Just reread the original post which started this thread.
So, just what exactly do they do at school #38 on the list ?
And that would be fine if the list was of the colleges where it’s hardest to be top of the class. But the list is purporting to be the colleges that are hardest to get into.
Once you shift from measuring admitted students to attending students, you are adding in the confounding variable of yield rate. While that boosts colleges up the list on the basis of prestige (and therefore produces a list that perhaps looks more like one that people would expect) and utilizes readily available standardized data, it makes the list far less useful as a measure of the relative difficulty of getting admitted.
@Publisher: Naval actually may be an antiquated term in that context, but in the case of Webb, students there prepare (with courses branching out from general pre-engineering and engineering courses) to design ships.
@merc81: My post above was intended to be humorous as I misspelled “naval” as “navel” which suggests that the school might be teaching plastic surgery.
@Twoin18, eh, there are so many variables in admissions that simple admit rate and test scores wouldn’t capture (round of application, hooks, desired major/fields of interest, how much a school cares about stats, how extra special a kid/ECs are, etc.) that by themselves, those 2 prices of data barely tell you anything about chances of admission anyway.
Just located this ranking for the 32 colleges / universities in the US with the highest average ACT scores. Thought it might be useful to cross-reference with, especially since it represents the most recent (2019/2020) stats.
Data10 was inquiring about Bowdoin which was also omitted from the top 32 on this list. The only NESCAC schools in the top 32 nationally, which all have an average ACT score of 33, are: Amherst, Hamilton, Tufts, Middlebury and Williams.
ACT School
36 Caltech
35 Harvey Mudd
35 MIT
34 Brown
34 Columbia
34 Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
34 Harvard
34 Johns Hopkins
34 Northwestern
34 Princeton
34 Rice
34 University of Chicago
34 Notre Dame
34 Vanderbilt
34 Yale
33 Amherst
33 Boston College
33 Carleton
33 Carnegie Mellon
33 Cornell
33 Dartmouth
33 Duke
33 Emory
33 Hamilton
33 Haverford
33 Middlebury
33 Northeastern
33 Stanford
33 Tufts
33 University of Pennsylvania
33 Washington University in St Louis
33 Williams
Who cares? Picking a school based on small differences in acceptance rates is inane.
Colby doesn’t require SAT.
How is this list adjusted for that?
and if so why wasn’t Bowdoin on the list with an 8.9% acceptance rate? Seems a bit odd and just a list of conjecture rather than hard data.
It’s a set of statistics, which some may find interesting.
I haven’t seen anyone suggest you use it to pick a school.
The root source for such lists usually involves federal reporting of stats. One good source for such federal stats is https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ . They have a lot more combinations and detail than just rounded up average of (25th + 75th ACT composite). Some examples are are below. IPEDS 2019-20 isn’t available yet, so these numbers are for 2018-19.
Lowest male admit rate and highest (25th+ 75th)/2 math test scores
- Caltech – 4.4% Admit Rate, 35.5 ACT, 795 SAT
- MIT – 4.9% Admit Rate, 35 ACT, 790 SAT
- Harvard – 4.8% Admit Rate, 33 ACT, 770 SAT
- Stanford – 4.2% Admit Rate, 32.5 ACT, 760 SAT
- Princeton – 5.3% Admit Rate, 32.5 ACT, 765 SAT
Lowest female admit rate and highest (25th+ 75th)/2 English test scores
- Harvard – 4.7% Admit Rate, 35 ACT, 750 SAT
- Stanford – 4.5% Admit Rate, 35 ACT, 735 SAT
- Yale – 5.75% Admit Rate, 35.5 ACT, 745 SAT
- Princeton – 5.7% Admit Rate, 35 ACT, 740 SAT
- Chicago – 6.7% Admit Rate, 35 ACT, 745 SAT
Largest discrepancy between male and female admit rate at highly selective colleges
- Olin – 32% Female Admit Rate, 9.6% Male Admit Rate
- Harvey Mudd – 24% Female Admit Rate, 9.9% Male Admit Rate
- Caltech – 12% Female Admit Rate, 4.4% Male Admit Rate
- MIT – 10.6% Female Admit Rate, 4.9% Male Admit Rate
- CMU – 24% Female Admit Rate, 13% Male Admit Rate
*. Curtis – 3.3% Female Admit Rate, 5.6% Male Admit Rate
Largest discrepancy between math and English SAT scores at highly selective colleges
- CMU – 775 Math, 725 English
- MIT – 790 Math, 745 English
- Harvey Mudd – 785 Math, 740 English
- Rice – 775 Math, 730 English
- Vanderbilt – 775 Math, 730 English
Some may find such stats interesting, but they have little use for an individual applicant since chance of admission depends on far more than admit rate + test scores, an individual’s chance of admission is usually completely different from the overall average for the applicant pool, and how far they are from the average often varies tremendously from college to college.
For example, in the Harvard lawsuit data sample, the admit rate for various groups with similar academic stats were as follows. Athlete, legacy, and URM were a big boost at Harvard; but they would offer little benefit at Caltech. In contrast being female seems to offer a big boost at Caltech, but the lawsuit found it offered little benefit at Harvard, The engineering and/or CS school is far more selective than the overall average at many colleges. For example, Cornell and CMU would have appeared towards the top for male + math had I separated by school. However, the lawsuit found little difference for CS/engineering at Harvard. CS applicants might even have had a small advantage over other fields. A similar statement could made about RD/SCEA/ED, various ECs/awards, various background characteristics, and countless other variables. A particular kid might have a great chance at one highly selective college and little chance at another with similar admit rate + scores.
**Admit Rate for Higher Stats in Harvard Pool/b
Athlete – ~96% Admit Rate
Legacy + DC or Black – 48% Admit Rate
Non-ALDC + Non-URM – 6% Admit Rate
**Admit Rate for Lower Stats in Harvard Pool/b
Athlete – 86% Admit Rate
Legacy + DC – 16% Admit Rate
URM – 2 to 5% Admit Rate
Non-ALDC + Non-URM – 0.6% Admit Rate
What is the definition of “athlete” for the Harvard data. I don’t believe that just playing a varsity sport in HS practically guarantees you admission.
“Athlete” is defined as the admission reader gave the student a ‘1’ (best) in the athletic category. It generally corresponds to being a recruited athlete. Potential walk-ons generally receive a 2, which is associated with a much smaller, but still significant boost. Just playing a varsity sport in HS and not being a potential walk on might receive a 3, which was not associated with a significant boost over students who received a 4.
In short, playing on a high school sports team appears to be just another EC unless you are likely to contribute to a Harvard varsity team. However, if you are a recruited athlete, it is a different story. Recruited athlete appears to be the strongest possible hook by a wide margin. Nothing else is even on the same order of magnitude.
Children of Harvard faculty seem to also do well. Not sure that it fits the definition of a “hook”.
“Recruited Athlete” is another way for Harvard to accept wealthy White students who otherwise would not be accepted.
A quote from one of the lawsuit analyses is below. Harvard’s expert found that if all hooks were removed and replaced with a larger preference for low SES, the number of athletes in the admitted class would decrease by 93%. Only 7% of recruited athletes from the class would still have been admitted in the new admissions model without hooks. In contrast, 72% of the faculty/staff kids would still have been admitted without hooks.
“Additional time and analysis has underscored the extent to which recruited athletes are truly outliers, even within the special recruiting categories. For example, the probability of getting admitted with an academic rating of 4 is minuscule for non-athletes (.076%) and nearly a thousand times greater for athlete (70.46%).”