<p>because you are getting some major competitions in life: Applications to BC rise to 31k. I laughed when The Heights incorrectly wrote BC admission number at 32%. That’s my year’s number. Since they are admitting roughly 8k, that means that admit number will be around 25% this year. This doesn’t make BC special, but it sure does make your life a bit more miserable as an applicant.
<a href=“http://media.www.bcheights.com/media/storage/paper144/news/2008/02/04/News/Applicants.Hit.AllTime.High.At.31k-3184101.shtml?reffeature=htmlemailedition[/url]”>http://media.www.bcheights.com/media/storage/paper144/news/2008/02/04/News/Applicants.Hit.AllTime.High.At.31k-3184101.shtml?reffeature=htmlemailedition</a></p>
<p>Are you serious?!</p>
<p>And here I was thinking I had a good chance at getting in. oh well...</p>
<p>Ohh god. This is the reason I applied to 15 schools, but if it wasn't for jerks like me, we wouldn't be in this situation.</p>
<p>Lets all have less kids. I don't want my kid to go through this.</p>
<p>Our generation (gen y) has a lot of kids - there will be many fewer college applicants in 15-20 years - just look at the demographics. But for now, the competition remains fierce. And it will translate into tougher admission for our 2011 class for grad school as well.</p>
<p>Dear Reddune : Had not seen the latest application statistics before your posting : 31,000+. What would be interesting is whether Boston College can comment on the quality in the growth of applications. In other words, are more students applying to BC from the bottom quartile of test scores in the previous year hoping for a miracle (not greatly altering the competition on the top end)? Alternatively, is this a function of the Ivy League schools all but shutting their doors to a vast majority of top end students (thereby greatly increasing the top end competition)?</p>
<p>If there is a substantial change in the yield data (typically around 30%), we will likely get some visibility on exactly these issues.</p>
<p>The parallel explosive growth in the application rate at Georgetown seems to say that more students at the top end are indeed putting together 10, 12, 15, and yes, even 20 applications for colleges. The selectivity of the top schools is causing a cascading effect and the correlation in applications at top schools must be statistically very high.</p>
<p>Surprising that BC's statistics department is not pushing more research externally on this topic.</p>
<p>Dear scottj:</p>
<p>I've posted something similar in another post. This might have some relevance to your question:</p>
<p>"Over the past 10 years, the 25th percentile for the SAT has increased by 60+ point (using the 1600 scale), and the 75th percentile has increased by 70+ points. Considering the top quartile doesn't have a whole lot of place to move since they are so much closer to the ceiling, their higher increase than the lower quartile is surprising.
<a href="http://www.bc.edu/publications/factb..._fact_book.pdf">http://www.bc.edu/publications/factb..._fact_book.pdf</a>"</p>
<p>The increase probably does have both the bottom and top quartile, but I'm inclined to think the top quartile are applying more than the bottom. The Eagle Eye day for Honors Program students held last weekend saw 40-50 more were students here than last year. That revealed one or two things: either more highly qualified students are applying or more of them are taking interest in BC, or both. The fact that schools like Harvard, Princeton, and UVA cut EA/ED benefited many schools below them. Students from middle/upper-middle tend to apply early, and thus without these schools they switch to others. These kind of students are usually very well prepared and are of higher quality in term of test scores and have greater financial resources to mass-apply.</p>
<p>I read on Northeastern's site that they had 35,000 applicants this year.
