<p>It’s time for the FAQ again. It’s a fallacy to assume that base acceptance rate is the only statistic to look at when describing a college as “selective.” </p>
<p>SELECTIVITY </p>
<p>It’s NEVER a valid procedure to compare base acceptance rates alone to derive an inference about selectivity. That’s because different pools of applicants apply to different colleges, based on their own estimates of their chances. I’ll repost here an example I have posted earlier.</p>
<p>If Podunk Community College started a more vigorous marketing campaign, and encouraged many more applications than it has received before, it might find that the number of applications submitted was far above its capacity to enroll students, and thus find, even taking into account less than 100 percent yield of admitted students who actually enroll, that it could not admit all applicants. If Podunk has a 10 percent yield, a new first-year class size of 1,000, and receives 200,000 applications, it might issue a press release, after it admits 10,000 applicants, saying “Podunk admission rate down to 5 percent, lower than any Ivy League college.” But a thoughtful reader of that press release, even one who believes everything that Podunk reported, might still have genuine doubts that Podunk is more selective than Columbia, not to mention Harvard. Base acceptance rate is one interesting statistic about a college’s annual admission cycle, but it is not the sole competent evidence about which college is most selective. Scholars of the college admission process have some genuine disagreements about how to show which college is most “selective,” but NO ONE thinks that base acceptance rate is the last word on that subject.</p>