U Miami - "42,000 students applying for 2100 spaces in its first year class"

Last year, U Miami had 40,121 applicants, so 42,000 is a 4.7% increase. That’s a similar degree of increase to previous years, and a reasonable increase for a school with its selectivity. The larger rate of increases tend to occur at newly test optional colleges that are more selective than Miami, such as MIT and Harvard.

As others have noted, you need to consider yield to estimate admit rate, and Miami’s yield is quite low. In previous years, they’ve admitted more than 10k students. If they admit 10k students this year, then that would be a 10k/42k = 24% admit rate.

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So in other words, hard to say whether harder to get in than in past years. You don’t think we can know for certain till the stats are confirmed. Does that make you question the correlation between admit % and competitiveness? These questions have been on my mind for all schools BTW.

It has always been necessary to exercise care with admit rates. A low admit rate from a weak applicant pool, or a high admit rate from a strong applicant pool, can be deceptive. Overall admit rates can deceive at schools that admit by division or major.

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Do we know how many Miami took from ED. If they took a Tulane approach of high acceptance, that would have been a smart strategy this year - assuming strong applicants and goal was to maximize yield and lower their admit rate.

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The most recent CDS mentions they admitted 755/1564 via ED, so ED applicants composed ~34% of entering class. I don’t know if that changed this year, but as noted above, there was not a particularly large increase in applications this year. Instead the rate of application increase was similar to previous years, so it’s not obvious to me that they’d need to change ED/RD policies from previous years.

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If the number of spots in a first year class did not grow YoY, but the number of applications grew by a similar number, 2100 (note that the letter said "more than 42,000), does that have additional meaning?

Apart from the deceiving headline as others have mentioned, if colleges allow high school students and parents back on campus for visits, the apps should go down. Students will hopefully make better choices on where they apply which should mean less applications. Test optional however will still drive apps up.

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One can make a similar eye catching headline for numerous other colleges that make the college sound more selective than it actually is. Some examples are below. It’s my understanding that this quote came from an acceptance letter. They probably did this intentionally as a way of making the college sound more selective to admits, partially in an effort to improve yield and PR.

Fordham Class of 2024: ~48,000 students applied for ~2000 spaces
Boston U Class of 2025: ~76,000 students applied for ~3000 spaces
UCLA Class of 2025: ~140,000 students applied for ~6000 spaces

When expressed in this format, the stats can rival the most selective colleges. For example, the numbers below suggest Fordham is more selective than Penn. Yet when looking at acceptance rate (53% admitted at Fordham vs 8% admitted at Penn) or GPA/SAT type ranges, one would likely to come to a very different conclusion.

Fordham Class of 2024: ~48,000 students applied for ~2000 spaces
University of Pennsylvania Class of 2024: ~44,000 students applied for ~2400 spaces

I don’t really think is deceiving. That’s pretty much how every university reports it. They do publish ultimately how many were offered admission but not until after RD.

Not in the slightest. The overwhelming majority of college report it in a different format on their website and on news stores, usually including information about number of admits and/or admit rate. It’s quite rare to only report number applications and class size, without listing anything about number/percent admitted. It’s true that if a college does not yet know how many will be admitted in RD, then they would not list number of RD admits. However, it’s quite common to instead list number/percent admitted EA/ED following the early round in an announcement relating to early round, rather than just total applied and class size.

I could list countless examples. Instead I’ll only list 2. Harvard – Admissions Statistics . It shows number applied and number admitted as the first 2 numbers at top. UMass Amherst – https://www.umass.edu/admissions/facts-and-figures/student-body-and-admissions-statistics . 2 of the listed stats are number of applicants and % admitted.

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That is just insane.

The Miami example is not from their website. On their website they have the last year class profile and admission rate shown as 33% similar to the Harvard example.

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Correct. This was in an acceptance letter to an early action student.

Yes, which is largely my point. That’s the usual format for listing admission stats. If you mean only in an acceptance letters and not on websites/news stores/…, it’s also not standard to just list total applied + class size, without any information about number/percent accepted. Many examples will come up in a Google search. Most common seems to be not listing numerical stats about num applied at all, in acceptance letters.

I certainly haven’t seen many admissions letters. My daughter was accepted early action and we received the same letter, but not even for a moment left us with the impression that the acceptance rate is 5% or that Miami is as competitive as Harvard or Penn… I just don’t understand why people find it so confusing. All it said was how many applied for what class size.

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I don’t think every university reports it like that, even if they do, doesn’t make it right as it’s the students and families that get hurt by that. Fortunately many students will just google Miami acceptance rate and it will show up as 27%.

“Correct. This was in an acceptance letter to an early action student.”

Interesting, it’s almost like they want someone who’s not going to dig into the numbers.

I believe it’s more a way of presenting stats to change perception and less obvious nudge in a particular direction than obvious confusion. For example, if U Miami instead said the following, it would probably leave a very different impression and result in a different yield among admits.

“42,000 students applied. We expect to admit approximately 10,000 and have a yield of approximately 20%. We hope that you are among the approximately 20% of admitted students who chooses to enroll.”

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Not confusing I do not think.

My question, still is, how would smart people interpret the fact that many schools will be receiving an increase in applications for the same number of spots? Possibly, the answer hinges on yield, heavily influenced by how much of the class a school took ED. If Miami, for example, took 1/2 of the class ED (which they may have), their acceptance rate will likely be enhanced YoY - and if they are smart about who they accepted EA and RD - maybe they will have a stronger student YoY. Truly find the whole thing fascinating.

I agree with that. If you are charging $70k+ and you are not a Top 50 or near a major city or very well branded for something - I would not want to be you.

Actually between all my kids I have seen many, many letters of admission/rejection/deferral and it is not that uncommon for universities to report on those letters only numbers of apps and size of class bypassing yield etc. And every year there are numerous threads on CC discussing the same thing. So not unusual at all. Maybe colleges were called on it and they do it less now but in my kids letters I have seen it many times.