How do you think about acceptance rate?

NiceUnparticularMan
Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:17:55 +0000

merc81:

and current PA scores may already reflect acceptance rates.

As examples like the ones I gave illustrate, there is likely some sort of positive correlation, but it is far from perfect, such that you can identify many cases of the kind I identified (colleges that rank similarly by peer survey do not rank similarly by acceptance rate).

This makes sense for various reasons. For a long time now, acceptance rates have not been an input into the US News rankings directly. And I think the people being surveyed by US News understand these issues as well as anyone–there are simply too many other factors that go into determining relative acceptance rates for them to assume lower acceptance rates automatically merit a higher score in terms of “overall academic quality” (the specific question they are being asked in the peer survey).

OK, so we know that what I described is happening–schools with durably similar peer survey results can have durably different acceptance rates. The question then is what else is determining acceptance rates besides whatever is measured in the peer surveys?

And again my working hypothesis having observed a lot of these cases is that location is at least one of the other big factors.