<p>As I am researching colleges, I came across many schools that are well known and highly praised in many areas. However, it doesn't make sense to me that if a school is so good, why is the admission rate so high? How good can a school be if it basically admits more than half of the applicants? </p>
<p>For the nursing schools, these schools are the top ranked ones in the US
For example:
University of Pittsburgh is renowned for many fields especially the medical field and is considered one of top public universities in the US but the 54.5% #7
University of Illinois at Chicago has an acceptance rate of 71%! #11
University of Iowa has an acceptance rate of 78% #11</p>
<p>The above first 3 schools are ranked higher than Case Western, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Emory and NYU! How is this possible....This does not make sense.....
I know that rankings take other factors into consideration but this is really mind boggling. Can some please explain or justify this to me? Maybe I'm missing something here.... Say even if the nursing schools are hard to get into, (which ones aren't?) how can a school that accepts over 3/4 of the applicants be ranked higher than a highly selective university that has equal if not more selectivity into the nursing program? </p>
<ul>
<li><p>you’re comparing public schools w over 30,000 undergraduates with private universities w one-fifth the enrollment. To have a comparably low admit rate, the arithmetic would require the 30,000+ public school to have a tremendous number of applicants applying to it.</p></li>
<li><p>a good chunk of a university’s “ranking” is based on the reputation of its research which is a graduate school activity.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>At a large State U, acceptance rates within a particular, highly respected program can vary greatly from the overall acceptance rate of the school.</p>
<p>Also, even if you do compare apples to apples, some schools have a very self-selecting applicant pool which can skew the numbers.</p>
<p>@ame1023: The three universities you cite are all entirely reputable institutions (undergraduate and beyond); however, I’d hardly designate them (as you have) as “highly ranked.” U S News’ annual National Research University assessment – and it’s not “the definitive evaluation,” nor is its methodology flawless, nor are its results sacrosanct – is widely employed to provide approximate/relative institutional rankings. It currently places Pitt as tied for #62, Illinois-Chicago as tied for #149, and Iowa as tied for #71. Are those results “highly ranked?”</p>
<p>They’re evidently highly-ranked in nursing.</p>
<p>In any case, though, as people have said, just because it’s easy to get in to a school overall doesn’t mean that it’s easy to get in to specific programs. And what does being highly-ranked in nursing mean? Does it give you any advantages?</p>
<p>I have found the average net cost of attendance for middle and low income students to be a better indicator of acceptance rate than reputation or ranking. </p>
<p>The average Princeton grad leaves school with only $5k in debt. If you were a high performing student, why wouldn’t you gamble with getting rejected? How about Cooper Union with an acceptance rate of around 10% or Berea College with an acceptance rate around 30 percent? A lot of people haven’t even heard of Cooper Union or Berea but when they learn that they are free tuition schools you get a lot of lower income students sending in their applications.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan: Being highly ranked in a few disciplines does not make a university a “highly ranked school” (which was the erroneous title of this thread). </p>
<p>Public universities have much larger entering classes and their mission is to educate and serve the home state. So admissions rates are drastically different than elite privates. However, the quality of the faculty – in terms of scholarship and research – at top publics can be every bit as good as elite privates. If a student is comfortable navigating the size of the top public schools, especially in the first two years when there is not a lot of hand holding before a student has a “home” in their major department(s), the education can be superb. </p>
<p>I have come to realize that – being from the east coast and not having grown up a with a culture of excellent public universities – I never appreciated the quality of education offered at top publics. Back then, we all assumed the “best” education was at the name brand schools, both universities and LACs, because that was best in that region. Now, as a parent living in the midwest, I appreciate the scene is far more complex than when I was choosing schools. </p>
You have misunderstood the numbers. Iowa welcomes 78% of its applicants to campus as freshman. Then you take 2 years of prep and apply for the nursing program.
That</a> is 72 out of all the students already at Iowa in the pre-nursing program or other majors and transfer applicants from other schools. I don’t know what the percentage is, but I would bet it is not 78%</p>
<p>Kind of a digression, but it still has some lingering reality to it: back in the old days (meaning the '50s and '60s) the standard practice at many state universities was to admit anyone in the state who met some minimum threshold, then select the real class by flunking most of them out freshman year.</p>
<p>Offering admission is different than students actually enrolling/registering. Schools are trying to fill their dance cards. Well regarded schools know from past experiences than many accepted students will have multiple offers from many colleges and will never actually enroll. For example at UCLA last year 80k+ first time freshman applied/16K+ were “admitted”/ only just over 5700 enrolled.</p>
<p>It does seem that your comparing ranking of program with admission to the school. Purdue has admission % of over 60%, however, their engineering program is ranked 9th in the country this year. Purdue, however, is ranked around 62 overall. My guess is that 78% of applicants to the nursing program do not get accepted.</p>
<p>Was just doing some research for another thread. Looks like the admit rate for the top pharmacy programs are in the 10-20% range, so expect the same for nursing. At public schools, the OOS rate may be considerably less.</p>
<p>Applicants to many near top tier schools are self-screened that mostly only qualified students applied, particularly those schools that have little financial aids. The applicant pool is smaller for different reasons even the school rank is high.</p>