Is this the New Norm?

[AustenNut]

@colonelmike64

The fact is that it is now commonly accepted wisdom that there “aren’t enough spots”. That’s nonsense. I went through the USN rankings and there are over 80,000 spots at T30 colleges. That’s without going into the LACs or top students who attend flagships or other schools for a variety of reasons.

I wrote a post addressing this on a different thread, and will repost my comments here:

@AustenNut

Here are some facts:

• There are approximately 26,727 high schools in the U.S. (source).
• 950,000 students in the Class of 2021 took the SAT (source ). A 1490 was at the 98th percentile for 2021 (source). Thus, about 19,000 seniors had an SAT in the top 2% of test-takers. A 1430 was the 95th percentile, thus there were 47,500 students with an SAT in the top 5%.
• The Ivy League (being used as a proxy for “tippy top” schools for ease of gathering data) had 281,060 applications, admitted 22,805, and expected 14,483 to enroll (source).
• Almost 2 million applications. 226,234 admits and 106,316 enrolled at arguably the top 56 colleges in the U.S. (universities & liberal arts and top publics) which will hereby be called “top 56” for brevity (source ).

My thoughts on the facts:

• There are more high school valedictorians than the number of students admitted by Ivy League schools.
• Sadly, some high schools’ valedictorians will not have received sufficient academic preparation to handle the rigor of the Ivy League schools. Other schools will have a plethora of adequately prepared students, far exceeding even the top 20 students in a graduating class. Thus, we’ll say that an average of 10 students/high school would be academically prepared…resulting in 267,270 academically prepared students. But if the “top 56” only accepted 226,234 (which includes huge universities taking big numbers of students like U. Michigan & UC Berkeley), that means that there are academically prepared students who won’t get any acceptances. If they all applied to the Ivy League institutions, then less than 10% would given an acceptance.
• If all of the top 2% of SAT takers decided they wanted to attend an Ivy League school, there wouldn’t be enough space for them in the 14,483 seats allotted. And if all of the top 5% of the SAT seniors applied to the Ivy League, less than half would be offered an acceptance.
• But what about the kids with a 1600 SAT and a 4.0 UW GPA? Wouldn’t they be shoo-ins? That’s when we get to the holistic part of the review. If their accomplishments entail being in the National Honor Society and participating in debate tournaments and writes a fine essay, would the university rather accept someone with a 3.8UW and 1420 SAT who was a varsity athlete in multiple sports, worked a part-time job, and had 600 hours volunteering at the animal shelter and writes a stellar essay? It gets sticky. And that second student is probably not going to fall into any of the “fact” categories listed above as the person didn’t get a 95th percentile SAT and probably isn’t in the top 10 with that GPA.
• So, once we add in the people whose ECs, leadership, and awards give them added strength even if they’re not in the top 5% of test-takers or in the top 10 students in the class, that total number of students in-play for a spot at the “top” colleges just keeps getting bigger.
• With the considerations above, maybe it’s a pool of 300,000 “good” applicants that would get past a pre-read stage and be deliberated with on an ad coms team? There’s 226,234 admissions to the “top 56” schools and 22,805 at the Ivies. There are good students who will likely be shut out.
• Then you combine just the raw number of students with how many school applications are being done by each applicant. I believe the current average is about 7 applications/student (obviously much higher with most people on CC). But if each of those “good” applicants did 7 applications that’s 2.1 million applications. And interestingly enough, there were about 2 million applications for the “top 56” colleges.