Think Tank Ranks Schools

sakky
Sat, 08 Jan 2005 14:03:26 +0000

First of all, actually, I believe that the Air Force Academy admissions rate is about 15% (you take the total number of offers of admission, divide it by the number of applicants)

http://academyadmissions.com/class_2008_profile.htm

Second of all, I’m sure you have to agree that saying that the military academies and the music/art schools are specialized and therefore are not usually taken into consideration in compiling lists is a rather arbitrary delineation. For example, I would argue that MIT and Caltech (especially Caltech) are also quite specialized schools and hence tend to draw upon a significantly different applicant pool than most other schools do. Now, are they quite as specialized as the academies or the music schools? Or course not. But they are more specialized than your regular college. The point is that drawing the line to include the Institutes but exclude the Academies and the music schools, is an arbitrary distinction. Whether it’s good to make that distinction is not the point, I’m just saying that it’s arbitrary. At the end of the day, all of these places offer bachelor’s degrees, so they are all undergraduate places of learning.

But that’s neither here nor there. The real point is that it illustrates that merely looking at acceptance percentages is a distorted way of determining overall selectivity. You also need to look at other factors like self-selection of the candidates. The MIT School of Engineering admits about 27% of all applicants into its graduate engineering programs. MIT’s undergrad program admitted 17% of its applicants. Yet you cannot then draw the simple conclusion that the MIT graduate engineering programs are easier to get into than its undergraduate program. The fact is, those people who are applying to graduate engineering programs at MIT are generally the best engineering students in the world. Only if you really enjoy engineering and have done very well in it are you then going to seriously consider applying to MIT for grad-school.