I wonder what happens to the less competitve, mediocre students applying to colleges. I mean any college, not just the most competitive.</p>
<p>When does BC start sending out its first acceptances?</p>
<p>Is no one bothered by the fact that they don't seem to be able to calculate a percent change??? (Application increase: 31000-28850=2150/28850=7.4%)...This makes me nervous. They've printed it twice now, even though I wrote to the editor to correct it. I am also made a little nervous by an Ad Director telling me, on Accepted Eagle's Day, "...they must have went that way..." I mean this is fifth grade math and basic grammar...can anyone reassure me that this is not an accurate reflection of the BC community???</p>
<p>Dear eaglet : You are confusing two terms : acceptance rates and yield (enrollment) numbers. BC will accept approximately 7,500-8,000 students from their 31,000+ applications. This generates the ACCEPTANCE RATE in the 25% range, lower than past years. The yield from that acceptance pool is about 30%, resulting in about 2250 freshmen ... in other words, roughly one of every three (little more) accepted students will actually enroll for their freshman year.</p>
<p>So, enrollment is a function of both acceptance and yield. Your calculation of about 7.5% is the correct ENROLLMENT RATE from the full applicant pool. (Should we now generalize and be concerned that potential BC students in the Class of 2012 cannot execute word problems?)</p>
<p>Expect that acceptance rates will be decreasing while yield rates will be increasing at BC over the coming several years. This will result in the same class size, but the correlation between BC and other schools in the acceptance pools will begin tipping more towards BC.</p>
<p>As for the grammar error from the admissions director, it happens.</p>
<p>No...no confusion at all.
If you received 28850 applications last year and you received 31000 this year, you have experienced an increase in applications of 2150 or a 7.4% increase. This is NOT a 5% increase. Appications are up 7.4%, not 5%.</p>
<p>As for the grammatical, certainly if it were simply a "wordo" (a spoken typo!),
I would have to agree and wouldn't think twice/let it make me nervous...it just sounded like the guy didn't know any better. But I'm gonna go with your more positive implication...I mean no one with a decent college degree speaks that poorly, right?</p>
<p>scottj...do you understand that acceptance rates and enrollment rates were not pertinent to the discussion? The issue was acceptance rate.</p>
<p>I dispute any statement of "fierce competition that is getting more fierce every year" and providing numbers showing lower admission rates to substantiate these claims. Last time I checked, the supply of students was relatively inelastic, and did NOT grow at 30% per year. The increase is simply coming from kids applying to more SIMILAR colleges, hence it is a (nearly) zero-sum game at the top, middle, and bottom. There are plenty of kids like my D, who applied to BC not because they really want to go there, but because they thought they would be happy there if the schools they REALLY wanted did not accept them. There are at least five schools that my D would choose over BC if accepted. Why did she apply there? You would have to ask my wife :-)</p>
<p>^It's very true; no one is denying that many students, myself included three years ago, are very paranoid and are applying to dozen and dozen of colleges giving rise to this ungodly increase in applications all across the board. Even with the mini-baby-boom, it's not enough to account for the 30-50% rise in applications some schools are experiencing. </p>
<p>But I think you miss the nature of the competition that comes with increased in application. By having so many people applied to the same school, the school has gained a huge advantage over the students. scottj asked a very valid question earlier regarding which spectrum the rise occurs at. For the sake of argument, let just pick generic test scores--SATs and ACT-- as our indicator of the quality of students applying (understanding that test scores are incredibly imperfect). </p>
<p>If more students from the 25th percentile are applying while applications from students at the 75th percentile remain the same, then the competition overall for all students doesn't get a whole lot more competitive than from last year, except for those who fall under the 25th percentile. Since the percentage of students getting admitted from the 25th percentile remains at 25% the total student population (I know, I'm brilliant at math), those who share similar scores still have to distinguish themselves in order to get in. And by virtue of the vast number of applications, BC gains the advantage of picking only the creme de la creme of lower quartile (or what it sees as the best). Leaving everyone else who shares similar scores to believe colleges are getting harder to get into and thus you must distinguish yourself more if you have or think you'll have these scores. By having the perception of overwhelming demand, despite the fact that the number of customers remains the same or increases only slightly, you create intense competition. It's like an auction, you might have only 20 people who really want the Ming vase out of 100 there, but by putting them together in room and have them bid, it might create intense competition among all 100 for the product despite the fact the vase might be worth less than the bidding value. It's because they all think the product is really valuable base on how the others bid. There might be a technical term for this, but I'm not an econ or psychology major. </p>
