<p>I am posting this in the "chance me" forum because it is the most frequented forum on this website. </p>
<p>My question is the following, why is it that some schools specifically University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and John Hopkins university have acceptence rates of approximately 27% while schools which are generally considered easier to get in to have relatively lower acceptence rates. These include schools like Vanderbilt, Cornell, UCLA, USC etc. (I do not mean to insult these schools)</p>
<p>One possible factor could be that the above three universities receive less applications, or have larger student bodies. However, U of C, NW and JHU all have smaller student bodies that the listed schools with lower acceptence rates (In general, not in every case). Also, considering the prestige associated to these 3 institutions I would strongly doubt that they receive significantly less applicants than other highly ranked universities. </p>
<p>Certain courses within the three listed universities could have very low acceptence rates but even that does not appeal to me as a possible reason. The reason I ask this questions is because here on CC, based on the chance threads and decisions threads, U of C, NW and JHU all appear more difficult to get into that Vanderbilt, Cornell, UCLA, USC etc.</p>
<p>Can somone please explain I seem to have run into a paradox.</p>
<p>Mostly self-selecting applicant pools. When Chicago’s acceptance was 40%, it still had higher SATs than most of the Ivy League. (And now, its 1600-scale SATs are only 20 points behind Harvard’s despite having a much higher acceptance rate.) That’s because only serious students apply to Chicago, and it was pleased enough with its applicant pool that it didn’t feel that it needed to artificially lower its admissions rate. Similar situation with JHU and Northwestern.</p>
<p>Then, with a change of administration, Chicago realized that it would never be as prestigious as it would like to be unless it changed and artificially lowered its admissions rate. Now, it stands at about 15%. JHU and (especially) Northwestern felt a need to compete with Chicago so they both decided to artificially lower their admit rates as well, albeit in less healthy ways (admitting more students ED, which has, for instance, lowered the quality of NU’s student body rather substantially). So now NU’s acceptance rate is 18% and JHU’s is also below 20%, which matches their prestige levels much more accurately. </p>
<p>Think of it as a game where admit rate really doesn’t affect student quality that much (otherwise, Brown would compete quite handily with Harvard), but where nowadays, latecomers like Chicago, NU, and JHU have realized that they have to keep a low admit rate if they’re going to keep up in prestige among high school students who judge a school’s quality via its admissions rate.</p>
<p>Actually, Chicago’s acceptance rate was 12% and Northwestern’s was 18%. (Johns Hopkins was in a similar ballpark.) Honestly, they are just as selective or more selective than their Ivy counterparts. Also, the applicant pool is very self-selective at those schools, while the Ivies get tons of applications from ‘Ivy wannabes’ who have no chance whatsoever (therefore lowering their acceptance rates).</p>
<p>Hmmm well it looks like US news is an unreliable source.</p>
<p>How would a school artificially lower it’s acceptance rate. By that do you mean looking more closely at non academic material within a college application and accepting only those who perform in more than one field? (As most colleges do now).</p>
<p>Thanks everyone. I’m not longer extremely confused ^^.</p>
<p>No, looking at non-academic material wouldn’t really lower acceptance rate since you’ll still be accepting the same number of students.</p>
<p>What the artificially lowering of acceptance rates is, is when a college purposely denies a highly qualified candidate in favor of a lower-standing one because it believes that the better candidate would likely get into a choose a more prestigious school. This has more or less been an issue at Northwestern, which, as Phuriku mentioned, has had a negative effect on their student body.</p>
<p>In fact, a friend of mine transferred from Northwestern to Uchicago 2 years ago, and told me that at UChicago, the atmosphere is much more serious, and that a disproportional amount of Northwestern students (for a University with such a reputation) are the party and greek-life obsessed individuals who treat college as a joke.</p>
<p>Of course, I don’t mean to discredit Northwestern, because it certainly has its brilliant and high quality students as well, but from what I’ve understood, it HAS lost some focus in the recent years.</p>
<p>The number of students these three colleges have been accepting has nt changed much in the last 10-15 years.</p>
<p>However, the application numbers have gone up ridiculously which resulted in the lower admission rates.</p>
<p>So Northwestern for example admits 5000 people each year with an expectation to have 2000 students in house as yield. However, their application numbers have shot up from 13000 in mid 90s (I dont have the exact year) to 30,000 in 2011. Similar trends can be noticed for Chicago when they were admitting 25% just two or three years ago to 12% this year. Most of the top schools have nt increased the number of matriculating students in decades (Princeton did move from 1000 to 1300 in the last 5 years) but the student applicant pool has increased at an unbelievable pace. Just think of Columbia going from 27k to 35k from last year to this year, with a single change - moving to the commonapp. You may see a very similar impact this year at USC since this is their first commonapp year.</p>