This time of year we spend a lot of time compiling and looking at lists of acceptance rates. That inevitably leads to warnings that a low acceptance rate does not equal being a highly selective school. Usually this comment comes about when a school’s acceptance rate ranks above or below where most of us judge that it “belongs” academically. This has bothered me for a while and I think it would make for an interesting discussion topic.
To illustrate what I mean, I’m going to use the example of Pitzer and Williams. But the concept I’m getting at is broader and they’re just examples. Pitzer’s acceptance rate has for the last few years ranked it with Amherst and Swarthmore and ahead of Williams. Clearly this bothers some people, and they feel a need to explain it away: (1) Pitzer is presumed to get tons of applications from the West Coast where there is a dearth of LAC’s; (2) Williams’ applicant pool is more “self selecting” in part because of its remote location. “Self selecting” is the favored explanation anytime there’s a need to explain why one elite institution is ranked lower by acceptance rate than where it is perceived to “belong.”
What bothers me about this discussion, I think, is the use of the term selective. Selective is used in the college admissions context (at least on CC) as though it means “better” or at least targeting a higher caliber of student as measured by GPA/SAT/ACT etc. I’m bothered by what I see as the elitism (and some East coast bias) in this thinking. Selectivity means choosing careful in picking your class from the batch of applicants. So what if your batch of applicants is presumed to be heavily weighted to the West Coast? Why should that discount the “value” of the acceptance rate? For that matter, so what if the average SAT/ACT is lower? Why do those applicants not count, or count for less, in a measure of “selectivity”?
I sense an assumption behind this that if the Pitzer admissions committee could swap its class of 2020 with the Williams class of 2020, it would do so in a heartbeat. While I’m sure Pitzer would happily take a lot of the Williams class, I don’t think they’d take all, or even most, of it. Pitzer has its own vision of the type of student it’s looking for, which is different from what Williams is looking for. So why is Pitzer deemed less selective than Williams, as the term is apparently used on CC?
I guess my beef here is with the use of the term “selective.” To me, any school that admits 12% is “more selective” than a school that admits 17%. Selective doesn’t seem like the right word for the concept that people are using to measure schools against each other. I’m not sure what word would work better. I’d be interested in others’ thoughts about this.
It is semantics and it is subject to personal interpretation. My personal opinion is that selectivity is best measured by the academic stats of accepted applicants.
The problem lies when people view “selective” as synonymous with “better” without deeper investigation.
Your problem isn’t the word “selective” because in your scenario of school w/12% admit rate vs. another with 17%, the first school IS more selective by definition.
Your problem is with peoples’ un-informed and automatic linking “selective” as equivalent to “better”
Selectivity describes chances of acceptance or even “popularity” or even “elite”. Highly sought after items probably warrant investigation as to what’s so attractive – perhaps the mob does see something that can be valuable to me. But it doesn’t automatically confer “quality” to the discerning e.g “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is certainly popular and one can argue has reached an elite or highly selective status – but…
Just a point of order…this isn’t necessarily true as it says nothing about the qualifications of the applicants or the method of selection. Not going to dig into the relative merits of Williams and Pitzer, but if we were to find that the incoming class at Williams had higher GPA’s and standardized test scores and more impressive extracurricular activities would it not be safe to say that Williams would be considered more selective despite its higher acceptance rate?
I think why this matters is that it’s easy to increase the number of applicants to a school. Just drop the application fee and any supplemental essays. Heck, I could probably double my school’s application numbers by creating a lottery among applicants. Apply to my school free and without any additional essays and you’ll be entered into the Sue22 $100,000 lottery. I’m sure I’d get a ton of applications. I’d just weed out the students who’d shown no real interest beyond my lottery and revel in my single digit acceptance rate.
To be clear, I am not claiming any particular reason for the relative acceptance rates of Williams and Pitzer. Just making the point that the qualifications of the incoming class are much more important than the raw numbers of applicants.
And as to selectivity vs. quality, this still doesn’t tell us anything about what students will get out of a school, i.e., the quality of the school itself. It simply tells us about the quality of the incoming class, a factor which contributes to but does not equal the quality of the institution.
OK let me try approaching this another way. Instead of Pitzer and Williams let’s just talk about Hypothetical Private College A and Hypothetical Private College B. Assume both say they consider applicants holistically. If all you knew was that A admits 13.5% and B admits 17.6%, you’d say A is more selective than B, right? Now let’s assume we have further data: let’s say that we know A’s applicant pool is 80% from California, that the average GPA of applicants is 3.2 and the average ACT is 29. For B, let’s say the applicant pool comes from a wider geographic area, the average GPA is 3.5 and the average ACT is 31. My point is that, as I understand the word selective, A is STILL more selective than B. It’s not like the admissions committee for A says: our applicants are all fungible, we’ll pick 13.5% at random. Nor does A say: all we care about is stats and we’ll take the top 13.5%, determined solely by stats. Sure wish we had B’s applicant pool. Instead A’s admission committee carefully goes through the applications to discern and select which 13.5% is the best fit for A.
