, but only for some categories of students used to a bigger slice of the pie, for example, wealthy white male applicants who used to get 100% of the slots and now compete with African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and even (gasp) female students. </p>
<p>I don't believe that it is harder for a black or Latino woman to get into an elite college than it was fifty years ago. It wasn't that long ago that women were not even allowed in the main library at Harvard, let alone eligible for admission.</p>
<p>I agree with ID, that it is not so much that schools have become more competitive as much as right now we have a larger number incoming college students applying for the same number of spots as most colleges have not radically increased their class sizes. As ID also stated the trend is short term expected to last another 3 to 4 years</p>
<p>Clearly the biggest gainers since about 25 years ago were</p>
<ol>
<li>Wash U St Louis. It was always good,but not nearly the quality or as hard to get into as it is today.</li>
<li>University of Miami: 25 years ago, you just needed a pulse. Now, almost 1300 SATs.</li>
<li>NYU. same as Univerity of Miami. NYU also has risen in the academic rankings enormously.</li>
<li>UMD. This school used to be a joke. Now it is a very hard school to get admitted to and has risen the academic rankings enormously.</li>
</ol>
<blockquote>
<p>As ID also stated the trend is short term expected to last another 3 to 4 years<<</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>The population blip may be short term, but I think there are other factors driving the increase in the number of applicants even more than population is, namely the rise of the National Applicant.</p>
<p>Back in our day the vast majority of kids who went to college applied only to local schools or maybe one or two in an ajacent state. A kid who went to the opposite coast for college was pretty rare. Today thanks to a combination of the rise of the internet and the rise of USNWR and other rankings. suddenly all the hot schools seem to be in reach of every smart kid across the country. And a whole bunch of them go ahead and apply.</p>
<p>With every college having a website and beautiful photos on-line, and sites like CC providing tons of information, and USNWR fueling the desire achieve the "best", you get all these National Applicants - kids dreaming of and applying to schools all over the country. My D was one herself. She applied to schools that to me in my day had only been a vague theory.</p>
<p>I don't see the National Applicant phenomenon going away any time soon. The increase in selectivity at the top 50 or so schools is not going to decrease very much when the population does. The old "normal' is gone for good.</p>
<p>I think you are correct in identifying the reason for the huge increase in application numbers, along with students now applying to 8 to 12 schools instead of 4 to 6. </p>
<p>However, my contention is that the majority of these applications are so poorly self-selected that they really aren't serious candidates. Look at the number of kids we see here applying to "all the Ivies" that, frankly, have no shot whatsoever -- something that is particularly noticeable in the rapidly expanding international pool. Frankly, a 9% acceptance rate is de facto evidence of very poor self-selection. 91% don't get in; surely a good many of those could have predictably figured that out ahead of time.</p>
<p>That's why I say that the underlying selectivity (the odds of a "real", accurately self-selected candidate being accepted) may not have changed that much. Aside from the changes relating to diversity, the same kids are still getting accepted to the same schools as 30 years. The only difference is a huge glut of applications in the rejected piles -- applications that bog down the system due to poor self-selection and give a false sense that college admissions are a crapshoot.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i think it would a lot harder to think of schools that were once quite competitive but are now less so. any ideas?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Sure. Almost all of the womens colleges. In the 1970s, they lost a "captive" customer base (resulting from artificial free-market contraints) as their prospective students suddenly had many more elite college choices. As a result, the selectivity has declined, although the quality of the schools has not. This makes for terrific admissions values.</p>
<p>I think one of the best examples is UGA. When Georgia began its HOPE Scholarship program (B average students could go to public schools in GA for free), admissions grew enormously. It went from a decent public school to one of the most competitive public schools in the nation and certainly in the South. Some of the smartest students in my graduating classes opted to go to UGA for the financial incentives, and its quality is definitely on the upswing.</p>
<p>There used to be schools that, if you graduated HS and could pay the tuition, you were pretty much in: Syracuse, BU, Ithaca, Hofstra, and NYU come to mind. I'm amazed when I see how competitive these schools are today.</p>
<p>I think that an increase in long-shot applicants to top schools is only part of the story. Sure, their numbers have gone up in the applicant pool, but so has the number of kids with legitimate chances. Back in the day, the vals and sals from my mediocre high school almost never applied to anything loftier than the flagship state U. Every few years a kid would shoot for a service academy. By contrast, at my D's similarly mediocre high school, every year the vals and sals and two or three of the other top kids apply for and sometimes get into HYPSM. This didn't happen 30 years ago. Back then Harvard might just have well been in France or on Mars. It's a different mindset now. </p>
