<p>What's up with the super low acceptances rate at Columbia College? Are there a lot of random HS kids who apply to Columbia just for the sake of applying or are the applicants all super competitive? i have a tight budget so i want to just apply to a good school that i like ED and be done with it. Would you say that CC is now almost as hard to get in as Harvard and Yale?</p>
<p>“what’s up with the super low acceptance”</p>
<p>Lots of applicants and few spots. Certainly not all of the applicants are competitive, but many of them are. Columbia is indeed almost as selective as Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>If you have evidence of this “tight budget” you may be eligible for application fee waivers. However, if the acceptance rate disuades you from applying, can you reasonably make the argument that this is a school you want to attend?</p>
<p>columbia is looking for a type of student that wants to go to columbia. so just because you are a good student, doesn’t mean you will be accepted. also just because you can get into other ivies, doesn’t mean you will be accepted (ED or otherwise).</p>
<p>so figure out if you care enough about CU to do ED.</p>
<p>Many students apply, and there are a limited number of seats. I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that Columbia is as selective as Harvard or Princeton, though the College is arguably the most selective institution after HYPS.</p>
<p>Like silverturtle said, most applicants are very competitive, but the majority isn’t. It’s like how Harvard has such a low acceptance rate - a ton of the applicants don’t have a chance in h3ll but they’re like “hey, it’s harvard, w/e, i’ll give it a shot.” People choose Columbia because after HYPSM, it’s probably the most prestigious U.S. college + it’s in NYC. Columbia is NOT as selective as HYPSM though. Also… don’t say “ED and be done with it.” There’s a good chance you’ll be deferred/rejected.</p>
<p>Yeah, a smaller class size will unavoidably make it more selective than larger schools.</p>
<p>creamcheese. your comments don’t quite make sense. plus who here actually knows what it means to be ‘as selective.’</p>
<p>strictly, the numbers say C is behind. but in the wide swath of american colleges they look to be as selective as each other. consider C’s 9.8 to S’s 7.5 is a smaller change than 9.8 to Penn’s 17.1 </p>
<p>from what i can tell this is my thought - if we are to use the word selectivity we should have a definition that takes into account differences among schools - different desires, etc. so i propose: selectivity ought to be defined by the likelihood that an applicant will be denied at your school, but admitted to a peer school. the higher the likelihood, the more selective your school is. your yield only refers to how likely will students once admitted attend your school, nothing about how unlikely will students be admitted to your school. </p>
<p>in that end and looking around - i think there is a lot of negation going on because HYPSM all do funky things and take kids that C rejects. now does HYPSM reject at a higher frequency C admits? maybe, but i don’t have those numbers. but i think it might not be a huge differences. </p>
<p>based on my metric, i was tossing some number around and i came up with a reasonable number - that HYPSM at most rejects somewhere around 12.5% of C admits (16% of RD admits) based on looking at some cross admit numbers, and taking out CU’s early decision pool, etc. if i did it in a reverse from let’s say H’s perspective, I could see it being somewhere in the high single digits. undoubtedly there are students that H admits that YPSMC must deny. i think if we had this number for all schools we could really figure out how selective each school was. you might be surprised. it also gets at how high the crossover in applicants are between such schools. it is possible that relatively choosy schools like Amherst might have a very high percentage of students that they admit that are rejected by peers, but because of their smaller size they can still have a small admit rate. </p>
<p>i think this makes more sense to define selective, then to use something that is rather amorphous and used out there. if you folks mean strictly admit rate - you have baggage in your analysis (students that do not or cannot apply to multiple schools, athletes, legacies and other special groups). i don’t think it is perfect, but eh i had free time.</p>
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<p>No, that’s not what s/he said. What s/he said was “Certainly not all of the applicants are competitive, but many of them are.” What you said makes absolutely no sense.</p>
<p>^sorry - wrong choice of wording. When I said majority I meant like, this year columbia had about 25000 ppl apply i think? I forgot exact numbers. But probably only about 10,000were qualified/had a shot at the 2,000+ acceptances Columbia handed out.</p>
<p>doesn’t the college have THE lowest regular decision admission rate?</p>
<p>I don’t buy the argument by so many people on this board that Columbia only has a low acceptance rate because so many people apply only for the city. </p>
