<p>Is it just me, or does anyone else wish there was more information available from colleges about which applicants they accept? </p>
<p>Why, for example, are there no schools publishing data about the application and acceptance rate of students who apply for financial aid vs. those who do not? Or, the application and acceptance numbers for domestic vs. international applicants?</p>
<p>Many students are applying to a large number of schools because they see the admissions process as an uncertain gamble. If schools would be more forthright with details about who is applying and who is getting in, I expect many students would apply to fewer schools.</p>
<p>Here’s a hint: You don’t need precise data to know that international students applying for financial aid have a very, very, very low admission rate everywhere. Even at the handful of colleges that are need-blind (and meet need) for international students – because those colleges are the ones that attract the most, and most competitive, applications from international students who need aid.</p>
<p>But basically, no colleges want to discourage applications. They want to decide whether they want you. They don’t want you to make that decision for them by failing to apply.</p>
<p>A number of colleges do provide stats on applicants, admitted students, and enrolled students. I know Brown does, <a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University, and Amherst does, too. <a href=“http://www.amherst.edu/media/view/445948[/url]”>http://www.amherst.edu/media/view/445948</a> It’s not surprising, in any event. Admitted students have somewhat higher stats than enrolled students (since the highest-stat admitted students are the ones most likely to have the most competitive other options), and both have higher stats as a group than applicants (because the higher-stat applicants are much more likely to get admitted than lower-stat applicants, even at colleges that reject lots of high-stat applicants).</p>
<p>I think this is why Naviance software is so useful. If a high school buys the whole package, it shows how an applicant stacks up against recent (past 5 years of grads, for example; every school does it differently) historical data about that high school’s applicants’ stats, who got accepted, deferred, deferred and admitted, waitlisted, rejected, all that. </p>
<p>It would be grand if colleges would do that, but as pointed out above, most colleges are trying to attract more applicants, regardless of their qualifications.</p>
<p>It’s not just that they don’t want to discourage applicants, but you can scare kids away if they don’t realize how grading system vary from one school to another, not to mention international grading systems! I don’t see any way they can do more than the net price calculators. How been need blind, need aware and mostly need blind are subject to too many complicated balances. Some kids who apply for financial aid will be highly desirable despite needing money, others less so.</p>
<p>No, I don’t think they can ethically recruit unqualified students to apply. I’ve seen talks by admissions directors saying they can not do that.</p>
<p>And I think Naviance is misleading. For some schools, the %admitted has changed a lot in the last 5 years. It can give you false hope. My favorite is the spreadsheet from NY Times that gives actual % admitted for early and regular decision</p>
<p>^Common data sets are helpful, but no, they do not really provide all that much data. Naviance is a wonderful tool which, unfortunately, is not available in our public school system.</p>
<p>I agree that colleges want lots of applicants, not necessarily to boost their rankings but more to give themselves opportunities to develop interesting and well balanced classes of students. But, many admissions departments at smaller schools seem to be increasingly overwhelmed with the large numbers of applications and I would think they might find it useful to put out a little more data.</p>
<p>I want to see schools publish a lot more data on their outcomes, not on their incoming class. I don’t want to know who they let in, I want to know what they put out at the end of four years.</p>
<p>[Looking</a> for StatFinder? | UCOP](<a href=“http://statfinder.ucop.edu%5DLooking”>http://statfinder.ucop.edu) had a lot of data of interest, but it stopped being maintained and is no longer available.</p>
<p>Niceday: Good observation-Schools have whipped candidates into such a holistic frenzy that applying to 10 schools is the norm not the exeption. (Elite school candidates). The sad part is that since everyone is using the same wide net, resulting in everyone actually fishing with the same small net.</p>
<p>The Common Data Set for each school is very informative. It is about a 30-40 page report on each application cycle. If you look at section H.2. you will find a lot of information on the numbers that get financial aid. Also another good website is [CollegeData:</a> College Search, Financial Aid, College Application, College Scholarship, Student Loan, FAFSA Info, Common Application](<a href=“http://www.collegedata.com%5DCollegeData:”>http://www.collegedata.com). If you put in a school and click the tab “admissions” or “money matters” you will get a lot of that information. </p>
