How do you think about acceptance rate?

College Search & Lists
41

One thing, among many, that bothers me about current rating methodologies is they do not do much to take into account quality of students. Some people think that is tough to consider quality these days with test optional, grade inflation, fewer schools with class rank etc.

One thing with admission rate… it is true that it is directionally more difficult to get into schools with low ones, and easier to get into schools with high ones. That is useful in itself for those applying to college, as opposed to the ratings now. US news colleges in the 30’s can be easier admits than schools outside the top 50. How is that helpful to the kids and their parents?

42

Note that US News has typically provided selectivity ranks that differ from the overall ranks that it assigns to schools.

43

CSUN describes its frosh admission process here: https://www.csun.edu/admissions-financial-aid/how-to-apply/impaction/freshman-impaction . Only three majors are subject to competitive admission; applicants for other majors will be admitted based on meeting stated minimum requirements listed there (2.5 recalculated HS GPA in academic (A-G) courses, which must fulfill the A-G requirements). Except for those applying to the three competitive majors, applicants who read the web page should be able to know if they will be admitted before applying.

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44

The same can apply to various measures of applicant desirability (from the point of view of highly selective colleges), including academic strength. For example, the SAT and ACT are probably worse measures of academic strength in English and math than they were before heavy test prep became the norm among high achieving students. The focus on grades and GPA has resulted in substantial high school grade inflation; the substitution of class rank by some colleges (e.g. Texas publics) has led to rank gaming which can sometimes be cutthroat. There have also been rise and fall of particular types of extracurriculars which once were unusual and indicative of interesting applicants, but became heavily used by affluent parents buying opportunities for their kids and therefore becoming devalued.

Regarding measures of colleges for ranking colleges, they can get gamed. If a college has a lot of classes capped at 19, 29, 39, 49 (as opposed to a distribution of size caps that seems more based on actual room sizes), then it may be trying to game the class size measure (although that was dropped from USNWR ranking criteria recently), for example.

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45

Proxy measures of student academic strength in USNWR ranking criteria include:

  • Graduation rate 16%
  • First-year retention rate 5%
  • Pell graduation rate 5.5%
  • Standardized tests 5%

It is true that some of the above are muddied by student parent SES (which correlates to less risk of dropping out due to running out of money as well as resources for test prep), and standardized tests in the US cover only a narrow slice of the various dimensions of academic strength, but it would be inaccurate to say that student academic strength is not being targeted by the measures.

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46

The rankings you describe, partially determined by the 26.5% above, offer little help to students, parents, and overworked counselors - who are trying desperately to know whether their applicant will be admitted.

47

Here’s our criteria…

1 - Safety - If it isn’t safe, acceptance rates, affordability, programs, vibes are entirely irrelevant.

2 - Affordability. We go into it assuming we are getting no aid and paying sticker price. Hopefully that’s not the case, but we’ve been burned in other things in life hoping things ‘work out’ and don’t.

3 - School programs / resources / campus life. All need to come together in order to make it on the list.

4 - Acceptance rate based on CDS. If the first three criteria are met, how likely is acceptance for our individual situation. If it’s a pipe dream, may still apply but keeping it ‘very real’.

5 - Distance. If it’s a logistical nightmare back and forth - we need to have a plan in the best and worst of conditions.

So, what do we think of acceptance rate? It’s only one of a handful of criteria. Certainly very unimpressed with those that boast a low acceptance rate as a selling point.

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48

Location can be a big driver of acceptance rates by boosting or suppressing applications.

For many of us parents, big city schools were “out” when we applied, but for our kids, big city schools are “in” and rural schools are “out.” In our generation, Columbia’s NYC location was seen as gross, now it’s seen as glamorous.

And I’m convinced that if a tornado picked up Carleton, St. Olaf, Grinnell, Beloit or Lawrence from the Midwest and plopped them down in New England, they would soon have admit rates below 10%.

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49

This is an important point and leads to what I sometimes think of as locational arbitrage.

If you don’t have a super strong locational preference (or can talk yourself into that state of affairs), you can often find otherwise comparable colleges in less generally popular locations where the admit rates are significantly higher. And possibly that even have robust merit programs.

