Lehigh’s admission rate dropped to only 25% of applicants this year, from 30% last year, and 35% the year before that. The combination of strong engineering, business, and arts and sciences programs, are drawing more applicants and increasing the yield. Additionally, they have maintained students’ flexibility to freely select or change their major across all schools, including engineering. That is a key differentiator these days, because very few highly selective schools still allow that level of flexibility, especially in engineering. I think applicants are realizing the value in that option.
I went to college in the '70s and I certainly had no idea what percentage of students were admitted to any of the places I applied to. I guess I would have figured that Yale was more selective than Reed but I didn’t really think about it. Did other people know these stats back then? Did colleges release them?
@delurk1, I don’t think anyone knew the facts and figures - just knew that you had to be a really good student to get into those schools.
@cobrat I get a few chuckles out of the nicknames of the schools. Like how UBC is now known as University of a Billion Chinese.
Colleges with F2014 AdmissionRates Below 20% Include:
19.6% Washington & Lee
19.3 Williams
18.6 UCLA
18.1 USCGA
18 USC
17.9 Colorado College
17.5 Rust
17.4 Georgetown
17.3 Tufts
17.2 Middlebury
17.1 Washington U
17 Swarthmore
16.6 USAFA
16.3 Mississippi Valley State
16 Berkeley
15.1 Rice, Cooper Union
etc.
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
The only ones above that surprise very much are Rust College and Mississippi Valley State.
However, they have entering GPAs and test scores much lower than other schools listed.
Re #104 and Mississippi Valley State University
Take note of the auto admit criteria at Mississippi public universities. MVSU must be getting an applicant pool with very weak academic credentials.
It does show that admit rate can be unreliable as a measure of selectivity.
Here is the current thread that shows the 2020 admission rates that have been reported:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1841185-college-admissions-statistics-class-of-2020-early-decision-early-action-acceptance-rates-p23.html
There are still some CSUs that admit everyone at baseline CSU eligibility (which is about where it was 30 years ago). However, it is true that most CSUs are now competitive so that higher academic qualifications than baseline CSU eligibility are needed, unlike 30 years ago when probably most of the CSUs admitted everyone at baseline eligibility.
(CSU = California State University; baseline eligibility is at https://secure.csumentor.edu/planning/high_school/eligibility_index.asp .)
I’m not sure ALL schools are more selective. For instance the service academies have the same process and it varies by year as to how many applicants they have. Also the “more selective” can be tied to the common app and students applying to more colleges.
Selectivity of the FSAs have historically fluctuated depending on the popular perception and esteem of the FSAs and the eyes of the US public at large.
For instance, by all accounts I’ve read and heard about, FSAs were extremely selective institutions in the aftermath of victory in WWII and this high esteem continued into the early-mid-'60s. However, with public opinion turning against the Vietnam War, questions about US military conduct of the War*, and the aftermath, FSAs found their popularity among more topflight US HS students to be seriously flagging. This reached a serious point by the early '70s to the point the FSAs had to be less selective in order to maintain adequate enrollment numbers to commission enough officers even with a massive post-Vietnam RIF.
And the perception continued well into the early-mid-1980’s judging by what I’ve heard from older HS alums and their contemporaries in other HSs who graduated in the late '70’s and early '80s when the FSAs weren’t very popular among many of their HS classmates and their parents(including some Vietnam War vets themselves)…especially above-average students academically.
However, this perception started to change due to factors such as the successful US operations in Grenada, ratcheting up of Cold War tensions in the '80s, and the successful operations in Panama and the Persian Gulf in 1989 and 1990 so that by the late '80s, the FSAs again were becoming popular choices by topflight students such as an older neighbor and fellow public magnet alum who turned down a full FA package to MIT to attend Annapolis because he really wanted to join the Submarine force and the competitiveness of that posting was such he’d have a much better chance of getting it at Annapolis than from NROTC at MIT. By the time I graduated HS in the mid-'90s, the FSAs and students opting for that route were regarded with the same level of respect usually conferred towards Ivies and peer elite colleges and their admits/students.
To some extent, this is similar to differences in popularity in MOS selection among FSA/ROTC/OCS graduates as during the Vietnam War and in the military my father and older relatives had to serve in as conscripted junior officers by opting to attend college before completing their 2 year mandatory service obligation back in the '50’s and '60s in the ROC(Taiwan), being assigned as an infantry officer was the default if one didn’t attend the military academy AND/OR ranked high enough in one’s class to get a different posting(i.e. Engineers, Aviation, Intel, Artillery, etc).
Most from that generation would be surprised to hear that by all recent accounts, infantry is now one of the most popular and competitive choices by FSA/ROTC/OCS graduates in the last decade or so.
