Sorry, but Colleges have to draw the line somewhere, and that line is drawn at fall enrollment (by consensus) on the CDS. Sure, they could wait to count heads until spring enrollment, but what about the kids who drop out/leave/withdraw and don’t return from the fall bcos they are homesick and plan to transfer? Are they still counted as ‘students’ of 4-year College even if they go home and enroll in the local juco for spring?
Reporting is like running a census – pick a date, such as October 1, and everyone is counting enrolled heads on the same day/date.
@bluebayou I was talking about students who are accepted in March and told not to start with everyone else in September.
They have all the data they need on those admissions acceptances by the Oct 1 date, they just aren’t reported anywhere or factored in to the SAT/ACT averages.
^what about those spring admits that don’t show up in spring? Count 'em anyway?
What about Cornell’s Guaranteed Transfer Option? Go somewhere else for a year and show up in Ithaca in year 2. Should these kids be counted as well in ‘Frosh’ reported numbers? (they are accepted in March…)
Aren’t all the “elite” schools reaches for everyone? That’s certainly what we are all told, no matter how high a kid’s scores and grades are. I don’t understand why anyone would encourage their kid to apply to one of these schools without telling them that admission is a very long shot at any school whose acceptance rates are below 20%. These schools can’t possibly give any specific applicant enough information to allow them to calculate their exact chances; I expect they don’t know themselves until they see each new batch of applicants and since their needs change from year to year, the “winning formula” for this year (if there is one), won’t work the next.
I really think that the best course of action for reach schools is to put together your best application but assume that you will be rejected and focus on safety and matches, but of course there are far too many applicants who simply believe that they (or their child) is far too special, worked too hard, etc., to settle for less than T20. These people will never be satisfied, if they don’t happen to get lucky.
The fall statistics are usually labelled for marticulated or enrolled students. If a spring kid is enrolled, fine.
A GT kid may be a transfer. You free-will enroll first in a qualified cc. The programs I know of ask for two years in cc. In any case, if you enter as a 2nd or 3rd year, you aren’t a freshman. You may be referring to something like Harvard’s Z List. None of us know how that’s counted. Or that there’s funny business involved with reports.
A NACAC survey found that 12% of colleges had deferred admission. It’s far more than just Harvard’s Z-list. There was a thread about deferred admit colleges just last week at http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/2143602-you-got-into-college-but-not-quite-yet-p1.html . The admission stats statistics in IPEDS, CDS, or similar standardized formats by definition do not include deferred admits. The article referenced above states the same:
However, there are also plenty of good reasons for deferred admission besides trying to manipulate admission stats. For example, most not super selective colleges have a good portion of freshman who drop out during first semester, as well as good portion of admits who do not show up on day 1. As more students leave or do not arrive, there is more space for other students to take their place.
Regarding the OP’s question, I believe the vast majority of posted admit rates are reasonably accurate, but not meaningful The overall admit rate usually is often only loosely correlated with general selectivity and has even less relevance to a particular student’s chance of admission. For example, the most recent IPEDS indicates the following overall admit rates. This tells little about at which of the 5 colleges a particular student would have the highest/lowest chance of admission. Even when comparing more similar types of colleges, there are huge differences in applicant pools as well as different degrees of selectivity for different types of applicants (what program/school/major, hooked/unhooked, ED/RD, in-state/out-of-state/international, …).
West Point – 10%
College of the Ozarks – 13%
Bowdoin – 14%
UCLA – 16%
Carnegie Mellon University – 22%
btw: for the ‘more transparency’ supporters, wouldn’t including spring admits defeat the purpose of more transparency? Doesn’t nearly everyone want to start in the fall, so wouldn’t the fall stats (test score interquartiles) would be of more value to admissions chances, rather than the blended stats of including spring admits (perhaps lower test scores?) who have yet to set foot on campus?
Yes, I realize that this thread is about admission stats, so including spring admits would raise the admission rate slightly, but then it could do the opposite with test score interquartiles. I would submit that the test score numbers are much more relevant to a prospie than whether the admit rate is 22% or 25% (with spring admits).
You are conflating several different issues. For the purposes of estimating admission chances, it can be useful to have more fine divisions that better apply to an applicant’s subgroup… For example, I mentioned CMU in my earlier post. CMU’s website indicates that SCS applicants/admits had the following stats for 2018-19: The admit rate is lower for SCS applicants, and entering SCS students tend to have better grades, scores, and ranks than the overall class. If you are applying SCS, it can be valuable to have the additional admission information specific to SCS listed on their website, rather than making decisions based on the CDS or similar information that averages across the full class.
