<p>For example, Tufts University and Wake Forest University are tied at rank 28. However, the former has an acceptance rate of 27.5% while the latter has an acceptance rate of 42.4%.
(Source: US News Rankings)</p>
<p>What is the reason behind such disparities?</p>
<p>Acceptance rates aren’t everything. Chicago had an acceptance rate of 28% last year, whereas Columbia had an acceptance rate of less than 10%. Yet the 25-75 percentile SAT scores of the incoming classes are nearly identical. Selectivity is what matters, not acceptance rate.</p>
<p>Moreover, even if school A is significantly more selective than school B, school B may make up for it with other factors, such as educational environment (e.g., percentage of classes with less than 20 students) or money spent per student.</p>
<p>^So would you apply to school A or school B?</p>
<p>The other item to keep in mind is that one school may have a larger pool of unqualified applicants simply because it is more widely known to the general public. In other words the quality of respective applicant pools may be quite different. Somes schools have been known to heavily market to a wide swath of unqualified students to apply to their school simply to lower their overall acceptance rate.</p>
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<p>Would you please help me understand the differences between these two terms, please?</p>
<p>Re the preceding question, here is a partial explanation (I think):</p>
<p>A school’s acceptance rate is lower if it is very well known and gets a lot of applications, some of which come from people who are not especially well qualified but apply because they have heard of it and think it might somehow work out for them. So that school may have a 20 percent acceptance rate while another school has a 40 percent acceptance rate. That does not necessarily make the first school more selective, because the second school may have an already self-selected pool of applicants; thus there are perhaps just as many highly qualified students to choose from. So the overall percentage of acceptances will vary a lot, but number of serious applicants may not be as different as the percentage implies, and the second school may be accepting as highly qualified a group as the first school and being just as careful about who it admits. The Chicago/Columbia example used by another poster seems like a good illustration.</p>
<p>Ok, so acceptance rate is easily quantifiable. Is selectivity? If so, how?</p>
<p>Numbers are not my strong point and this is not a professional opinion but I think selectivity is somewhat subjective. There is an objective part: you could perhaps say that the schools with the very highest midrange SATs are the most selective, or the schools with the highest percentage of valedictorians or something similar, but that probably wouldn’t show the whole picture. I suspect different schools weight their criteria slightly differently and that intangibles come into play, as do social, economic, and geographical diversity and whatever else a school is looking for to strengthen its overall community. So short of knowing that a given set of schools is incredibly selective, it would be hard to do more than group schools–too many gray areas and sliding scales I imagine to do a strict numerical one-by-one ranking.</p>
<p>I basically agree with mattmom about the question of selectivity. Selectivity has much more to do with student ability as measured by the SATs. But, SATs are not always the best measure of student ability. Consider Art schools (RISD), Music schools (Julliard), and the special-focus schools at Cornell in Hotel Management, Industrial Relations, Architecture, and Agriculture. Students attending these special-focus schools have the highest level of ability in those specialties but don’t necessarily have the highest SATs.</p>
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The short answer is that acceptance rate is only a single, relatively minor factor in the USN&WR rankings. In fact, it accounts for only 1.5% of a school’s total score. </p>
<p>The long answer is that USN&WR assigns a “Student Selectivity” rating to each school, which represents 15% of the total score. The “Student Selectivity” rating, in turn, is based on three subfactors: standardized test scores of enrolled students (50%), the percentage of enrolled students in the top 10% of their high school classes (40%), and lastly on acceptance rate (only 10%). </p>
<p>So the selectivity rating represents 15% of a school’s total score, and the acceptance rate represents 10% of the selectivity rating. It follows that acceptance rate accounts for 1.5% of the total score. </p>
<p>So in order to be a “selective” school, at least as far as USN&WR is concerned, the important thing is to enroll a highly qualified student body. From the USN&WR perspective, it isn’t very important whether a school has high or low acceptance rates – what matters more is the quality of the students who ultimately enroll (as measured by standardized tests and class rankings).</p>
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<p>It’s very hard to get reservations for certain restaurants, but they aren’t necessarily the ones with the best food or service.</p>
<p>“If you’re trying to choose a good restaurant, which factor is more important – the quality of the food, or the difficulty of getting a reservation ?”</p>
