Not only should there be disclosure for incomplete information, but there should be details around fees received, testing requirements, essay requirements, common app vs. non-common app, promised financial support, and other indicators of true interest.
There is a school in the Northeast that has become more selective every year, as they eliminated their essay, reinforced their test-optional position, eliminated the application fee, committed to free schooling for families under a certain income level. Applications have nearly tripled in the past 5 or 6 years.
Is the school 3 times more selective, or have they just gathered thousands of “why not” applications for students that figure what’s 11 applications when you’re submitting 10? Don’t cost nothin … what do you have to lose?
I’d love to see a list of schools that are the most rigorous to apply to.
The one thing I did learn from my FOIA requests is that the academy has the reputation of being so selective because it defines applicants in a peculiar way. Unlike civilian schools, the academy counts incomplete applications (just name and address). It also counts the 7,500 high school kids who apply for a week-long summer seminar (2,500 come), defined as “preliminary applicants.” Until last year, it also counted as academy applicants the roughly 3,000 applicants to Navy ROTC - at other schools.
Going back to post #8, how do you measure admits by major? Engineering, nursing I understand but a lot of colleges don’t admit by major for the vast majority of their departments.
You can drive yourself insane trying to figure out admission rates, I have, ED, non athlete v athlete, female V male (some very big differences between the overall rates published v the rates when broken down by gender). All those colleges with an almost 50/50 male female split on campus, chances of that?
I think it’s all gone a bit mad. I know some kids who have struggled in high school who are getting bombarded with junk mail from places like U Chicago. If this is going on all over the country, and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, how many thousands of kids are apply to and inflating the numbers at colleges and universities they don’t have a realistic shot at?
A college may have some buckets for specific majors, but also a bucket for “general undeclared admission” for those majors where there is no direct admission to major.
Oh, come on. Now you want every app to be an open record?? Who did or didn’t send all of it?
And frankly, imo, a bunch here are guessing.
And even if a college does not admit by program (eg, college of engineering or school of business,) they can review you by the major(s) YOU write on your app. You. Your choice.
No college forces you to apply if you aren’t interested.
Do your homework re: colleges you like. It’ll get you further than all this venting.
No one is asking for that. All the colleges need to do is to publish the profiles of their applicants and their admits stratified by each and every factor they use in their admission decisions.
If schools went back to applications completely unique to each institution you would finally have accurate admission rates. What we have now is the electronic academic equivalent of the steroid era in Major League Baseball.
And just a thought from the other side: finding a balance between useful / meaningful info and a reasonable burden for colleges of all sizes. One of the factors in the inflating cost of college is the increase in admin costs. Somebody has to collect and manage the data. If we want it to be the same across institutions, a college with a student population of 2000 has to be able to manage the same data requirements as one with 20,000.
Irl, the only way for it to be perfectly transparent is a purely score based system (which is what most of the world does), which has its challenges as well. There are some significant drawbacks to this system- but it is 100% fair and transparent.
Really not too sure why folks are caught up on Admit rate (or yield, for that matter). I’m mean, what difference does it make if the true, pure Admit rate (if it can ever be defined) is 7% or 10% or 15%? The odds for an unhooked applicant are still really, really small in any event.
CMU’s common data set shows an acceptance rate of 17.1%.
Their undergrad admission statistics page show acceptance rates for each program between 5 and 14%.
I wasn’t a math major, but I think it’s kind of hard to have an average higher than every individual number.
(I believe applicants can apply to 2 programs - I suspect they count applicants to each one, and not accepted even if accepted to another program. So accepting everyone would be 50%)
So are we saying that if someone submits an incomplete application they didn’t actually apply? I would think that someone hitting “submit” has applied, whether they choose to give themselves the best chance of admission by including all required documentation or not.
@lookingforward. I respectfully disagree with your premise. Applying to a college is a purchase decision. The applicants are spending their time and usually money on the transaction, and, like in all consumer decisions, they deserve to have accurate information on what they can expect in return. The schools publish statistics, ostensibly to alert applicants to their chances of obtaining what they seek. The schools state, in their CDS, what they deem important and their key statistics. Grouping all applicants together obscures important information which the applicants need to assess their chances of receiving a return for their time and money. If schools are going to put their stats (GPA and test scores) front and center to describe the performance of their student body (those who ‘won’),then the applicants deserve those same measures of those who applied to the school. Not having this information puts the applicants at too big of a disadvantage. They can make poor decisions because of it (e.g. apply to 25 low admit rate schools, or if they are financially or time constrained, may choose to avoid elite schools when they really should not have.). They cannot make a solid purchase decision without having accurate information. The schools can easily provide this information but choose not too.
It might be useful to consider whether an application would be considered “actionable.” For example, if a college sometimes accepts students with one missing LOR, then all applications of this type might be considered essentially complete, and therefore fairly could be considered when calculating an acceptance rate. However, if applications are never approved with, say, two missing LORs, then those applications would not seem to be genuine, and therefore, fairly, should not be counted toward this purpose.
If the stats weren’t so important, why are so many colleges trying so hard to manipulate them? I guess W&L staff must have felt it was important, along with all those other schools similarly acting.
Cypresspat. It’s not a purchase decision, per se, until admitted. They aren’t publishing admit stats as a public service. In holistic, candidate stats are not the sole “it.” And I keep pointing out that that the CDS is: 1. Not definitive. 2. Not the traits they look for, and 3. Not policed.
It’s on the kid/family if they can’t figure those are 25 low admit colleges. Tell me what now prevents you from knowing your chances at any tippy top are less than 1 in 7.
Meanwhile, mark my words: they too often can’t answer a Why Us? And make other avoidable mistakes.
I want kids to start their digging into what IS there. Process that.
I think the Common Data attempts to make the statistics comparable.but things slip through the cracks
I don’t care if incomplete applications are counted or not, as long as they are so counted forvall colleges. If W&L is counting them one way and Gettysburg another, then the numbers are no longer comparable.
It’s just not essential to know how many were incomplete or the adcoms didn’t get to. The grossly incomplete or inadequate will be dropped during first cut. For a viable app, adcoms can wait to see if a missing LoR comes through. Sometimes even decide without it. If your transcript never comes through, they have no record, zip to finalize on.
The real hurdle isn’t your comparison to those kids. It’s you vs the true contenders. You need to know the right things that matter, show that in your app, not get waylaid asking for every detail one can imagine.
I don’t see how you parse “genuine.” If a kid submits an app, in whatever state, it is a submit. If he gets x-ed out, it has no bearing on your app. You still need to present what they want to see. First and foremost, you need to try to get a read on that. If you’re the dogged sort, truly interested in a college, it stands to reason you’ll dig though what IS there. If you’re making this a crapshoot, you’re on the wrong track.
Not just CDS and stats comparisons.
This is your race to win. Make the best of it. Stay in your lane, don’t get distracted.
Pishicaca…in my son’s case he requested to withdraw his application because he wasn’t truly interested in the school and didn’t want to go through the effort to submit what they needed other than the common ap. The college provided a link which when he tried to use it, didn’t work. The whole thing seemed rather shady. It became more of an effort to try to withdraw the application so as a busy high school senior he just left it alone.