The same principle applies to the other subgroups as well, such as hooked vs unhooked. I don’t consider deferred vs regular admit a key division, like CMU SCS vs overall above. However, if a college does have a large group of students entering at a different time, and those two groups have different degrees of selectivity, then it can be useful to provide separate admission numbers for those two groups rather than averaging all of them together. For example, if a state school that has many transfer admits decided to combine website stats for freshman admits and transfer admits in to a single average, that would decrease their value.
This is not the same thing as whether colleges are truthful about admission rates. Colleges should be truthful in their published statements, regardless of how much value being truthful adds to a particular student. I don’t consider excluding deferred admit kids to be lying, but I do believe a minority of colleges use deferred admission in a misleading way.
Now that is conflating issues, CMU SCS vs CMU overall sheds no light on who CMU admits in regard to hooked or unhooked applicants, especially seeing that you have to apply specifically to CMU SCS. There is plenty of data out there in regards to the selectivity of admissions to particular colleges within a university and relatively little data in regards to hooked applicants. Only the Harvard lawsuit has shed any real data on this particular issue.
Providing the wrong data for 20 years doesn’t sound like an error. If a school (and more importantly the people there) would lie on an item that makes up 5% of the scoring for 2 decades, what else might someone “tweak” or “round” in their reporting?
People are measured and rewarded based on this stuff. When money and prestige are involved, some will break the rules.
If there’s an incentive to cheat, and the system is opaque without regulations or policing, should we be surprised there’s some cheating going on? It’s part of human nature, unfortunately. We’d like to think universities are different, but they’re run by human beings, and these days, mostly by business people, not academicians.
A poster suggested that the published admission rate need also include spring admits. I was challenging that pov and why it wouldn’t work, using an example of test score data and the Cornell GTO which is essentially a deferral of sorts for one year. I was challenging where you draw the line.
By the rest of your statement, you appear to agree with me (partially?), as you write that it would be helpful to have separate admit rates for fall and spring (if spring was a large enuf group). But my pov – and yours too, I think – is that fall numbers are fall numbers.
Now, the fact that you are suggesting the need for additional data – fall numbers by department/program/college, hooked status, gender status (women probably are 16%+ at scs), URM status, etc. – that is a wholly separate point.
That’s possible, but I would have assumed that someone who claimed the moniker of ‘Data’ would have done the math first to see if the deferred would make a significant change in the published stats, at least before casting aspersions (that the school is being ‘misleading’). In addition to schools like USC, which I think started out as a way to fill beds and curry favor with legacy kids (who quite didn’t make the final cut) and top athletic recruits, Middlebury has had a Feb admit/start program for quite awhile. So, the question: does the 100 students that are Midd Febs change Midd’s published data significantly? Same question for 'SC and other schools with Jan/Feb start dates?
And since the spring numbers aren’t published, we have no way of knowing how material there are/are not. At least Midd informs us how many they bring in spring (~100) so one could at least estimate a combined Admit rate, but no way to guess test interquartiles (the latter are much more important that admit rates, IMO).
Moreover, the numbers are excluded bcos the Common Data Set is designed to count all heads enrolled in Fall term. (Gotta draw the line somewhere and that’s where they drew it years ago.)
It is a well known back door into universities. I am not sure why you would expect USC or Tulane to announce, those with lower scores, apply for spring admission.
At some (many?) of the LACs they do not include students who are studying abroad in the CDS numbers either…I get that they are not on campus but excluding them impacts the prof:student ratio favorably…it could be the difference between a 9:1 vs 8:1 ratio…this practice is probably fair, but OTOH it’s good to aware of it.
For example, Bowdoin excludes the roughly 175 students who are off campus each term. Each class at Bowdoin is around 500-515, yet their CDS is usually around 1,850 students.
I have become confused about whether the argument is:
schools tweak numbers to make admission statistics look lower than they are, making them seem more desirable and inducing more students to apply; or
schools tweak numbers to make it look easier to get in than it actually is (especially for unhooked applicants), thereby inducing more students to apply.
Both these viewpoints have been expressed.
Also, bad on Oklahoma for lying, but did anyone here look at alumni giving (other than being a parent alum making own donations) as part of their student’s decision process?