Every year around this time colleges and universities release their acceptance rates. Every year the most selective colleges report that acceptance rates are at an all-time low, which freaks out the next class of high school juniors to no end. So every year I make the following point, which is that it’s not as hard for qualified students to get into a selective college as it seems. Here’s why:
1) The general perception of a tightening admissions environment is highly driven by the annual publication of institutional acceptance rates. People arrive at the seemingly reasonable conclusion that if the acceptance rates at all the top schools decline (as they have been) then it’s harder to get into a top school.
2) That is not necessarily the case. That’s because there are at least three possible explanations for declining acceptance rates: (A) A larger number of qualified students are applying for a fixed number of slots. (B) A larger number of unqualified students are applying for a fixed number of slots. (C) The same number of qualified students are sending out more applications for a fixed number of slots.
3) Only the first case (A) represents an actual tightening of admissions. It doesn’t matter how many unqualified people apply to selective schools. Admissions selectivity is only an issue for people who have a plausible case to be admitted. And if the same population of qualified students increases the number of applications they submit for the same number of slots—if students apply to all eight Ivy League schools whereas in previous years the same students only applied to four, for example—this will have the effect of driving down admissions rates at every selective school while not changing the odds of a student getting a spot in a selective school. (It will, however, probably decrease the odds of students getting into exactly the selective school they want.) That’s because while every student can increase the number of schools to which they apply (I’m assuming that few students apply to every selective college in the nation) no student can increase the number of schools in which he or she decides to enroll, since that number is limited to one. Under these circumstances, if you ask an admissions officer if they’re getting more qualified applicants, they will correctly say “yes.” If all the admissions officers say that, it seems like irrefutable evidence that more qualified applicants are applying. But it might just be that the same number of qualified applicants are sending out more applications.
4) The only way to really answer this question definitively and parse the extent to which declining admissions rates are a function of (A), (B), or (C) would be to analyze the applicant pools at a number of selective institutions over a number of years. Institutions protect that information so that is not likely to happen anytime soon. But it seems reasonable to assume that some not-insignificant percentage of the decline in admissions rates is attributable to (B) and (C) and not (A).
5) Electronic applications have reduced the time cost of applying to college and selective colleges have strong incentives to keep financial costs low because low acceptance rates are a sign of institutional prestige. Therefore, it seems likely that the application/student ratio will increase among students vying for selective spots and thus institutional acceptance rates will continue to decline. Where does it end? Selective colleges are struggling to process 20,000 to 30,000 applications as it is. What if it grows to 100,000 or more? As Chad Aldeman perceptively notes, the more acceptance odds fall to lottery-like levels, the more students will treat the process like the randomized lottery it’s becoming and the more tickets they’ll buy. The process will feed on itself. Eventually, colleges may have no choice but to run the selective undergraduate admissions process as an actual lottery, as medical residency programs are run today.
6) And of course it’s always worth noting that the vast majority of college students don’t go to a selective college at all and they’re the ones we should be worrying about.
4 Responses to Real College-Acceptance Rates Are Higher Than You Think
11182967 - April 20, 2010 at 9:29 am
And amen to (6)! Fuss about selective admissions is simply another part of an ongoing PR campaign put on by a smallish number of tradititional institutions to persuade the public that they are still the model–and hence the arbiters–of what a college education should be. Graduating on time,” “retention rates,” etc. all become weapons in the war to limit the definition of a college education to an old-fashioned model which funnels money, public and private, to schools which best fit the model. A particularly pernicious result of this campaign is its ability to hoodwink the public into cutting back funding for public institutions on the premise that these schools–the very institutions which educate the majority of students–are not doing their job because they dond’t measure up to the “very best schools.”
11132507 - April 20, 2010 at 12:23 pm
“Eventually, colleges may have no choice but to run the selective undergraduate admissions process as an actual lottery…” You mean it’s not a lottery already? With marketing campaigns successfully bringing in thousands more applications than selective schools need, the hair-splitting between applicants has reached extreme levels. As I reminded my daughter when we were strolling around the campus of a nearby highly selective university that she’s thought about applying to, they’ll reject an awful lot of smart kids. And the ones who get the fat envelope may be picked because of the state they live in, their intended major, the sport or musical instrument they play, etc, etc, etc…”jackpot, you’re a female mechanical engineering major from North Dakota who plays the bassoon and third base!”
jffoster - April 20, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Especially if she plays the bassoon ON third base.
comosifuera - April 25, 2010 at 11:57 pm
The SAT’s scoring system makes it such that the more students who take it, the more students with high scores there will be. This is because, as a standardized test, the mean is always roughly 500, with 100 point increments representing standard deviations. So as long as the population of students who take the test increases, the amount of applicants with high SAT scores will also necessarily increase. It’s also worth noting that increases in the domestic population, international applications, and regional mobility make the “A” scenario extremely likely.