You make me feel so common.
Someone who mentioned Colgate above. Colgate had a great pandemic strategy which brought the students back on campus. I seem to recall that the president also in the fall Quarantined in the dorms with the students, saying that he should do what they had to do. They had some “gate” system which allowed for more activity depending on the numbers. so I do think in some cases pandemic responses will be affecting applicates in the non top schools.
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Were you referring to Colgate as a “non top”? Even prior to its recent application surge it placed within the top 50 of U.S. colleges by selectivity.
I was referring to Top 20. Was not trying to diminish Colgate at all. I was trying to even say that its going to do better because of its pandemic response.
@sdl0625: I asked out of curiosity. I didn’t regard anything you posted as intended to diminish Colgate. Actually, you praised its recent efforts. As another opinion, in a country with 50 states, 49th in selectivity seems top to me. Others often say “top 20,” but that would leave off notable schools such as UC–Berkeley (#43), Vassar (#45) and UMichigan (#48), at least according to the source posted above.
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I expect extremely few if any colleges list yield in an acceptance letter. Emphasizing yield was an example of how a college could nudge EA/RD accepted students to attend elsewhere, rather than nudging students to attend the college. It wouldn’t make sense for a college to do this.
To get a sense of random sampling of acceptance letters among colleges with varied selectivity, I looked up acceptance letters for the colleges listed in multiples of 10 on USNWR national rankings from 10 to 100. Not a single acceptance letter listed only number of applicants and number of spaces, without any information about number/percent accepted. By far the most common structure was to not list any information about number applied/accepted/rejected/spots/… at all. However, a few did list other combinations. For example, in some years (not in 2020), ULCA acceptance letters had a statement similar to, “You were selected from the largest college applicant pool in the nation – over 100,000 students applied to UCLA.” It mentions a large number of applicants, but does not mention number accepted or number of spaces.
The USA Today article is not a good source for “top” colleges. It appears to only use 2017-18 25/75 SAT score and 2017-18 acceptance rate, then list the colleges that have the best combination of high SAT score + low acceptance rate. This type of methodology obviously ignores a large number of critical factors in what makes a “top” college. It also will naturally favor smaller schools.
Regarding Colgate, Colgate’s increase in applications is far too large to primarily relate to going test optional. The colleges with the largest test optional boost are consistently more selective than Colgate, and none I am aware of have had increases that large over previous years (for example, Harvard increased by 42% from 40k to 57k). I also don’t think Colgate’s increase is primarily due to pandemic response since other colleges with top notch pandemic responses or areas with few COVID-19 cases didn’t see such a large increase. It may more primarily relate to something unique and specific to Colgate, such as good marketing of Colgate’s new FA policy, with claims of no tuition for families making less than $125k.
I wrote top by selectivity, and simply supported this with a conventional source. This contrasts with many assertions in these forums, which often appear with unstated sourcing.
I’d argue that smaller schools are inherently disadvantaged by the source’s methodology, in that they do not receive applications based upon the name recognition associated with sheer size and nationally prominent sports programs.
The post you quoted and replied to that started the tangent said “non top schools”, without any mention of selectivity. Being selective is not the same as being a “top school.”
The ranking doesn’t directly consider number of applications, number of high scoring students, quality of college, or similar. Instead they only consider factors that improve in proportion to a smaller class size.
Or one can look at the results, and observe some patterns. For example, among the top 50 I count ~20 small colleges (exact number depends on definition of “small”), and 2-3 large colleges. Even UCLA didn’t make the top 50.
If they had instead done something like the original USNWR methodology of sending a survey to admins and asking them to rank colleges on a scaled of 1-5, then that would have unnaturally penalized small colleges on average. The most meaningful ranking (whether than be ranking by selectivity or ranking by something else) depends on a variety of individual factors that vary from applicant to applicant, so it cannot be summed up well in a USA Today list.
Yield, which is the number/proportion of admitted students who matriculate, is unknown at the time acceptance notifications are sent out.
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Selectivity goes far beyond test scores and admission rate.
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It is more accurate to say that Colgate’s new FA policy has no federal loans for students whose families make less than $125K. I can assure you there are families under that threshold that are still paying their EFC but their students will not have the $27,000 loan balance upon graduation.
Most of those are large public colleges with higher acceptance rates and lower test scores and so would be hurt by this methodology. There are only eight of those on the list:
UM, USC, Notre Dame, Stanford, Duke , Vanderbilt, NU, UCB - all have nationally prominent sports programs. This ranking is biased away from the large flagships and to smaller private colleges.
The $27k in loans won’t be part of the package, but the student can still take them and I think many will. If the EFC is $25k, the school will expect the student to pay that, and many will do it through loans.