Why is Boston College's acceptance rate so high?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Boston College
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Let me make something very clear. I do not consider the acceptance rate for Boston College to be high. Everyone knows it is a highly competitive school. My question is, with such a beautiful campus, with a great faculty and facilities, in a great location, with a pristine reputation, and a strong Jesuit tradition, why is the acceptance rate at BC as high as it is?

When you compare BC, with an acceptance rate of 35%, to a school like Bucknell University, with an acceptance rate of 24%, it makes me wonder. BC is a much better school, with over $1.4 billion in endowments more than Bucknell, and has considerably higher standards both in testing and in extracurriculars. I think it’s also worth pointing out that the acceptance rate went up this past year.

I say all of this with all due respect to Bucknell University, which is a great school; I’m just using it as an example.

So the question remains why does BC have an acceptance rate as high as it is. I would expect to have a school of such a caliber to be more around 15-25%

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It’s because it’s a Catholic school and does not attract Jewish, minority, asian and international students.

Notre Dame is harder to get into than some Ivy League schools but has an acceptance rate of 20% due to a self selecting application pool.

This is true of lots of Catholic schools.

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I would have liked the question better if 1) you had refrained from categorical statements (“BC is a much better school [than Bucknell] . . . and has higher standards in . . . extracurriculars.”) and 2) you had recognized that Bucknell has a higher endownent per student than BC.

1 Like
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Is my statement false? To my knowledge it’s not. I’m sorry if I offended you, but the question is asking why BC’s acceptance rate is as high as it is, not whether or not you “like the question”.

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Just guesses
Catholic schools have a somewhat narrower appeal than secular schools, financial aid there isn’t great and there are an awful lot of colleges in that general area.

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A couple of years ago BC added several essays to its application. The number of applicants dropped significantly, acceptance rate went up but YIELD also increased.

BC wanted to avoid applicants who were applying “just for the heck of it” or Hail Mary applications from students whose stats made BC pretty much out of reach.

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@tomsrofboston - like Georgetown, it may have a “not so easy to apply” rep that discourages kids who aren’t completely sold on it. I know my D dropped Gtown primarily because she didn’t have time to do more Subject tests and that was the only school on her list that needed 3 and wouldn’t accept the ACT in their place.

However, BC’s doesn’t seem that onerous. A single 400 word essay with 4 options for topic? Not a big deal.

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Well, mathematically some of your statements are questionable. If you compare the schools with respect to their academic standards, sixty points in SAT score difference (CR+M) is not particularly significant. Regarding resources, Boston College’s higher overall endowment in comparison to Bucknell’s should be weighed against BC’s lower endowment per student. Other statements, such as that which asserted BC’s much higher standards with respect to extracurriculars, are simply unsupportable.

That said, I probably shouldn’t have commented that I didn’t like your question, but that it appears to contain flawed or subjective premises that make it difficult to answer.

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Last yr, the number of applications BC received increased +25% to over 30,000 (according to adcom) so I bet the accept rate dropped. BC Is a much bigger school than Bucknell so accepts significantly more students. Bucknell has been known to falsify data and has also made a big effort to increase apps by lowering the fee, dropping the essay, all to get their admit rate lower. That is more of a marketing ploy vs a determination of how good the school is

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Two important points to understand before we exit this conversation:

Correcting your data - our acceptance rate for the Class of 2019 was 29%

Bucknell’s applications increased 39% last year (from 7,800 to 11,000) after it eliminated an essay from its application. As a previous poster mentioned, we added a supplement (and have kept it) for the last three enrolled classes in an effort to create a smaller but more intentional applicant pool. What is required to apply, as well as various deadlines (ED, EA, SCEA, etc.) are important in understanding reported data.

–Boston College Undergraduate Admission

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Dear All : Happy Thanksgiving to you all today! I wanted to offer some thoughts on three observations in this thread regarding acceptances and yield numbers.

[#1] Using the Boston College Fact Book, review the colleges and universities to which accepted and enrolled Boston College students most often applied as self-reported during student orientation sessions. The Top 12 cross-application schools include the following from 2015.


[QUOTE=""]
Ivy League : Harvard, Penn, Brown, Cornell, Yale Boston Area : Boston University, Tufts Other Schools : Georgetown, Notre Dame, Villanova, Virginia, Duke

[/QUOTE]

Each of the Ivy League schools now sports an acceptance rate around 10%. When you compete in that strata, your number of acceptances will be larger as the yield can potentially be lower. When adding the other schools, similarly competitive, you see a continued drain of the overall talent pool of students, thereby making the yield numbers seem artifically worse.

