Lies. Damned lies. And statistics.

July 22, 2012 7:31 AM

Are there any reliable statistics for the number of American high school seniors who apply to colleges each year?

So, I'm looking for some sort of reliable statistics that attempt to estimate the number of high school seniors in the United States who apply to college each year.

Anyone know of any government agency and/or educational institution which estimates this information and which makes the data (in summary form) publicly available?

Thanks...

posted by dfriedman to education (3 answers total)

Maybe poke around at the National Center for Education Statistics? Colleges report the number of applications they have each year. Whether it's possible to extrapolate that into the number of actual humans, I'm not sure.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 8:22 AM on July 22, 2012

In kind of a twist, I'm seeing some of this data come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as apparently they collect data for a report called "College Enrollment and Work Activity of [Year] High School Graduates.

Otherwise, it looks like a combination of NCES (the gateway to all education statistics in the US) and the Census Bureau (reliable count of the number of 17 and 18 year old in the US, then get the appropriate average age of senior high school students elsewhere) will get you what you want.
posted by librarylis at 6:49 PM on July 22, 2012

Maybe there is a way to extrapolate it pretty closely by getting the number of HS juniors that take the ACT and SAT?
posted by JohnnyGunn at 8:43 PM on July 22, 2012