Are College Acceptance Rates Truthful?

Applying to College
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Look, the CDS is there. Their mission statements are there. Their blogs, admissions officers, FA offices, and websites have tons of readily accessible information, and emails, and telephones. Isn’t it obvious, that yes, they want your kid to apply? The simple answer is, if you do not like what you do or don’t know about a college, do not apply. Bottom line. All our children can get a fine education at State U. Kids with great stats can get a full ride at Alabama and others if State U is too expensive. Kids with great stats and financial need do not have to apply to HYP, or any other elite school. Kids with not so great stats, or average excellent kids, or C students, or athletes, or rich people’s kids do not have to apply to elite schools.

Many colleges game the system. Northeastern is notorious. Many colleges have done all kinds of things to boost applications and manipulate their USNWR rankings. We have a choice, which is to not apply if we don’t like it.

I don’t think colleges are pretending to engage in a noble mission. The mission is noble. They want to educate your kid and they do a good job. They aren’t going to do it for every kid, and they aren’t going to always do it for free. Not sure what’s the pretense is. I guess Stanford is nobler than most though, as they said they would stop publishing their acceptance rate, and maybe this year they did.

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EyeVeee, when a kid applies to a holistic, any tier, they should know what they’re applying to. And the qualifications needed. But too many don’t. It’s not devoting time to extensive research. But nor is it just looking at stats- yours or the college’s.

Cypresspat, you pick the targets, the colleges pick the admits. It’s not personality fit, nor an essay that highlights that. It’s more comprehensive.

So many look for “chances” and miss that it takes more. So, for many, the thinking is off, in the first place.

I personally don’t think you need to look at the CDS. It’s not meant to fully inform you of how to get in. And people misread it as such (not the college’s fault.) They think, eg, that ‘demonstrated interest’ means getting on an email list and can, meanwhile, never show their match.

In the end, gettin an admit is not ust about what you want. That directs where you choose to apply, not your chances. It’s a competition.

So, look at the Duke link, above. See if you can translate that and self assess whether or not you match- can show it, in your app, the record and the writing. How do you stand up, in a competitive pool, not just in your one high school, among those peers.

Don’t stop at some idea that, “But Early admits are not 20%.” Or they don’t tll me how to answer a Why Us. You should know that, before applying.

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Or perhaps Duke needs to either stop saying early admits are 20%, or say unhooked early admits are 6%. Either works, but continuing to affirmatively mislead is wrong. It is unethical to affirmatively mislead. Full stop.

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I think unhooked Early admits may be much more than 6%. Duke has about 650 athletes. Of course, not all are recruits. But if they take 1/4 of that, call it 170. For the purpose here, let’s assume the bulk are accepted Early, 30% are URM (Duke’s overall freshman admit number,) and that’s spread equally among athletes and non. So, I get more like an 11% chance.

But, how does that matter, in real life? You don’t get an admit because 11% of unhooked kids get in. Again, not a lottery. If you don’t match, your chances are zero. That means, if you do match, your shot goes up. Isn’t match what you need to focus on?

So tell me how a breakdown of Early admit stats actually affects your app and your shot. If you send a scrambled app to Duke, what makes knowing the exact numbers helpful?

Meanwhile, some data cruncher posters insist Early is a statistical better bet. It’s NOT, if you don’t show the goods the college wants.

And it’s true that 20 % were admitted Early. (21%, per the written info.) You ask for “unhooked,” but other posts suggest some really want more- some assessment of their individual kid’s chances- white, from xxx, what major, what if he was president of Stu G vs founded some club.

Don’t get so sidetracked.

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“I personally don’t think you need to look at the CDS. It’s not meant to fully inform you of how to get in.”

I agree that CDS is of limited use. What good does it do if a highly competitive school tells you in section C that GPA, rigor, and test scores are very important in the admissions process? You knew that going in. However, limited use does not mean useless. Let me give you two examples: The CDS for BU says that demonstrated interest is important and interviews are considered. Those are two pieces of information that anyone applying to BU should be aware of. Crunch the admission numbers on the CDS for Carnegie Mellon and you will find that the overall admission rate for females is twice as high as it is for males. Now, I realize that you have to take into account the fact that you apply to CMU by school, and different schools have different admission rates. But still, a useful piece of information for both males and females considering applying to CMU.

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Either number could be right, looking forward, and that is the problem. Your guess that unhooked early admits have an acceptance rate of 11% is no better than my guess of 6%, and it is quite likely that neither of us are correct, and the number is something else entirely. You may not base a decision on that, but some might, just like some base a decision on the quality of a college’s meals or appearance of its dorms or any other factor.

The one thing we can agree on is that the early admit rate for unhooked applicants is not near 20%, though that is the only number Duke releases. Why should we have to guess the number of legacy or Questbridge or recruited athletes in that number, and why is your guess accurate? At least Rice actually disclosed its early admit pool included x number of athletes and y number of Questbridge.

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Btw, google Duke class of 2022 admissions profile and you should see the pdf with an extensive breakdown.

The irony is that Duke is one of the more open colleges about info. Don’t take it off your list because they don’t break down Early by sub categories. Focus on what does improve your chances.

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The quality of a college’s meals may affect your decision to apply. It does not reflect your match or chances.

Adcoms don’t say, she really liked our dorms, let’s take her. In fact, for the more selective, no matter how much the dorms did affect your emotions about a school, it likely won’t be a satisfactory Why Us.

@roycroftmom Can you link the athlete/QB page? It’s not on their regular profile page. Btw, the fact you found it may reflect my advice to look deeper than stats and USNews.

