USA Today:College Acceptance Rates

Parents Forum
1

<p>This part of the article "Cracking the Code of College Admissions" provides statistics from 2004 to answer the question "How many get in".</p>

<p>
[quote]
With acceptance rates under 13%, Harvard, Yale and Princeton are indeed extremely selective. But looking just at them gives a very skewed picture.</p>

<p>"When we read stories about how hard a time people are having getting into those very selective institutions, it's not the tip of the iceberg — it's the fly on the tip of the iceberg." says David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.</p>

<p>Using data that colleges reported to the U.S. Department of Education, Hawkins crunched application and acceptance numbers for 857 four-year, not-for-profit colleges in the country that accepted more than 1,000 students in 2004. In this chart, only 2.6% of the schools accepted fewer than 25% of their applicants, while 82.5% accepted more than half.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Check out the list at:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-02-collegerates_x.htm%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-02-collegerates_x.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

2

<p>that is fascinating
Some universities who are ranked USNEWS "regional" have a lower acceptance rate than some USNEWS top 50 "national" LACs</p>

<p>and a school that I would rank academically above those schools- at least for my daughters interests has a much higher admit rate.</p>

3

<p>Very interesting - for example, acceptance rate at California State University - Long Beach is 49%, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor - 62%.</p>

<p>I wonder if the qualifications of the applicant pools vary significantly so that comparing acceptance rates between some schools is like comparing apples and oranges.</p>

4

<p>Off-topic, but a quote from the article. </p>

<p>
[quote]
Filtering out colleges that accept fewer than 1,000 students cuts out not only scores of colleges with 100% acceptance rates, some with just one student

[/quote]

The curiousity is killing me. What "one student" college are they talking about??</p>

<p>And fendrock, you're right of course. Some of these numbers involve an element of self-selection that makes comparisons difficult. According to the list, North Georgia College and Alcorn State (fine schools in their own right) have slightly lower acceptance rates than UNC-Chapel Hill, Lehigh and Vanderbilt. But that doesn't mean they are more selective, obviously.</p>

5

<p>
[quote]
Very interesting - for example, acceptance rate at California State University - Long Beach is 49%, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor - 62%.</p>

<p>I wonder if the qualifications of the applicant pools vary significantly so that comparing acceptance rates between some schools is like comparing apples and oranges.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>If one compares the SAT ranges, one sees that there may indeed be a difference in applicant pools:
Cal State Long Beach
SAT - Verbal Range (25-75%): 450-560
SAT - Math Range (25-75%): 470-580</p>

<p>UMichigan:
SAT - Verbal Range (25-75%): 590-690
SAT - Math Range (25-75%): 630-730</p>

<p>Looks like apples & oranges to me.</p>

6

<p>long beach was actually the school that I was looking at - because it is one of the schools where D will be looking </p>

<p>I realize that there are a lot of variables
for instance schools that heavily recruit- for instance the schools that have reps that hit up the major high schools- (for example- my Ds high school has had about 2 or 3 reps visit a day for the last two months-) and send out lots of mailings, will probably have more applicants than schools that more narrowly target students. ( none of the schools that D actually applied to- put her automatically by SAT score and interest on their mailing lists)</p>

<p>Yield also is not necessarily going to corrolate with admission rate- a school like LongBeach - may have a lower yield than schools that are "ranked " higher.</p>

<p>While I think SAT score & GPA are helpful measures to have- I also think that straight admit numbers like the USATODAY article are very helpful and will give students some reassurance that they can get into a college.</p>

<p>I was also quite pleased to see the relatively high acceptance rate of a school- although we haven't physically seen it yet- appears to be one of her top choices ( or should I say my top choice- she is " only" a junior and not interested in talking about specific schools- her swim team is going to state and she still has soccer season to finish up- all the time in the world mom)</p>

<p>I am also more interested in what a school actually is teaching rather than being concerned about high school measures like GPA and test scores
One of the reasons why we were interested in Reed- was the focus on writing- not the test scores of her classmates
I understand the appeal of a cohort- but I think that there are many great schools who have students with lower than Ivy league GPAs who get an excellent education-</p>