<ol>
<li>Columbia isn’t on the common app</li>
<li>Columbia’s app is a BI***</li>
<li>NYU is on the common app, and would more likely get the “omgomgom i could live in NYC!!1” kids</li>
<li>After 30 seconds of research any idiot would discover Columbia’s Core, which I would argue is a pretty heavy deterrent to most people.</li>
<li> Why doesn’t SEAS have a correspondingly high number of applicants? It’s in NYC too.</li>
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<ol>
<li>It’s population is much smaller than the College’s, about 1/5. So it’s understandable that it attracts a smaller applicant pool.</li>
<li>It’s an engineering school, which means the applicants are more self-selecting. So you get less of the random undecided folk who just apply for the name.</li>
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<p>Fastfood might be saying compared to other engineering schools, not just colleges in general.</p>
<p>Very hard. ATM, the acceptance rate is 8.9%. Columbia hit single digits and that number may well off decrease by the Class of 2010 applications. Columbia is just Columbia. Don’t expect nothing from it. </p>
<p>To give some people hope though, an African American from my school got a 97 GPA (W) and 1700 SAT and got admitted RD. Not sure if it gives a lot of hope, but it sure gave me hope. I was shocked, because our school isn’t even competitive. I don’t even think it’s in the top 100 H.S.</p>
<p>GL if you’re gonna apply.</p>
<p>@karot:</p>
<p>SEAS has the second lowest acceptance rate of any engineering school - second to MIT and lower than Cornell Engineering. probably comparable to Princeton Eng if Princeton were to pull out numbers.</p>
<p>but i do agree on self-selecting body. plus SEAS’ selectivity has ratcheted up in recent years. going from 30+% to 14.42% in like 7 years. school finally is getting its due. plus folks are realizing that a ugrad engineering education has worth outside of strictly engineering. if you want to be a standard engineer - go to Cornell or GaTech. if you want to apply engineering (apply applied sciences) then Fu SEAS is a rockin’ place, or so you gather the the public sentiment to be.</p>
<p>the college does not have the lowest acceptance rate. the 4th lowest. Harvard, Yale, Stanford than CC. Columbia ugrad combined has the 4th lowest, ahead of Princeton for the first time ever 9.82 to 9.93. Puck Frinceton.</p>
<p>re: SEAS and NYC. to eng students and i have heard it said on this board before - NYC is a deterrent. if you are going to be doing problem sets until 4 in the morning every other night and spend most of your time in the lab then often “where” you go to school doesn’t matter so much as what school you go to. though NYC does attract its slew of engineers. the increase in SEAS’ applicant pool is probably more related to the relative perception that SEAS is a good academic experience, more so than any NYC popularity coattails. </p>
<p>you could argue that folks looked at SEAS admission data (as it was over a decade ago, but then again so was the college) as an easier way into the Ivies - which in a way created more people applying thus lowering numbers - almost like having a sale and then having your store be overrun by customers. </p>
<p>i think this is not quite true from engineers i spoke to, and kids i have interviewed - certainly a sense that students buy what SEAS is selling and believe it will make them more competitive in the marketplace even though SEAS still doesn’t have the respect in the rankings (yet). plus if you have applied to SEAS in the last 4 years you know its just as hard (if not harder) to get into than the college. ConColl has this theory as well - when you look at aptitude, testing and other aspects that are required of students in engineering, the quality is just as strong as college students (plus higher testing/GPAs).</p>
<p>I was just venting frustration from people discrediting Columbia’s low acceptance rate as a result of just being in NYC. I think it’s low because it’s a great school.</p>
<p>Just throwing this out there, but the Columbia App isn’t any harder than Common App + School Supplement.</p>
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<p>Definitely, but it is separate, the common app is as long but usually spread over 6-7 colleges. so per college it is much much smaller, there is no denying that adopting the common app sky-rockets the number of BS applicants applying to a school, because acceptance rates plummet and sat scores / high school GPAs don’t change much. I know people who’ve used their common app essay for the Columbia essay, but my guess is that these usually don’t get in, because Columbia is very aware of essay topics and can smell recycling.</p>
<p>And hell yeah, HYSC in terms of acceptance rate, love it. My guess is that next year it’ll be HYSCB and then princeton. puck frinceton :)</p>
<p>^ The Columbia essay topic isn’t restrictive, so why would an applicant be disadvantaged if he/she recycles the CommonApp essay as long as it sums the person up effectively?</p>