In the current competitive process of college admissions, it seems like elite colleges are racing towards a sub-zero acceptance rate. (You got 2021 statistics like 4.6 percent for Stanford and 5.8 for Columbia. It seems like every year, the acceptance rate falls.) These tiny numbers and decreasing acceptance rates have dropped at an escalating pace in the last decade.
The question is: when will this trend stop?
I know that this issue is complex since one will have to factor population growth/ decline, current job market, etc. But, based on your reasonings, is there an asymptote to college acceptance rates? Is it even possible for rates to plummet below 2%/ 3% in the next few years?
My opinion is that there HAS to be an asymptote where lowering the acceptance rates will result in diminishing returns. Maybe in the next decade, the rates will start to steady out around where they currently are (give or take +1-2%).
As long as kids continue to send an increasing number of applications to schools, acceptance rates will continue to decline. It’s fairly simple, when there are a fixed number of seats at these schools.
For those schools whose admit rate is not far away 5%, the increases in their applications in the past 10 years have been largely driven by increases in international applications, leading by those from China, followed by those from India and Korea. The increase in domestic applications is a secondary factor.
Imho, it is going to be a long time, if ever. Assuming the number of available spots remain the same, the tippy tops have to convince 5 times the current number of applicants to apply. That’s a strong ask considering:
The number is US graduating seniors is forecast to decrease over the next 5 years.
As the acceptance rate decreases, there is a strong disincentive to apply. Many people will feel why waste $70 on a lottery ticket.
As the acceptance rate decreases, there is a strong incentive for the school to expand. For each new spot created, the school would have receive over 100 additional applicants for the acceptance rate to decrease toward 1%.
Of course, this is just opinion and not based on any research or careful study of demographic trends. What I do think will happen over the medium term, is a consolidation in higher ed through the shuttering of small private schools with small endowments such as Holy Cross in Indiana. (Not picking on them, they were just in the news recently about potentially closing). At the same time demand for “brand name” colleges will increase creating a strong incentive for them to grow.
Over the long term, I just have no idea how higher ed will change. 100 years ago, substantial majority of jobs didn’t require a high school diploma. Now a majority of jobs require at least a high school diploma. Demand for higher ed will probably continue to increase as more jobs in the knowledge economy require higher ed. Plus higher ed is a nice short cut for employers to see that a person is educated and dedicated.
I strongly believe in residential higher ed and I’m so happy both my DS have gone that route. I think they learn as much from their peers as they do in the class room. But the system is so darn inefficient. Annual costs at the tippy-tops greatly exceed median annual salaries in the US and have been growing faster than inflation. Obviously that can’t continue over the long term. But I just have no idea, how higher ed will succumb to productivity pressures.
Since most top schools keep their international students at about 10%, the ever increasing number of international applicants doesn’t affect domestic applicants’ chances. It would be more revealing to see the admission rates just for domestic applicants.
I agree this will definitely be a pretty significant factor. A few years ago was the peak of the later baby boomers’ kids (youngest boomers are currently 53 years old)
I actually think you have this backwards. In my opinion, the decreasing acceptance rates has had a positive feedback loop on the number of apps people send out. The number of kids grew and the number of apps/kid grew which in turn drives the acceptance rates down making students feel uneasy and causing them to apply to more schools which lowers the acceptance rate and so on
I’m actually not sure what you mean by this. Why would schools have a strong incentive to expand as their acceptance rate decreases?
My question about this is there some way to tell the actual quality of applicants? I’m newer to the game, but I am assuming no. If the number of applicants keeps increasing due to say, how easy it is to apply online/increase in population/more international apps, but only a certain percentage of the total applicants have SAT/ACT/GPA scores that would even qualify them to be considered, how can you really tell what the percentage rate is anyway?
Sorry if this strays from the original post but it really makes me wonder when we hear about acceptance rates.
@iwannabe_Brown Sorry I don’t have the message board savvy to cut and paste your inquiries so you can easily follow my responses to your questions but:
Strong disincentive to apply: My thinking is based on law of diminishing returns. Certainly, the feedback loop that you have described is what is happening currently. I applied to 2 schools (a long time ago!), while DS15 applied to 15 and DS17 applied to 12, so lots has changed since the mid 80's! However, I feel (not based on research so take with a grain of salt) that once an aspiring college student gets to a certain number of applications (say 15?) the time and money for the incremental application decreases in value. And when you move from a 1 in 20 chance (5%) to a 1 in 100 chance (1%), you are essentially buying a lotto ticket. But we are talking about college applications, so a lot of families throw out logical thinking.
Strong incentive to expand: My thinking is based on the near "risk-free" growth opportunities. I am not an educator nor a policy maker so my thinking may be flawed. I am in business so my natural inclination is to grow. The tippy-tops have huge demand and huge endowments which could easily fund expansion. I would rather have a larger organization with higher revenues, funding more research, generating more alumni with the ability to change the world and the ability to give back. But I understand that educators may not feel the same way that I do.