<p>Now, if the application from the top third-quartile (75th+) are increasing, then the whole pool is getting more competitive. If a college has 3000 more students who score in the 2100s+ than last year applying, those at the 25th are at an automatic disadvantage. A school can still admit the same number of students as last year, but it can pack more of the top scorers in it and leave the bottom quartile fighting even harder and fueling the frenzy. You brought a very good point that not all the top students go to school they are admitted to. That's where the invention of waitlist comes in so handy. By the virtue that more top scorers applied, a university can pack a lot great students in the mid-range who didn't get in (but would have gotten in if there weren't so many top students applying) on to the waitlist as well and down right reject those who might have gotten in in previous years because they miss it at the tiniest or margin this year. Because of this the waitlist tends to be HUGE, this gives schools the advantage by casting their nest wide. It won't be catching all the remaining big fishes, but because of the sheer size of the remaining school of fishes, they have a greater chance to capture quite a number of also highly qualified waitlisters. </p>
<p>Although a 30% increase in applications doesn't make a school 30% harder to get in, but in the long run, it creates competition in the school favor. It also generates excitement among students and build momentum for a school. Through this competition among students, a school can slowly, but surely, grow more competitive and harder to get in the truest sense. If you examine a school like BC, the 25th and 75th percentiles of admitted and enrolled students have both increased over the past 10 years, they don't jump by 30 points a piece for every year there is a rise in application, but they do rise very slowly because of the rise in competition. </p>
<p>But the supply of top scorers are limited (unless you parents plan to contribute more of them) and there are a lot of top schools competing for them as well. A school will hit its ceiling eventually--not even Harvard can get all the 1500s SAT scorers there are even if it wanted to. Nevertheless, by having a sizable number of top students at your school, you forces students at the bottom quartile, who are a lot more numerous, to compete fiercely because of the competitiveness they think schools possess. The rise in application doesn't affect top students, but the the mid-range and bottom students will feel the pain.</p>
<p>So in conclusion, the lower the admission rate, the more competitive the school seems; the more competitive it seems, the more desire it elicits; the more desire it elicits, the more likely it will land top students; and with more top students, its standard of admission increases; when it standard of admission increases, the more competitive the school seems. It's a vicious cycle working in the school's favor. If you want to kill the cycle, apply to five schools only, and within a few years, we would all be a lot happier and equilibrium would be restored.</p>
<p>Dear Reddune : Excellent explanation! You drew exactly the right point about the increase in application numbers - without information about the spectral spread of these applications (whether measured through SAT scores or another metric), watching the College Board's mid-range scores will be the only true way to measure what is happening at the 25th and 75th percentile ... and ultimately what the increase in application rates meant for Boston College specifically.</p>
<p>If the 25th percentile score is rising, but the 75th percentile score is the same, you will know that most applications/acceptances are coming from the midrange applicant pool. If both the 25th and 75th are rising, you know that the top end of the pool was heavy and that lower end and middle students felt the squeeze.</p>
<p>actually, they accept 2250 students from EA pool, and 9000 altogether, so 9000-2250= 6750 accepted RD. 6750/31000= 22% accept rate for RD applicants</p>
<p>THe acceptance from the EA pool was about 32%, but that is mostly due to the higher quality of applicants. BC's website says this also.</p>
<p>
If the 25th percentile score is rising, but the 75th percentile score is the same, you will know that most applications/acceptances are coming from the midrange applicant pool. If both the 25th and 75th are rising, you know that the top end of the pool was heavy and that lower end and middle students felt the squeeze.
</p>
<p>That would be a valid argument if it applied to matriculated, not accepted students. Unfortunately, colleges trumpet the latter and (usually) carefully guard the former. Admissions is a game of statistics, with the college trying to both do the right thing and guess who is likely to attend, hence the love affair with ED at some other schools.</p>
<p>P.S. D was born in late 1989 :-)</p>
<p>Dear GroovyGeek : From a public disclosure perspective, visit the following web site on the College Board : </p>
<p>College</a> Search - Boston College - BC - SAT®, AP®, CLEP®</p>
<p>The statistics disclosed cover the middle 50% of first year students.</p>