<p>In the current case, you are doing none of these, you are trying to establish the quality of a restaurant by examining, in detail, the attributes of its patrons who are dining there.</p>
<p>If all school publish stats like Brown, Wellesley, etc…</p>
<p>For example,</p>
<p>If your stats is from 750-800 in each section, acceptance rate at Wellesley is 75%
acceptance rate at Brown is 25%</p>
<p>This makes a lot more sense than general acceptance rate. </p>
<p>Both school can enroll students with similar stats, but school A accepts only some students while school B accepts almost all. School A is clearly way more selective. I don’t think it’s fair that US News is separating the two.</p>
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<p>But from the perspective of the enrolled student, what difference does it make? As you indicated, if you enroll at either school, you will be among fellow students with similarly high stats. </p>
<p>Your college experience, at any school, is obviously affected by your fellow students. But only the students who enroll. So the quality of enrolled students is an important consideration.</p>
<p>On the other hand, your college experience is not going to be affected by the students who were rejected, and it is not going to be affected by the students who were accepted but enrolled elsewhere. If they don’t affect your college experience, then what does it matter whether there were lots of them, or only a few ?</p>
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Fair enough – I was editing my post as you wrote that.</p>
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<p>It does. School A can pick great students with something extra, whether it’s sport (I know, highly unlikely) or musical talent, or feeding brown children over the summer. School B does not have this option. </p>
<p>Enrolled students in school A, IMO, are a bit more interesting. They offer a lot more to the school besides academia.</p>
<p>Tufts university is competing with Ivy League schools; Wake Forest University competes with several top state universities such as Virginia, William & Mary, Georgia, UNC-Chapel Hill, etc.</p>
<p>I Many schools publish the profile of the whole class, which would include GPA, SATs class ranking, maybe also special accomplishments. I think if you compared the profile of the incoming class of school A to school B, that would be how to measure selectivity.</p>
<p>Also, bear in mind the “yield-protection” leveraging strategy pioneered by Tufts (and often referred to on CC as “Tufts Syndrome”). They know their applicant pool and enrollment trends well enough to turn down not only their under-qualified students, but also those who appear to be over-qualified to the extent that Tufts doesn’t anticipate landing them. The acceptance rate goes down, because the 2300 SATs are rejected along with the 1800 SATs, and the over-qualified rejected applicants go back and tell their friends “Wow, Tufts is really hard to get into. I got in at Dartmouth and Brown but was rejected by Tufts.” This makes future applicants, in their own minds, elevate Tufts’ standing in the pecking order (as in “You know, I hear Tufts is harder to get into now than Dartmouth and Brown!”), resulting in more over-qualified applicants who can be turned down in succeeding years. Meanwhile, because Tufts is accepting fewer students (not all of those who are qualified; only those who are just qualified enough), their yield rate (the proportion of those accepted who subsequently enroll) goes up, making them look even more desirable so that they get even more applicants to reject the following year.</p>
<p>As indicated above, acceptance rate isn’t everything.</p>
<p>OT, but related to post #19:</p>
<p>1) according to an article I read, this strategy was actually pioneered by Brown, in the late 60s.</p>
<p>2) The motivation may indeed be statistics related, but to me, one man’s "“yield-protection” leveraging strategy " is another man’s “accepting people who really want to be here”. who wants to populate a class with people who didn’t really want to be there, and may as a result be more likely to bring a negative vibe to campus life, and be more likely to transfer out?</p>
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<p>I can guarantee you that at least half of the enrolled students at Brown would have zero chance for admission at Wellesley. How’s that for selectivity?</p>
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That doesn’t necessarily follow. If School B has a small but high-quality applicant pool, one that yields high average test scores and class ranks, then it’s possible that the same pool could yield strong extracurriculars as well. </p>
<p>If there was a simple and straightforward procedure for quantifying the extracurricular activities of enrolled students, then sure, it might make sense to include this factor in selectivity rankings – just as test scores and class ranks are included. But there isn’t, so it’s not a factor. </p>
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That’s basically what USN&WR does: their selectivity score is largely (90%) based on average SATs and high school ranking (which is a function of GPA) of the enrolled class. USN&WR does not address special accomplishments, but that’s probably because there is no simple way to quantify them, as noted above.</p>