I think we can both agree that it is a good thing that I am not in charge of a tippy-top university. Tuition would be through the roof, construction would be happening at break neck speed, fund raising calls to alumni would double and use of the existing physical plant would be maximized.
@yeboiiiiii it will probably happen, either Stanford or Harvard or both will probably get to that level in a decade or more. I think the balancing force will be students looking at admission to these schools as a complete crapshoot and thus some might be unwilling to spare the time and effort to apply which might lead to lower number of apps and thus higher admission rates. This effect won’t be huge when it comes to Harvard or Stanford because of the strength of their brands and their undisputed top 2 dream school status. However it will have a bigger effect on the other elite schools. i feel in the end the acceptance rate for Harvard/Stanford will reach equilibrium around 2-4%. but of course that is just conjecture, who knows.
I feel like low admission rates shouldn’t be something that colleges use in compromising the expansion of the school. There are so many economic and social benefits that can arise from expanding these schools and allowing more kids in. I feel like the schools should expand, as they have the endowment and resources to certainly do so in hiring more faculty, building more residences, and creating new research facilities. It’s really too bad that selectivity and competition can blind colleges from implementing and investing in this sort of growth.
In some other countries acceptance to top universities is largely driven by high school GPA, or by test scores. Their acceptance rates are far higher because high school students (at least in the same country where high school guidance counselors know the universities) can predict whether they will get in. If you won’t get in, you don’t apply.
One issue with “holistic” application evaluations is that it becomes very difficult to predict whether any particular student will get into any particular university. This drives students to apply to more universities.
It seems pretty clear from the piles of ads that we got from universities and colleges (starting with older daughter’s PSAT test) that universities and colleges in the US are trying to solicit more applications. If they get more applications then they can be seen as “more selective” (even if the increase in applications come from students who have no chance to be accepted).
If universities want to drive acceptance rates to 1% or less they probably can do it – they need to accept the common application and eliminate fees. Why not have every US high school senior apply to both Harvard and Stanford?
So, take the number of incoming freshmen at Harvard or Stanford, divide by the number of high school graduates in a given year. This is the asymptote unless these schools can get a large number of international students to apply.
Of course, this is ridiculous, but it is the direction in which we seem to be headed.
@DadTwoGirls . Interesting. Very interesting but extreme analysis, as there are approximately 4 million graduating students this year.
“Why not have every US high school senior apply to both Harvard and Stanford?”
Because this can never happen in our country’s current economic state or ever in the future. It would be a miracle alone if the U.S. can get the rate of high schoolers seeking a BA degree to 100%. Absolutely impossible.
Eliminating fees and being more “holistic” is not going to drive 4 million students to ever apply to those top schools. It will probably take eliminating an application altogether to drive numbers even above 100,000 and eliminating tuition in general so students have the incentive to even consider the schools. Based on the law of diminishing returns, a lower acceptance rate will be a disincentive to even spend the time applying.
It was very interesting discussing and reading these comments though. Different perspectives to consider.
When students start applying to 100 colleges at a time.
Back in the 80s, I applied to six colleges. Now, the typical number seems to be at least 12. That’s a lot of uncertainty and hedging, which is understandable since college is so expensive now. It’s not a trivial investment.
I don’t think applying to More than 10 schools is typical these days although many students do. It would be hard to apply to 100 schools unless there is no fee or a flat rate and there is no supplementary essay from each school. Many countries are like that though.
Most people I know applied to around 3-5 colleges. I think the only people who apply to a lot of colleges are those who apply to mainly all UCs and prestigious colleges. I know several people who only applied to one. I personally applied to 11 because I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted in a college.
Maybe if a selective school decided to (unannounced) begin to admit 90-99% or whatever large almost entire class size of its incoming class through ED. Then RD will be low! And I’m pretty sure RD is the admissions stat that schools use?
I also only applied to six colleges in the 80’s, but things are a lot different now, worse. We’re just more brand and prestige conscious than in the past, we somehow also got the idea that only a handful of schools can make us successful, then the rankings came along, then the common app, and finally the thought that you should apply to all the ivies even though that makes little sense. I don’t want to keep saying the good ole days, but students back then had a real good idea of where they could get in, the best students in our class only applied to 2-3 ivies, we lived in upstate NY, at most a 4 hour driving distance to any of them.
Back to the OP, until it gets to 1%, students will keep applying, at that point when it’s 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 1000 after you take out athletes, legacies, URMs, first gens, people will say this makes no sense, and applications will start going down.
I totally agree with the lottery analogy, but guess what people buy tons of tickets even though they know the odds and don’t care or they don’t know the odds.
But students applying to prestigious colleges is what we’re talking about. Let alone the 80s, back in 2004 I applied to Princeton, Yale, Brown, Penn, JHU, Emory, and WUSTL. My peers were applying to similar schools with similar numbers of apps. >10 would have been insanity.