<p>I am not a math person so please don't laugh at me :) I don't have a child in the app process this year so I've been able to read the acceptance threads with a modicum of objectivity and I'm struck in Xiggi's thread by the fact that the top tier schools have this critical mass of applicants in the 25,000-35,000 range. </p>
<p>Reading about acceptances/rejections, there's a lot of kids with apps in at 4+ of these schools. Even here in TN, where the prestige mania isn't present, the kids who are applying to one top tier are usually applying to at least 2. </p>
<p>If the top 20 schools get roughly 600,000 total applications (I'm rounding widely here folks and I know I could drop exact numbers into an excel sheet, but it's early!) and we know that of those 600,000 apps, students are represented 2,3,4, or 5+ times because of multiple apps, how many unique applicants do you suppose there are? </p>
<p>I'm struggling with the fact that the number of hs seniors is dropping and yet the selectivity is still getting higher. I know it's because everyone is feeling the pressure and applying wider, but that's just compounding the problem. No one wants to be the one to limit their high achieving student to just one top tier app and see them fail, but honestly, how else does the madness stop?</p>
<p>^^I am not a math person either but have this thought: the most extremely competitive schools have such very high yield rates that it seems almost no one turns them down. At least that is how I interpret it. We hear about students getting accepted to multiple tippy top schools but how many students can there really be in this position not be impact yield rates?</p>
<p>edit: do you mean unique applicants in the sense that they only apply to one Ivy, one top LAC, etc?</p>
<p>See, I forgot about yield. Harvard’s is usually around 89% but then they start to drop. Isn’t that part of the reasoning behind “Tufts Syndrome?” I’m sure there’s someway to put this in a formula and figure out some type of rough estimate of unique applicants.</p>
<p>A little off-topic…I’ve wondered how many int’l apps these top 20 schools get and how many int’ls get accepted…especially the need-blind/full-need ones for int’ls. I think those % might be very, very low…but I don’t know.</p>
<p>I’m picturing tens of thousands of kids from China, India, etc, etc applying with super stats, and maybe only - what? 3000 total get accepted to top 20 schools? more? less? (some might get multiple acceptances)</p>
<p>By unique I mean representing one person. So if Susie applies to 5 top schools, Bobby applies to 3, etc. and you could figure out how many individuals were represented in the 600,000 applications. It’s not 600,000 individuals. It’s probably “only” between 100,000-200,000 individuals.</p>
<p>In website traffic, they measure “unique visitors” which wikipedia defines as “A unique visitor is a statistic describing a unit of traffic to a website, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report. This statistic is relevant to site publishers and advertisers as a measure of a site’s true audience size.” </p>
<p>So I’m trying to figure out if there is a rough way to determine the equivalent of a “unique visitor” number in the top tier of college apps. </p>
<p>I spend way too much time on CC if I"m thinking about stuff like this ;)</p>
<p>I believe what is meant is out of the 600,000 total apps to top schools how many actual students does this represent? For example, if you took the top twenty schools and all together they received a total of 600,000 applications and each of those applicants applied to 10 schools in the group, there are only 60,000 students making up the total of 600,000 applications. 60,000 students * 10 applications per student = 600,000 total applications. </p>
<p>It is highly unlikely that most kids apply to all the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT and top LACs along with other top 20 schools. However, there is a lot of overlap. The decision thread indicates that many of the students apply to 4 or more of the tipppy top schools, along with a few lower on the list. Thus, the 600,000 applications at top 20 likely come from about 100,000 to 150,000 students and the number of students applying to the very top schools would be even smaller.</p>
<p>The yield has to drop at all but the tippy top. While some students are only accepted at one Ivy or other top school, seems like others get multiple admits and have to choose.</p>
<p>So, if we say literally the top 5 most competitive schools with the lowest admit rates: what might be interesting is how many students are accepted at one, who had applications in at more than one of the group. I am thinking about whether students applied to the schools solely based on prestige versus a particular interest in a particular school for a particular reason, imagining that school out of the “top” 5 a good fit but the others not so much…
so you might have students self-selecting and admissions officers agreeing with that self-selection?</p>
<p>if I think about this very much it is going to make my non-math head really hurt!</p>
<h1>Vals is approximately 1 per HS, ~20,000 in the USA. Except for the high schools that report all students tied for top rank as Vals. I vaguely recall reading about one HS that labeled as Vals all 98 students who were tied at 4.0GPA!</h1>