This is the issue that bugs me about the word selective. We import all sorts of judgments onto it about the worth and “quality” of the applicant pool. And we do that without actually even having data about the applicant pool, just educated guesses. Of course the bottom line is that acceptance rates are a flawed metric especially given the limited data included with them. But as humans we love to make lists, ranks and judgments.
@Corinthian,
Let’s make the differences more dramatic for the sake of clarifying the argument. School A has 10,000 applicants and an admissions rate of 10%. School B has 2,000 applicants and an admissions rate of 50%. However, the top 10% of applicants to School A have an average GPA of 3.0 and an ACT of 20. These stats would put those applicants in the bottom 10% of applicants to School B.
It seems you would consider School A more selective. I would argue that School B is more selective because a student who would be admitted to School A would be rejected by School B.
I admit I’m quibbling about semantics, which is why I titled the thread the way I did. But yes, in @Sue22 's example, I’d have to say that A is more selective than B. But I’m also assuming that A actually has a holistic selection process and doesn’t just automatically take the 10% with the highest stats.
Well, @Corinthian, if your point is that choosing a school based on selectivity is a poor decision making I would agree. If you don’t mind, let’s throw in another school, Let’s call it School C. School C has a huge application pool of 51,000. 9,000 students are accepted (17% roughly) and 2900 of those students enroll (32%yield) with an ACT mid fifty range of 29-33. Would you say that school is pretty selective? 17% acceptance is selective I would think.
But then you find out, that school C offers another 1000 students spots as Spring admission. About 200 enroll. We don’t know the test scores of the Spring Admits.
Next year School C enrolls another 625 in this class, and again enrolls 625 before junior year. After 30 credits, No ACT or SAT score is required.
Is this school selective? I would call this school selective for fall admission only.
Now you’re choosing between School C, and School D.
School D receives 20000 applications. School D accepts 3400 students for an acceptance rate of 17%. School D enrolls 1570 students for a 46% yield. ACT scores a mid fifty range of 29-33.No Spring admission, but a transfer class of 70 each year before sophomore and Junior years.
Is this school selective?
Which one would you choose?
BTW, these two example schools are loosely based on two real schools, and are both ranked nearly the same on USNEWS National Universities.
Semantics is boring and ontology is the most tedious of the philosophical disciplines.
That said, who cares? Why should hair-splitting degrees of selectivity matter to an applicant? Why should someone who loves Pitzer be worried about Williams’ prestige? I’m pretty sure nobody at Williams is worried about Pitzer…
School C sounds like USC. I agree it’s selective for Fall admissions. School D is also obviously selective. D’s higher yield suggests it is the first choice of more of its applicants – but maybe it also has better financial aid and is more affordable? And it’s of course not enough data to choose, except that C is obviously a very big school which was a significant factor for my kid who wanted someplace smaller.
If all colleges had a purely stats driven admissions process, then yes you could assume that any student who got into Williams would also have been admitted to Pitzer. But I submit that in a holistic admission system, that’s not necessarily true. Of course if we had a purely stats driven admissions process then results would be more predictable and students wouldn’t feel compelled to apply to more and more schoos, causing a vicious circle of ever lower acceptance rates.
@marvin100 I agree with you. I’m pushing back against the hair splitting degrees of selectivity. To me the acceptance rate is just a numerator over a denominator. That’s my point. It’s not a useful measure of how to select a school, and if you recognize that then there’s no need for contortions to explain away the results.
Is a graduate going to constantly say, “I attended School A, with an acceptance rate of 2%?”
Some schools are also more selective in ways other than test scores or grades. Service academies are very selective, but the scores and gpa’s of students might not be higher than a school that is considered ‘less selective’. An art school may be very selective on the portfolios, but not require a high SAT score. BYU is highly selective, but not that many will apply who aren’t willing to attend BYU and follow the rules.
@Sue22 , thanks a lot! You just made my rose-tinted spectacles fog up. My D was accepted to Kenyon, which did exactly what you describe. Now, do I tell her the ugly truth and crush her dreams?..
@Corinthian: My example is USC as you noted and Georgetown. The numbers I used are out of my head, and rounded for ease. But an example two different ways of having low acceptance rates.
I think this thread is important bc, your Pitzer and Williams example, and @Sue22’s Lottery/Essay Free school point out the problem in College Admissions. I’ve seen many times posters arguing over the relative ranking and selectivity on various selection threads in order to help someone choose between two colleges. And I said on another thread, using rankings and selectivity as tool to choose a school is like using your horoscope to choose a school.
Schools go to trouble to increase selectivity and rankings and to the detriment of the mission of educating students. You can’t blame them as long as students consider rankings and selectivity in their decisions. The best way to fix this is to stop considering these things and consider more pertinent information about the schools.