<p>Multiply this by all the thousands of high schools across the country, and you can easily get tens of thousands of very smart, qualified kids applying to the top 50 schools. Their vision has been extended by technology and their desire has been fueled by the rankings. And that will continue. There is no going back.</p>
<p>I agree with interesteddad. I really think most apparent shifts in selectivity are a statistical invention, driven by demographics, the increase in the number of applications per kid, and by overall grade inflation and SAT score inflation.</p>
<p>coureur:
But someone must have been applying to those schools back then...Just because you didn't know them doesn't make it statistically meaningful.</p>
<p>It has just recently dropped back to where it was at the end of the baby boom in 1970. Notice that admissions rates skyrocket in the mid to late 1970s after the baby boom passed through the system and have steadily drifted downwards reaching a low point around 1990 and another low point now.</p>
<p>Of course, their overall rate is lower than Swarthmore's, but the shape of the curve appears to follow similar trends. They only show back to 1979, so Yale captures the same high point as Swarthmore's, but not the previous lows of 1970 and earlier. They show the same low point around 1990 and, of course, the current historic lows. </p>
<p>Nobody anticipates the bottom dropping out of the market as it did in the late 1970s (giving false hope to and collecting application fees from thousands of international applicants will see to that), but the expectation is that acceptance rates will creep upwards from 2010 and beyond.</p>
<p>I think the only systemic changes in the system are the ease with which students can apply using the Common App and the fact that elite college admissions are no longer restricted to rich white people (and in most cases, to rich white males.)</p>
<p>I think it's also possible that a decade of beating heads against impossible admissions odds may eventually return some self-selection to the marketplace, but I'm not really confident that will happen. There's too much stimuli encouraging consumers to view college as a brand-name consumer status purchase.</p>
<p>The demos are still on the upward trend and we can expect increased competition for a few more years. It's kind of like what has happened in the US in the last couple of decades. The gap between rich and poor has grown. Schools towards the top of the rankings, where you could get in with reasonable grades and scores a decade or so ago, are now extremely difficult to get into. A kid with a 1350 and a 3.7 gpa is probably not in the running. And schools towards the bottom, especially out of the way LACS, are letting almost anyone (with some money) in. As for the higher rankings, Lafayette has shown the biggest gain among the top LACS. BMC, Sarah Lawrence have fallen far. The mid western LACs have struggled, Ohio Wesleyan is almost third tier, and Wooster and Dennison are barely holding their own. Kenyon and Oberlin are about where they were a decade ago. In the South, Elon has seen a large rise in reputation, (and also price).</p>
<p>There may be those international applicants that blanket the ivies, but I'm under the impression that at least half (probably more) of the applicants to Yale or Swarthmore could easily qualify for admission. They'll tell you they could admit at least one full class of rejects that is practically indistinguishable from the admitted class. Since applications have risen so high, that qualified number has increased too (and trickled down to the next tier) so I think it really is more competitive. </p>
<p>The thread alludes to a new group of competitive schools, who've been the lucky recipients of those who qualified for admission to higher ranked schools but didn't make the cut. I know there is some science to elite admissions but there's a lot of randomness too. For a school like Penn or Wash U...I'd contend that their student body is appreciably higher stat wise and in other ways than say 20 years ago (maybe more like the Princeton or Yale classes of a decade or two ago), so I think these schools actually have gotten more difficult for admissions.</p>
<p>sounds like the old trickle down theory and I think it works for a number of schools in the first 50 or so, but then tails off fast - due to economics and fin aid. Students elect to attend their flagship states or the honors programs at the lesser states. Schools like Wooster or Ursinus or Ohio Wesleyan lose out to PSU or Miami of Ohio or even Pitt.</p>
<p>Doubtful. Neither Ohio Wesleyan University nor Wooster share applicants with state schools. </p>
<p>According to Princeton Review, OWU shares applicants with Allegheny, American, Cornell, Denison, Gettysburg, Harvard, Kenyon and Oberlin. Pretty much the same kind of schools...LACs and competitive. </p>
<p>For Wooster, the schools are :Allegheny College, Beloit College, Case Western, Centre, Denison, DePauw, Dickinson, Earlham, Elon, Grinell, Kenyon, Oberlin and Ohio Wesleyan. Again, pretty much the same kind of schools.</p>
<p>Don't forget that some of these schools actually invest money and resources not in areas that will improve their ranking but that will benefit their students. For example, summer research opportunities: </p>