College Admissions - does the number of applicants really matter?

xanthos · July 8, 2011, 7:07pm

Here is my question. I've read everywhere that more and more kids are applying to top universities every year leading to a severe drop in acceptance rates. Here is an example from The Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper:

I doubt that the quality of students can change drastically from year to year. So, despite the ever increasing number of applicants to the most elite colleges and universities in the country, wouldn't the "real" acceptance rate for qualified students stay steady?

Challenged · July 8, 2011, 7:11pm

Of the increase in applicants from 2014 to 2015 there will undoubtedly be a portion that are qualified. As the number of applicants increase one could argue that this portion of the marginal gain are diminishing. However, there certainly is a decrease in the “real” acceptance rate, too.

What I am interested in comparing are the statistics in the common data set over the past 5 years.

davidthefat · July 8, 2011, 7:12pm

Yes, the number of seats available stay the same, but the number of applicants increase. Do some critical thinking will you? Look, the same number of admissions officers and the same number of seats. Lets say, in a school with 10 admissions officers got 1000 applicants for 100 seats. Each officer reads 100 applications and picks on average around 13. The extra is to over shoot since not all with metricate. The next year, the same team receives 1500; they still can only pick around 13 per officer, but they have to read 50 more applications. They would have less time per application and less time to debate on who to accept. That in turn lowers the acceptance rate and the selectivity.

xanthos · July 8, 2011, 7:28pm

Yes, I realize that the acceptance rate obviously drops when more and more people apply to colleges. What you have just stated is the obvious and is the reason why I said

By qualified I mean the students who actually stand a decent shot at HYPSM, not those who simply apply “just because”.

22955 people applied to Harvard in 2007-2008. 27462 people applied to Harvard in 2008-2009. That is a difference of 4507 students.

I realize that the number of spots stays the same. That is not the question that I was bringing up. My question is whether or not those 4507 students are really so qualified as to pose a threat to those students who actually stand a chance at Harvard. I’m sure that there are very qualified students within the bunch but I feel like they are in the minority. Thus, I believe that the majority of the additional 4507 students simply add to the applicant pool while only a small percentage of those students actually add to the pool of students who have a reasonable shot at Harvard.

Of course, I believe that the “real acceptance rate” drops a bit as well for the ideas mentioned in the fat’s last few sentences. All I am postulating is that the “real acceptance rate” does not change to the same degree as the official acceptance rate does.

For additional information:

2108 admitted 2007-2008.
2175 admitted 2008-2009.

* All information above was taken from Harvard’s common data set. *

mrlaurencenguyen · July 8, 2011, 7:31pm

If one person applies to Harvard, and happens to be adequately qualified, then Harvard will have a 100% acceptance rate for that year :D

xanthos · July 8, 2011, 7:37pm

Here is a relevant post by mifune (a student at Harvard).

mifune:

Understand that single-digit admissions rates are a promotional fabrication fed to the largely gullible public who largely do not understand the rate’s true significance. In deriving its figure from admissions to the class of 2014, Harvard was completely disregarding admittances from the wait-list and students annually situated upon its “Z-list”* in order to gleefully announce the unprecedented sub-7% acceptance rate. Uniting U.S. residents with international students in the same calculation, (internationals, based on reasonable estimations, are admitted at a four-times-lower rate) slenderizes the figure a bit, in addition.

The statistical reality is that a preponderance have practically zero chance of admittance (and that holds true at Harvard’s peer institutions, as well), despite attestations that a sizable majority of the pool is “qualified” to handle the academic demands. In fact, the “85% are qualified” response politely evades answering the inquiry that attracts far more wonderment and relevance – how many are actually viable contenders. Asking how many are appropriately credentialed in order to make reasonable inferences about their ability to manage the workload and how many are realistic candidates for admission are not the same question and entail completely disparate answers. That the standard applicant stands “a 6.9% chance” is misleading because it’s largely an extraneous factoid about the aggregated applicant pool in conjunction with convenience of excluding the aforementioned students from the tally. ** The acceptance rate is more genuinely 20%-25% if one were to aggregate those who do have a chance while the rest are merely purchasing a bogus ticket to the Harvard lottery. ** Admissions competition is not genuinely among ~31,000 (the total applicant pool) or the 26,000 or so that that Harvard claims are qualified. It’s more realistically limited to roughly 10,000 remotely feasible contestants. You will occasionally hear older members of the CC community assert that MIT unintentionally verified this reality about ten admissions cycles back when they arranged its pool in order of outcome of the Academic Index calculation, and the bottom half produced no admittances save for particular candidates with special consideration. Many of the most selective institutions validate this actuality in a more evasive and nebulous manner when they contend that they could admit a second or perhaps a third qualified class (but certainly not a fourth or fifth).

The relationship between SAT scores and admissions also serves as an efficient proxy for modeling and inferring the same conclusions. The effects of this can also be observed in the book The Early Admissions Game (page 153, Figure 5.13b), which charts Harvard acceptance rates during the 1999-2000 admissions cycle by SAT breakdown . To summarize:

400-1400 – 2% regular / 6% early
1410-1450 – 8% regular / 21% early
1460-1500 – 7% regular / 22% early
1510-1550 – 12% regular / 55% early
1560-1600 – 33% regular / 57% early

In other words, those from priority categories are admitted from the lowest distinction; no visible sensitivity is applied to the SAT in the “mid-range” categories, with exponentially heightened admissions probability as scores approach higher levels. The page 153 figure essentially denotes a different graphical interpretation of the charts assembled in the Revealed Preference Rankings study and in Espenshade’s earlier publishings. Namely, it determines the same meaningful relationship and matches the identical fundamental conclusions of multiple sources. The acceptance percentages will necessarily be lower eleven years later (for the 2010-11 admissions cycle) by virtue of having more applications contend for a similar number of spots. But the reduction will be roughly proportional to the above percentages presuming that admissions policies have not substantially altered since then.

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<li>– Legacy applicants who are admitted from a special wait-list on the stipulation that they do not matriculate at another university in the intervening year

</li>
</ul>

system · April 16, 2021, 2:58am

College Admissions - does the number of applicants really matter?

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