7

<p>I don't see Pomona on the list; is that because they accept fewer than 1,000?</p>

8

<p>according to US news Pomona had about 5,000 applicants and accepted 19% so would that be just under 1000?</p>

9

<p>I just looked up that the entering class of 2006 was 47% acceptance rate. 12,196/25,733. But enrollment is only 5399. Expected yield is a huge factor in acceptance rates. Michigan has many qualified in-state students that use Umich as a safety (rolling admissions) driving up the application numbers but then decide to go to one of their other "top 20" choices when accepted. So acceptance numbers, as all statistics, really need to be looked at in context. At the end of the day, U-M wants 5500 or so matriculating.</p>

10

<p>my D got into her "safety" not even having looked at any stats, and her safety accepts 30%</p>

<p>what I noticed in one of those rating books was that the "selective" "highly selective" ranking was very inconsistant</p>

<p>so it is better to look at #s than at words</p>

11

<p>Yeah, Pomona, Swarthmore, Haverford, Claremont McKenna all admitted under 1000.</p>

12

<p>The companion article noted that "On average, four year colleges still accept 70% of applicants." I like the fly on the tip of the iceberg analogy. Lots of great schools taking lots of great kids out there folks. Just have to look a little deeper and farther to find them.</p>

13

<p>
[quote]
I wonder if the qualifications of the applicant pools vary significantly so that comparing acceptance rates between some schools is like comparing apples and oranges.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Sometimes it is, technical schools like RPI have very high acceptance rates (75%!), but the average SAT scores are quite high. V580-690, M640-730 for the 25-75th %iles. And 46% of the class has 700+ in math.</p>

14

<p>hmmm some of these are VERY interesting! thanks for the link</p>

15

<p>some schools that seem to have high acceptance rates, and for the calabor of schools that seems inconsistant, they tend to be specialized schools who have a kind of self selecting applicant pool, like what mathmom said</p>

16

<p>No doubt this is a major point of this and its companion article - depending upon the given context, statistics can give skewed information. The first part of the article, "Cracking the Code..." gives great advice to keep in mind as our kids set off to conduct the necessary research about the numbers related to acceptance rates and selectivity.</p>

<p>
[quote]
With the baby boom echo winding its way through high school and college, the Department of Education projects the number of high school graduates will keep rising through 2009. Not only are there more high school graduates, but the percentage expecting to go to college also has grown. It's now over 60%, says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. With online applications making it easy to shoot out a lot of them, the number of applications per student also is up.</p>

<p>All of which make the admissions process less predictable. But not totally unpredictable.</p>

<p>"To give students some indication of the likelihood of admission -- 'Is this a complete crap shoot?' -- the answer is, 'No, it's not,' " says Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment management and college relations at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.</p>

<p>Predicting who'll get into a few highly selective schools is getting more difficult, but the overall selectivity rate hasn't moved much in the past 20 years because there are more places at four-year colleges, Hawkins says. On average, four-year colleges still accept 70% of applicants.</p>

<p>Admissions professionals say there's plenty students can do to make the process more predictable.</p>

<p>Any number of websites, including most individual college websites and the Department of Education's College Opportunities Online Locator (nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool), will give you a test-score median range of students at individual colleges so you can tell how you stack up, Hawkins says.</p>

<p>Good research involves multiple sources, and guidebooks with profiles of individual colleges...

[/quote]
</p>

17

<p>It's fun to look such lists, but its worth not losing sight of the point it was designed to make: most schools, including many fine ones, have fairly unintimidating acceptance rates. </p>

<p>The danger is that the list looks suspiciously like a ranking (and this emerges as a subtext in a lot of this thread). Acceptance rates are probably the weakest link of all the factors that make up selectivity, and selectivity itself is surely a weak proxy for overall quality of the educational experience, let alone fit for a particular student. The list--treated as some sort of ranking--is like the pimple on the fly on the tip of the iceberg.</p>

18

Seriously, this is a 10 year old thread. Please do not resurrect old threads. Closing threads