Now the thing is, if they are truly comparable, then what it takes to be considered a competitive applicant for those colleges may not be much different. But, what can be different is the amount of uncertainty over admissions IF you meet their standards, and again possibly merit offers if you are on the higher side of what they are looking for.

So these can become Likelies, Targets, or softer Reaches when their peers in more desirable locations might be one or more categories less predictable. But again, that doesn’t mean they necessarily get materially less qualified students, it just means if you ARE a qualified applicant there is materially less uncertainty about whether that will be enough for actual admission.

And of course you don’t have to go all in on this strategy. You can still have some preferences in terms of, say, setting, even if you are open minded about region. You can still apply to some colleges in your favorite locations. And so on.

But at least strongly considering this sort of locational arbitrage can help you avoid that feeling of being forced into choices you are not particularly excited about because of what happened in admissions. Like, OK, you didn’t get into your top choices in your favorite region, but maybe you got into some top choices in other regions. Or you got some very competitive merit offers. Or so on.

And indeed, even if you then go with one of your offers in your favorite region, but that was not one of your original favorites in that region, that will be your choice! You won’t be going to that college because you were forced to, you will be choosing that college because you want to, and that is generally going to be a more exciting way to begin college.

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50

I actually prefer to look at more targeted data when it comes to acceptance rates. I can see the acceptance stats for my kid’s public-school district and the results for applicants from his actual school in previous years (both of which are available on SchooLinks and are far more accurate than national acceptance rates). Feeder schools exist. Some colleges with single-digit or barely double-digit acceptance rates accept a quarter to a third of the applicants from his school. Conversely, some colleges that look “easy” to get into (49% acceptance rate) often take a much, much smaller percentage of students from his school.

As for ranking schools by acceptance rate, I see it as a game of musical chairs: There is so much variety and quality out there. I don’t put too much stock in that proxy, especially given the explosion of applications due to the Common App.

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51

I don’t really pay attention to published acceptance rates. And you will also never see me do a “Chance Me” for my daughter on CC.

Rather, I just look at the Scoir data for our high school with respect to the particular college in question.

It sounds crazy, but you probably don’t have the gen pop 3% chance of getting into Stanford ;-). More like…a BUNCH of people have a 0 percent chance. And some people have a 100% chance of getting in. And others are in between. The gen pop acceptance rate means very little.

But I think that, unfortunately, there are some high school kids who think that EVERYONE has a 3% chance of getting in to Stanford. Like it is a lottery. So, with that logic, if you apply to say…the top 40 schools. You will get in somewhere…or not.

And we know kids who have done this and gotten zero acceptances.

The “Scoir method” is certainly not foolproof, but it does show how people from your high school with comparable “stats” to your kid have done. It is the best method that I have seen for determining an individual’s likely acceptance rate.

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52

What is your measure and standard of safety? Would you eliminate every urban school because all will have local crime rates higher than rural or most suburban schools? Which doesn’t necessarily mean your student is any more likely to be the victim of a crime. What about the rate of suicides on a campus? Princeton is in a very safe area but had 8-9 suicides within a couple years. Does that make it pragmatically less safe because of environmental factors?

Acceptance rate by CDS seems much less useful than individual high school acceptance rates in a program like SCOIR or Naviance. Some high schools have consistently meaningfully higher or lower acceptance rates than the population as a whole. And the latter gives more nuanced data on the average weighted GPA and standardized test score acceptances at that high school.

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53

I think both are useful. Sometimes a kid is interested in a college that hasn’t been popular with other students from their high school, then you don’t really have much or any naviance etc history to go on. Agree when it’s available it’s very useful.

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54

NYC went from being synonymous with crime a generation ago to being one of the lowest crime big cities in the country now.

The popularity of NYU seemed to rise as NYC crime fell.

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55

Not every college has enough of a sample at a given high school.

Admission rate would be much more useful if given by GPA bands or GPA / test score grids (and also by major when that matters). The 4.0 student and the 3.0 student are unlikely to have the same chance of admission for a specific college with holistic admission reading.

56

However, consider a New England school such as Connecticut College. It offers notably strong programs in areas such as botany, visual art, literature, dance and international relations, a nationally recognized arboretum and NESCAC membership. Nonetheless, its acceptance rate of 38% is significantly higher than those of Grinnell (13%) and Carleton (22%).