<p>There are a lot of “top rank” students out there.</p>
<p>My son’s good friend is a very good student with stats that make him a no surprise choice for a top school, but certainly not a shoo in. He chose to apply to just one very top tier school in terms of selectivity and the rest of his choices were in double digit accept rates, including a number of schools that would be safeties for him. He did get accepted to all of his schools except for the lottery ticket. Would he have gotten into that level of selectivity if he had applied to , say, 10 such schools? Don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not His twin brother applied to 6 top schools and 4 less selective ones, and was denied at all 6. But there are kids out there with similar stats that did get into one of those schools that denied these two guys. One can “what if” forever. </p>
<p>Some years ago, my neighbor who was determined that her D was going to get into a highly selective school applied to 25 of such schools. And she did get into 3 of them which would not have made the list had she applied to only 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 schools. They ranged from 16-22 in her choices. She got into Colgate, Macalester and Hamilton. Some less selective schools denied or WL her and some more selective schools were lower on her preference list than those. So some of this is a numbers situation but not entirely.</p>
<p>Yes. My husband tried to do a calculation for our first kid showing how many vals with greater than 1500 SAT students might be applying for X number of spots at the most competitive schools after you took out spots reserved for athletes, while acknowledging that some athletes would also be val/high SAT but, probably weren’t in competition for spots with my kid who wasn’t recruited for a sport. His point was that there might literally not be room for all of them at the “top” schools. </p>
<p>Using comments from Deans of Admission from top colleges and CC as a sampling of the top tier applicants you can certainly derive some conclusions.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Most top tier applicants (as defined as having stats in the range to be admissible to a top 10 college) will apply to more than one such top school and often to more than 5. You just need to review on each school’s board on CC the admission results. One question asked applicants is where else the person applied and where he was accepted and rejected. With the admission results to Ivy league schools released yesterday, you are already getting a wealth of data. </p></li>
<li><p>Because of the somewhat random nature of the application process at the highest level, top tier applicants NEED to diversify their chances by applying broadly. There is actually not a great correlation in admission between one top school and another. Harvard admits are routinely rejected by Yale or Stanford and even by slightly less selective school such as Brown for instance. How do we know that? Even though the self-reports on CC reveal a number of cross-admits, there is a strong referral bias i.e. students admitted are far more likely to report their results than students rejected. The yields at top school tell a different story. Harvard has the highest yield at around 75% with Yale, Stanford, MIT and Stanford ranging from 60 to 70%. With such high yields it would be mathematically impossible to have many cross-admits between them. </p></li>
<li><p>The number of academically truly highly qualified applicants for the top colleges is fairly small. The Xiggi number of around 25,000-35,000 is probably in the right range and may actually be on the high side once you remove the athletes and legacies. The number of academic superstars is much smaller and would not fill an entire class at MIT or Harvard. Superstar students are not valedictorians or students with just high SAT scores or NMF status but students having won major national or international competitions. They are subject to very active recruiting by top research universities very much like top athletes. MIT reports than around 25% of its class consists of such superstars and Harvard’s numbers are in the same range. That is only around 700 students between them. With the other top ten schools you would end with no more than 2,000 such students total. Furthermore, the competition for INTERNATIONAL talent is now fierce among the top schools especially in countries like China. You just need to look at the results from the Putnam competition (the largest collegiate math competition) over the past decade to find a steady increase in foreign born students taking top awards. This international influx further reduces spots for US candidates. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>In short you have a relatively small and shrinking pool of truly qualified applicants playing musical chairs among top colleges. Most apply to multiple top schools, on average more than 5. A minority are admitted to more than one top school. Few admitted to a top 10 college (and extremely few among HYPSM admits) decide to go to lower ranked school.</p>
<p>Someone from another thread used this economic or game theory reference: “Optimal behavior for the individual is detrimental to the group.” I agree</p>