<p>I came across this paper on a different CC thread.
<a href=“http://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Papers/EarlyAdmissions.pdf[/url]”>http://www.stanford.edu/~jdlevin/Papers/EarlyAdmissions.pdf</a></p>
<p>It has some data points about WashU admissions that I think are interesting, and tend to debunk some of the admissions myths we see on CC, although it is referring to 11 year-old data.</p>
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<p>The interesting data is in Table 1, which I transcribe below just for WashU:
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<p>A few interesting points:
- WashU doesn’t generally make its ED admissions rate public. But in this survey, it is only slightly higher than the overall admissions rate, 35 vs 34.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>WashU is more selective now than it was 11 years ago, and the overall admissions rate is down sharply. (This is already well known, but I thought it was worth mentioning.)</p></li>
<li><p>In this survey, of highly qualified students, the admissions rate was a very high 79%. If WashU was denying “overqualified” students in the Year 2000, the admissions rate of those high qualified students couldn’t have possibly been that high. In fact, WashU was a much more reliable admit for the highly qualified students than any other school on the list (tied with U. Chicago). In part, that would naturally follow because it was less selective overall than most on the list, at that time. But, if you look school by school, WashU had a much higher difference between the “highly qualified” admissions rate and “overall” admissions rate than most of the schools on the list. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>This is 11 year-old data, but still food for thought.</p>