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57

I wonder if we can use public published acceptance rate to our advantage when making college list?

Use S24 as an example, he applied 20 colleges and got accepted to 10 of them. All rejected colleges had acceptance rate below 30% (after adjusting to is/oos status and major). And out of colleges accepted him, he ended up only interest to go to the ones with acceptance rate below 50%. He spent so much times, effort and money to apply 20 colleges, at the end he only seriously consider 3 or 4 of them.

if we know his sweet spot was between 30% to 50% acceptance rate, he could have focus on building a list of target schools with 30% to 50% acceptance rate, just add couple more for reach and safety.

S24 was our oldest, if somehow, we can figure out the sweet spot acceptance rate for my younger daughter, she can try this strategy in the future.

58

I would suggest that seeking a “sweet spot admission rate” is probably not the ideal solution.

First, in a vacuum, and in spite of all the above posts, that metric provides little information about the college or its fit for your kid.

Rather, I suspect that simply cutting the application list in half would have likely yielded the same or similar acceptances as did the list of 20. The point being that applying to schools can be a draining, exhausting process, especially if the student has a large academic load, playing a sport, and / or has other time consuming ECs. A narrower list ( and 10 is not overly narrow) will provide more time on each application. Moreover, it will somewhat force the student to better reflect on what they want in a college and apply only to those that speak to those wants, which will also make for a better application.

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59

OK, but are those really peers of Connecticut College?

The last time I saw unlocked US News peer reputation surveys for these colleges (which admittedly is not definitive), a peer for Carleton would be something more like Middlebury. Which has like a 10% acceptance rate.

Meanwhile, peers for Connecticut College would include Rhodes (acceptance rate of 50%), Furman (53%), and Centre (56%). St Olaf was slightly higher in that survey, but in any event was 52%.

Just taking St OIaf, in its last CDS it had 5956 applications, 3106 accepted, 825 enrolled (yield of 26.6%).

Connecticut College had 9397 applications, 3597 accepted, 555 enrolled (yield of 15.4%).

So the people who are actually accepted to St Olaf are more likely to take that offer, but nonetheless Connecticut College gets SOOOOO many more applications than St Olaf, it can accept a significantly lower percentage despite its lower yield.

Of course I am not trying to bash Connecticut College–it is a fine LAC and I think its lower yield is not indicative of less quality than St Olaf, but rather the fact it just faces so much more regional competition for LAC admits.

But still, I do think it “benefits” from its location in the sense of getting more applications, and the net effect is a lower acceptance rate than peers like St Olaf and the others I mentioned.

By the way, the 25/50/75 SAT and ACT at St Olaf were 1260/1370/1450 and 28/30/32, and at Connecticut College they were 1170/1290/1370 and 27/30/32. Interesting that St Olaf’s ACT and SAT distributions were at least reasonably close to the official concordance, whereas Connecticut College had a notably higher ACT distribution.

But in any event, while this is again not definitive, I think it is supportive of the idea that just because Connecticut College is getting more applications than St Olaf and ends up with a lower acceptance rate, that does not mean it is necessarily enrolling significantly more competitive applicants.

We don’t have similar admit data, but this sort of thing is part of why I don’t necessarily think St Olaf actually has lower standards than Connecticut College. But it may have more predictable admissions for people who are in their competitive range.

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60

So having at least shared a lot of anecdotes, I think it is often true that with the benefit of hindsight, you can see how schools above a certain selectivity level (understanding acceptance rates are not a great measure of selectivity, at least not on their own) ended up all rejections.

But when you think about, this is bound to happen in some form except for the kids who get into their most selective college. And we know that most kids who apply to some Reaches will not get into their most selective college. So it is pretty expected a lot of kids will have some sort of selectivity “cut off” point–with the benefit of hindsight.

But of course we don’t typically know in advance where that point will be. It is that typical level of uncertainty that leads to the Reach/Target/Likely framework, and we know some kids do in fact get into Reaches. And some get into none.

So in that sense, it would be a mistake for all kids to cut all Reaches from their lists before knowing whether they will be one of those kids who does get into one or more Reaches, or one of those kids (very common, admittedly) who does not.

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