A conceptual issue on admissions probability

cellardweller
Sat, 26 May 2007 10:00:58 +0000

idad:

Yes, we agree. A school where a student’s stats is around the median will typically result in a 25 to 50% acceptance rate, therefore still a reach. Absent a major hook, a school where your stats are significantly below the median of admitted students is not a reach but a “hail Mary” in my book. Furthermore, if you intend to apply to a medical, law or business school after college, you generally need a reasonably high GPA in college. If you are well below the median coming in, it is not very likely you will be at the top coming out. With this type of definition of a reach school, one technically need not worry about having many matches or safeties. With enough schools in the reach pool, you are bound to get a hit at some point. With greater trust in the model, My D and I would have saved the time and expense of applying to matches and safeties.

With these caveats, the admissions process need not be completely random for a statistical approach to the admissions process to work well. You just need enough randomness or unpredictability. Beyond the anecdotal evidence of the kid with perfect stats rejected from all his top choices, we know that schools within a specific range of selectivity rank prospective candidates differently. If top schools all ranked applicants in the same order, you would have a much greater overlap in admissions that what actually is happening. Acceptance rates would increase quickly as you went down the list and yields would drop just as fast. But that is not true, at least among the top schools: they can all maintain low admission rates and high yields. Every student admitted to Harvard is not also admitted to Yale, Princeton, Stanford or MIT. If that were true, Yale, Stanford and MIT (all without a binding early decision program) would not have yields of 70%. Actually the vast majority are only accepted to one top school. Every student admitted to Williams is not also admitted to Amherst or Swarthmore. There are actually extremely few “supercandidates” virtually assured of admission at any top school. And the definition of a supercandidate differs radically at Harvard from MIT for instance.

Every highly selective college recognizes that the number of qualified candidates is at least 2 to 3 times greater than what they can enroll. Even veteran college interviewers have given up predicting which student will be accepted. So, as long as the student is legitimately qualified, he can only improve his chances of getting into a reach school by increasing applications to other schools with similar selectivity profiles. With enough research and applications he can reach a certain level of confidence of being accepted to one of his top choices.

The much worse decision is for a student to actually apply to too few reach schools for which he is qualified and get accepted to none and then have to pick among matches or safeties where he is overqualified.