<p>I personally do not like Naviance. First it costs the school money when so many other better websites are free and second the data is only as good at the student input it. It is based on only those students at that particular high school and since so many other factors such as what a family can afford affects where a student applies I do not find it very helpful. My son was rightly upset at his high school guidance counselor (she only helps the top 5 students and everyone else is on their own) and he did not want her getting any credit for the 10 schools that accepted him and the $750k in merit money that he received. Therefore he did not enter his data. </p>
<p>Also you can always email the admissions office your question and it has been my experience they will answer it.</p>
<p>Complete statistics on what kids are doing when they leave – what % have jobs at graduation, jobs actually in their fields, earnings, average GRE/MCAT/GMAT scores from ALL students who take take them within 2 years of graduation, exactly what grad schools students have been accepted to. Say at graduation, at the 1 year mark, and at the 5 year mark. Schools LOVE to brag about the statistics of their incoming class. But most of them tell individual stories about a few successful graduates, but don’t give you the whole picture. It is incredibly difficult to find this information (nothing on the college tours or the school websites about this!). That is one reason, IMHO, why they don’t give any merit aid to transfer students. Because the outcome of those students (and all of their students) is fairly well hidden. So no need to look for the best at that point, who cares as long as they can brag about high average SAT scores of incoming freshman and a selective admissions process with far more applicants than they could possibly accept?</p>
<p>Students don’t input the data to Naviance at our school, the GCs do. Pretty selfish of your son not to input it, it’s for the benefit of future students, not the GC. The huge advantage of Naviance is that it reflects the idiosyncracies of how your school is viewed by admissions officers. So we do quite well at Harvard, less well at MIT, and terribly at Stanford, even though on paper it looks like your odds should be the same at all three schools.</p>
<p>I love Common Data Sets when I can find them. My kids seemed to specialize in schools that didn’t have them, or where they were useless. (Carnegie Mellon really needs to have separate ones for each sub-school.) CMU’s school of Computer Science does a survey every year of where its grads are going. One of the things that sold us on the school.</p>
<p>You are probably going against the common opinion on these forums that “college is not job training” (which ignores the reality that preparing for a better job is one of the reasons that nearly all college students attend college, although they may also have other reasons).</p>
<p>intlparent: The Chronicles of Higher Education has a pretty good website called “college completion” that gives a lot of the data you requested. Here is the link: [College</a> Completion: Graduation Rates and Data for 3,800 Colleges](<a href=“Student Outcomes”>http://collegecompletion.chronicle.com/)</p>
<p>Mathmom: at my son’s h.s. the data is entered into by the student. also if you knew this counselor it really was not for any student’s benefit it was the counselor wanting to boast numbers and take credit for all the work done by other people. The school is small; average graduating class is 175 students so even without naviance people know where students got accepted. No student has ever been accepted to MIT and the numbers are extremely low for the other two schools you mentioned. </p>
<p>Also I think it would be a far cry from calling us “selfish” Let me tell you why. Both my son and I got mad at his counselor and her lack of really helping students. During his junior and senior year we would pull aside whatever student we could and give them as much free help as possible. I gave up practicing law and went back to school for college counseling. I opened up my own shop where I counsel low-income students on on a pro bono basis and for other students I created a series of low-cost workshops ($30 to $70) dollars and my application workshop is $300 for 6 weeks of work. I have help a ton of students form DS h.s. and the results have been great- they are getting into great academic and financial fits for the students. Of course my income is not anywhere were it use to be but I am fine with that. And as far as the GC at his h.s. she has proclaimed an edict that any student who works with me she will not help which is ridiculous because these families pay $15k tuition a year and she is a salaried employee of that h.s. After decisions all come out the parents and I plan on approaching the president of the school to “talk” to him about the need for a new g.c. </p>