Bucknell, along with Lehigh, Lafayette, Muhlenberg and similar, are wonderful schools based in Pennsylvania. Comparing Bucknell’s rates with those of Boston College is an impossible task as the two schools do not compete in the same cohort group.

[#2] The assertion that self-selection (based on religious or other factors, raised by TurnerT) impacts acceptance rates makes little sense. If this year’s class was self-selected, so was last year’s and so forth. The number of acceptances needs to remain consistent in order to fill an incoming class with an assumed yield rate. With an application pool reduced to ~25,000 after the introduction of Boston College essays and now again exceeding the 30,000 mark, it would be difficult to say that a culling process occurred. Recognizing these application procedural changes makes for a very important differentiation when interpretting acceptance data.

[#3] Universities can certainly game the system by decreasing acceptance rates and increasing yields by 
 lowering standards. That comes at a cost of reputation. So, the gaming process is not as simple as you think. Further, spending per student, the so-called tuition “discount rate”, can be increased through merit awards to counter losing students towards the top end of the applicant pool. Boston College does NOT have a true merit scholarship system (despite the Presidential Program) which can also tilt statistics after the acceptance phase once financial aid awards are announced. You can read numerous stories on College Confidential where families could not afford BC once the final price tag was presented. Meeting 100% of demonstrated need does NOT mean the same thing to everyone. Despite a $1.4B endowment, that is not drawn down as a piggy bank for incoming students.

In closing, acceptance data, yield data, and enrolled class standards are all very interesting data points, but are very difficult to compare across institutions.

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BC, BU, and Northeastern compete with each other for a lot of the same students. Agree with other posters Catholic BC along with ND, Holy Cross, and Georgetown don’t get as many applicants due to religious affiliation.

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Worth noting that those are not the top 12 cross-application schools. Those are the top 12 schools that had the most students that also received acceptance to BC based on a survey with a 33% response rate. For instance UMass is likely one of the top 12 cross applicants based on the fact that over 30% of BC’s applicant pool is from Massachusetts and I imagine most of those student qualified for free tuition through Adams Scholarship program. BC just wants their “peer schools” to look a little nicer by chopping off the bottom of cross-applicants.

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I believe the endowment stands at about 2.3 billion, not 1.4 billion as stated above. And, correct me if I’m wrong, hasn’t BC increased its financial aid fund rather substantially almost every year, to ensure that it does meet “100% of demonstrated need”?

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Because financial aid is not merit, I would guess that a lot of students that do not qualify for financial aid, but are very academically strong and are accepted to the top “BC peer schools” - Harvard, Yale, Duke et all, choose not to attend BC because of cost (would you want to spend $240K on Yale or BC?). BC is trying to be selective in choosing students who will choose them. Especially the ones in the Full Pay department, who may be slightly lower stats than likely HYP admits. I’m guessing those are the ‘sweet spot’ kids that really help yield. They want to be the reach school for full pays and the match school for HYP contenders.

I would guess that internationals, non-Catholic, and lazy kids who just want to push a button for one more school (don’t want to write that essay), choose not to apply, therefore increasing the required acceptances to fill the seats.

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I want to correct one more statement – BC financial aid is pretty good or they would not be on my daughter’s list. They are both need blind and meet full need, our criteria.

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With respect to acceptance rates in general, and Boston College in particular, it’s been suggested, by at least one reputable college admissions officer, that rates below 30% do not produce a substantially more qualified class. The mention of a 15-25% rate as being commensurate with BC’s “caliber,” therefore, seems to invoke a strictly competitive nature to the admissions process that is not relevant to the quality of the current BC. At 29% (9), Boston College is already where it needs to be in terms of acceptance rate. From a technical standpoint, their relatively low yield should be their only concern.

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Tuition at UMass is about $2000 and the Adams scholarship covers that. UMass has an "Educational Fee’ of $11,000/year that is not covered by the “Adams Full Tuition scholarship”.

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Well, I can tell you why my D did not matriculate there-- the financial aid package was one of the worst we received.

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By the way, since Bucknell was an element in the original post, I’ll say that the small town environment of the school is exactly what some are looking for. College years are a great time of life to experience places that may not be available later because of career or other responsibilities.