A conceptual issue on admissions probability

cellardweller
Sat, 26 May 2007 18:15:17 +0000

Actually every highly selective college shows a very strong preference for high academic achievers and the preference gets stronger as you go down to less and less selective colleges. Many second tier colleges will seek to skew the process by essentially bribing with merit aid the high achievers who may not enroll otherwise. This is in part driven by the need for many colleges to hold on to their USNWR rankings. Harvard can actually afford to pick some students with lower stats and not affect the median because they have so many strong applicants as well. Outside of HYPSM not a single college has a yield in the regular decision round greater than 50%. That means that they loose a substantial number of their top admits to higher ranked schools. The top LACs lose around 75% of their admits in the regular round. That also means they need to admit large number of high academic achievers to hold on to some of them and meet their SAT and rank targets. I have found as a rule of thumb that with stats in the median of enrolled students (not of the admitted students) an applicant has about a 25% chance of admission to a highly selective college. That percentage then rises to about 50% if he is in the 75th percentile. It is precisely because of these low rates that a student needs to apply to a substantial numbers of reach schools if he is to be accepted to at least one.

It is also true that even a strong applicant needs to dress up his application with decent ECs, strong recs, polish his essays and show some passion. In my experience most top academic achievers also have these qualities. In the same way many have been prepped to get good test scores and tutored if necessary to get good grades, they also have counselors help them package their application. The level of sophistication among applicants to top colleges is quite high, not least because of sites such as CC.