A conceptual issue on admissions probability

cellardweller
Sat, 26 May 2007 00:23:07 +0000

There is nothing wrong with the basic premise that applying to more colleges increase your chances to be admitted to at least one of them. It is essentially the model used by med school applicants. You need to apply to a large number of schools to get at least one offer of admission. With med schools applications the process is more predictable than with colleges: med schools generally have similar admissions criteria mostly based on MCATs and GPA.

Imagining a simple world where 1) all the Ivies had a 10% admission rate, 2) had the same median SAT scores and GPAs and 3) the only factors used for admission were GPA and SAT scores then assuming 1) you applied to all eight and 2) your SAT and GPA were right at the median you have a 58% chance to be accepted to at least one of them. If having the Ivy label was all important and you did not care about which school you attended, that is obviously a lot better than 10% for any individual Ivy. If you wanted to attend a top 20 school and did not care which you would have close to a 90% chance to be admitted to at least one of them if you applied to all.

We clearly know that college admission is not that simple, that most top colleges use holistic approaches where GPA and SAT scores, while important are not the sole criteria for admission. Even worse the other metrics can be very vague, are seldom explicit and could vary from admissions officer to admissions officer. In addition, factors such as geography, economic background, gender, choice of major also play a role to the extent the schools are seeking to create a balanced student body.

Does that mean that a statistical approach is useless? I don’t believe so. If that were true, high schools guidance departments would not be adopting tools such as Naviance. With enough research you can get a feel for the chances for a particular kid from a particular high school to get into a specific college. If your HS regularly sends 4-5 unhooked students per year to Harvard comparing an applicant’s hard stats to the admitted and rejected students in prior years, will provide an estimate of chance of admission. It is obviously harder if nobody ever applied to a particular college from that HS, but again places like CC specifically gather useful admissions data. With such an approach you CAN develop a system to assemble a range of colleges with mostly reaches, a few matches and a safety with reasonable estimates of admission into each group. The more schools in each group the lower the variance from the original estimate.

I developed and used such a system with my D this past year, targeting 12 reaches (stats above the median of admitted students but below the 75% percentile), 5 matches (stats above the 75% percentile) and 1 safety (above the 90% percentile) among the schools that interested her and offered the specific program she wanted to study. She got into 5 reaches (42%), 3 matches (60%) and her one safety. She had visited every school except 2 and was willing to attend any one of them if that was her only choice. Although 8 admission offers may sound excessive, less than half of the colleges offered adequate financial aid packages, so it really came down to picking between two to three good choices in the end. Despite all the research and costs involved, I would do all over again.