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At CWRU, they guarantee freshman housing. So they want not too many or not too few students.
So they figure out historically how many students accept their admissions (the yield). SO maybe 3000 are admitted, but if they had 33% yield, they know about 1000 will come. So they admit the 3000 and then put more on the waitlist. Maybe they want the freshman class to be 1200. So they give leeway in case the yield was >33%.Last year it was. But other years they admit off the waitlist to get the numbers just right.

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If all schools followed Stanford’s lead and stopped publishing their admit rates, that would eliminate a helpful data point for compiling a list of reaches, matches, likelies, etc. You can of course use stats relative to the school ranges, but the admit rates provide another means of categorizing, especially when there is little differentiation in GPAs and test scores as you near their respective ceilings.

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You are asking the wrong question, dad. Unless you are one of those aforementioned groups, the question you need to ask Duke is, ‘is there an admissions advantage for for the totally unhooked & unconnected (after eliminating all of those aforementioned groups)?’

And the answer is certainly, “Yes”.

They don’t, or at least I’ve never heard such a thing among the several times I’ve sat in the Duke preso. When asked the question in the right format (as above), the answer is ‘yes, the unhooked still have a few point advantage in ED over RD.’ At no time do they say its “much easier”.

But then, do the math: a 10% admit rate in ED vs. a 7% admit rate in RD (aka, ‘several point advantage’). Still, admit numbers are really low and no where close to “much easier”. But, 10/7-1 = 42% increase in chances for ED!

“They are absolutely…[out] to help their own agenda.”

Well, yeah.

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Sorry, that in itself is feel-good spin by Stanford as their admit rates are readily available in their CDS and on IPEDS. Not publishing the rate just means one less press release.

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Of course we all want to know what our particular kid’s chances are at any given school, but since there are so many factors involved there’s just no way to know that in advance. Maybe the school is looking for more kids to shore up the classics department this year and next year will be looking to increase the geographic diversity of the class. If you learned Dartmouth wanted more kids from the Pacific Northwest would you move to Seattle? Would you encourage your kid not to apply ED to Dartmouth because her chances were 3% lower than a kid from Oregon?

Lots of kids fit into multiple silos. I know more than a few who are legacies who were also recruited as athletes and have other strong EC’s but who also have the academic chops to be admitted on their own. Is it really helpful to try to figure out what exact percentage of these kids are admitted and what that does to your own kid’s chances?

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I don’t really have an opinion on the ethical/moral aspects of how much info a college should disclose, but I will very selfishly advocate for more detailed info on admission rates.

The consensus best advice on CC is for kids to develop a balanced list of Safeties, Matches and maybe a Reach or two, all of which the student would be happy and solvent attending. No controversy here, I think.

Now imagine if there were no published info on admission rates at all. How would you develop that balanced list? Fit only? What if the student was really into tech and decided the best fits were MIT, Cal Tech, GT, CMU and Stanford? He or she would probably be in for a big surprise in late March. So I think that publishing admit rates helps students find the right “fit” schools at which they can also reasonably be admitted.

The published overall admit rates are better than nothing (see the example above) but are still highly misleading. If the data on ED vs RD, and hooked vs non-hooked was published it still wouldn’t tell you whether you will get in or not (duh), but it will help you make better application decisions. The posters who are against releasing this info seem to be saying that it isn’t a magic bullet; well, yeah, but there is no reason for the perfect to be the enemy of the good. In this case more info is helpful, if not perfect.

And this is not just for the White/Asian people applying to top schools. Kids applying to Virginia Tech should know that the overall acceptance rate for humanities applicants is many times higher than that for engineers. And an AA student with a good but not great academic record may not apply to Dartmouth when he sees the single digit acceptance rate (“no way I’ll get in there”), but if he knew that the admit rate in the ED round for AA students was 36% (made up but probably in the ballpark), he might decide it was worth it to spend his one and only ED app on the Big Green.

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It’s not ‘enemy of the good.’ It’s more that the number of variables is even more extensive than Sue22 hints. How exactly does it matter if some subgroups have a shot less than 20%? It’s still a reach for all. A more extensive breakdown doesn’t change that. And a poor app still gets you nowhere. Put another way, if the admit rate were 40%, that’s still only for kids who match.

If your decision rests on knowing the percent, broken down to your picture-- without seeing your app-- then the decision is incomplete and you mis-estimate YOUR shot. Not a lottery, not a crapshoot. Still a reach.

Yes, I used general admit numbers to guage college selectivity. But we didn’t stop there in making app decisions. I said to D1, answer this: They would want ME because…? And it never was, “Because I applied early.” Or liked the dorms. Or am at/above the 75th percentile of scores.

URMs need to qualify, as well, when it comes to top colleges. It’s a bit dismissive to assume the colleges go after anyone just for being URM. They need to match, too.

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Exactly. Even with more disclosure (er, transparency) its still much ado about nothing. Is your kid gonna apply if you think that the rate is 22%, but when you find out that its really 17% for his/her unhooked so s/he is now not gonna apply?

It’d be one thing if the college claimed a 50% admit rate but the real rate was <20%. That would affect application strategy. But will an application decision really change if the 22% advertised rate is really 17% (to make up some numbers)?

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Is the answer to the OP’s question supposed to be “no, but it doesn’t matter.”

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Or just, “no”, and we can leave it to the applicant and their families whether it matters to them. Some posters have very set ways of how they believe all people should be selecting and applying to schools but the truth is, there is no set way. You get to choose what you value, the schools get to choose what they want, and there is surprisingly little oversight or standards in the whole process, as evidenced in the current scandal. I wish it were different, but at this point it is not, so go in to the process as caveat emptor.

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All these pages and iirc, only a few questionable college numbers have been named.

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Right, because those are the ones we know about who have been caught. Rather like the cheating scandal, if Harvard and Yale are implicated, there is a good chance Princeton is too