Hi. I went to college back in the early 1990s and I have a two year old son so this topic is not that relevant to me at a personal level until a decade from now, but I was wondering why is it that the perception is that it is much harder to get into Ivies these days. Based on what I read it seems that it is harder today than 10 years ago to get in which in turn is harder than 10 years before that to get in.
I personally went to Yale and I did recall it was a very intense competitive multi-year process to ensure I got in. But the way I am thinking about it is the SAT-I and SAT-II are all normalized on a percentile basis. The class rank are also on a percentile basis. It seems to me the reason why the Ivies acceptable ratio has fallen is really a function of more people applying for the brand name as the economy moved into a winner-take-all mode. Perhaps it is because of the echo-boomers but aside from that all things equal we should have the same number of people in the top 3% of class rank, same number of people in the top 3% of the SAT-I and SAT-II scores. As I recall back in the late 1980s, many of my friends who were also academically strong but in other high schools all applied to Ivies universities like I did. Perhaps these days people apply to 5+ Ivies as opposed to 2-3 like we did back then, but then the Ivies would have to admit more since the yield will go down. I guess my point is the pool of qualified people that can go into Ivies really did not go up and for sure did not go up from a percentile basis.
Of course if the reason for this is because of the echo-boomers applying to Ivies and the Ivies not increasing their slots, then this bodes well for my DS who was born in 2011 and from what I read is the bottom of the birth rate in USA mainly due to the effects of the economic crisis.
IMHO some of it is an increase in applications from the “clearly unqualified,” which don’t reduce the chances of the qualified. But I think there’s also been a significant increase in the pool of qualified applicants, due to factors unlikely to reverse themselves: increased awareness, rising cost of public schools, test prep (both multiple test administrations and time since reforming mean that more than x percent of test takers have at least one score in the top x percentile).
Your kid will find the right school. If you start thinking about it now, you’ll just make yourself crazy.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree I should not think about it too much for my DS since it is far away. I am just very interested in this topic from a personal experience point of view as well as a public policy question like AA etc etc. I only mention my DS more to given context on how far away from this from a personal life point of view.
BTW, I agree with you. I always thought the decrease in % accepted at Ivies more reflected more people that are “not qualified” applying. But you make a very good point about people taking the test more times as to create a greater pool of higher Super Score candidates. Never thought of that.
Even without superscoring, if you figure that any two scores within 50 points of each other are statistically equivalent, a kid whose theoretical “true” score is 650 will probably get a 700 at least once if they test enough. If a 700 is “qualified,” then the percentage of the applicant population who could be qualified by test score isn’t whatever population is the equivalent of 700+, but rather that which is the equivalent of 650+. (Similarly, there are kids whose “true” score is 700, but who might get a 650 on any given administration, so were “unqualified” 25 years ago, when testing a single time was more common.)
Personally, I think outreach / awareness and comparatively more generous financial aid are bigger factors in the increase in the number of qualified applicants (however defined). Test score creep means that test scores become relatively less important.