2014 acceptance rates at the service academies:
7.9% USNA
9.5% USMA
16.6% USAFA
18.1% USCGA
However, the USNA and USMA test scores and HS class rank numbers are similar to the numbers for other schools with much higher admission rates such as Holy Cross, Gettysburg, Dickinson, Boston U, or Wisconsin (schools with admission rates of roughly 30%-50%).
“Most from that generation would be surprised to hear that by all recent accounts, infantry is now one of the most popular and competitive choices by FSA/ROTC/OCS graduates in the last decade or so.”
With a war that’s been going on for 15 years with no end in sight, and the preponderance of the fighting done by pilots and infantry officers, that’s not a surprise. For people who want to go into special operations, being infantry is the best way to do that, or for other elite units (Rangers, etc.).
In 1985, Harvard received 13,617 applications for the Class of 1989 and admitted 16.1 percent of them. Yale received 11,737 applications for the Class of 1989 and admitted 18.6 percent of them. Penn received 12,800 and accepted 36 percent of them.
^ Applications to Harvard this year - 39,040 - up 4.6%.
When I attended Reed several decades ago, the college was better known nationally for its academic strength than it was known locally. At the time, a survey taken of people in downtown Portland found that most Portlanders didn’t know where the college was located. (It’s in what used to be a SE “suburb” and is still just a 10-minute bus ride from center of the city.)
For my son, Reed was an automatic admit b/c of his high school achievements; that his dad was an alum didn’t matter.
However, when he graduated hs about 20 years ago he chose to attend another university that was then a virtual automatic admit for academically talented students: University of Chicago. UofC’s acceptance rate was something like 35% at the time. Chicago was something like Reed today in this respect: the quality of the students (as reflected in their GPA’s and test scores) was much higher than the acceptance rate implied.
The intellectual atmosphere at both colleges is similar (the curriculum is designed for “students who like to think”), but of course UChicago is much larger, has many outstanding graduate programs and famous faculty, and now has a very low acceptance rate. Reed, however, is still wide open for the qualified student who really wants to attend – whether or not Portlanders know where it’s located.
I grieve the days when academic achievement was enough to get strong students into UChicago (and Wash U, and Johns Hopkins). You didn’t have to be Renaissance person; you could be intellectually focused. Smart, hard-working kids who were a good fit would generally get in. Sigh.
USC has raised itself prob the most in rankings and selectivity. It’s gone from Univ of Second Choice with an 80% accept rate and low yield to a highly selective top school in a fairly short time (20 years or so). I think you’d be hard pressed to find a school that had moved as much in that time.
Here’s a surprise few: Penn, Cornell, brown and Dartmouth. When I was at a very highly ranked college in the 90s I recall those as being of course well known schools, but not relatively super selective. They had, for example, admit rates of 40% or more, as I recall. The top LACs like Williams and Amherst were viewed as being far more selective than the “lower ivies” (hate that term but it is somewhat descriptive, getting into Harvard is a complete different ballgame than getting into Cornell for example - naviance proves that) and places where the “super smart” kids went. The admit rate at those top LACs seemed to be pretty low even back then. Much closer to Harvard and Yale than Cornell or Penn.
I don’t know what has caused Penn, Cornell, etc. selectivity to increase so much recently. Common app? Websites like cc? But they’ve somehow gone from the mid to upper 30s down to 10-15% in around 10 years.
I do wonder how much of it is “real” though. It seems like a LOT of kids with no chance apply to those schools these days. I know a lot of kids from my kids’ high school do. Kids with 3.6, 28 ACT and no hooks, etc. I think there is quite a bit of fluff in those selectivity numbers these days. Id live to see the average sat and act numbers for their entire applicant pools.
Others for me are Rochester , wustl, tufts.
One that is higher than I’d thought is Emory. It’s proven difficult for kids in my area to get into, even with high stats, but they show a 25% admit rate. We get more kids into Cornell than Emory.
Admission statistics for all of the Ivy League schools since 2007.
@mackinaw, Reed is following UChicago’s path, however. In the span of a few years, UChicago went from disdaining playing the USNews rankings game to gaming as hard as anyone.
Reed just recently changed from deliberately ignoring the USNews inputs to now paying attention.
By alumni acheivements, it’s actually at an Ivy-level already, though (
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19692277#Comment_19692277) despite a very low USNews ranking. It has one of the highest rates of getting kids in to PhD programs.
@Hanna, yes, it’s a bit of a shame.
Re: University of Chicago…one thing that I believe significantly increased their applicant pool was the change in their financial aid application process. No more Profile required. FAFSA only and a shirt school based form. This meant that students no longer needed to deal with non-custodial parent information.