Do you know the data on why "its so hard" to get into elite colleges?
April 27, 2022 11:40 AM Subscribe
I've seen a number of media claims that use the Ivy League schools' admittance rates (a miniscule fraction of colleges) and maybe other highly ranked schools as evidence that college is harder to get into than it used to be. I don't really know if that includes all colleges, like a regular state school or a regional liberal arts school. But I've seen the headline "Its harder to get into college now than ever before." Is that true?
For reasons of both intellectual and personal curiosity, I am wondering about the consistent media claims that "college is harder to get in to now than ever".
There are competing factors that make me question the legitimacy of media claims. (I'm not saying its untrue or a conspiracy). Aren't less kids in the this particular age cohort than previous eras? And, isn't there a reduction in total applications during the last few years, pandemic included? Just using those assumptions, would it be feasible to surmise that while it could be harder to get into some schools (b/c they are getting more applications), then other schools would become easier to get into?
I'm not asking HOW to get into college, and not for personal anecdotes. I'm interested in the more systemic, demographic or sociological factors for the relationship of increasingly low percentage of students getting accepted to "elite" schools (narrowly defined as Ivy Leagues and schools highly ranked in US News & World Report) and the wider community of colleges.
For reasons of both intellectual and personal curiosity, I am wondering about the consistent media claims that "college is harder to get in to now than ever".
There are competing factors that make me question the legitimacy of media claims. (I'm not saying its untrue or a conspiracy). Aren't less kids in the this particular age cohort than previous eras? And, isn't there a reduction in total applications during the last few years, pandemic included? Just using those assumptions, would it be feasible to surmise that while it could be harder to get into some schools (b/c they are getting more applications), then other schools would become easier to get into?
I'm not asking HOW to get into college, and not for personal anecdotes. I'm interested in the more systemic, demographic or sociological factors for the relationship of increasingly low percentage of students getting accepted to "elite" schools (narrowly defined as Ivy Leagues and schools highly ranked in US News & World Report) and the wider community of colleges.
Well, without quoting any direct statistics, women go to college these days. And in general more students of all genders are attending college than ever before.
I'm only 36. When I was born something like 20% of Americans were college grads and women were much less than half of that group. These days women outnumber men and the percent of college grads is in the high 30s.
There are simply more people attending college in general, and since college is an expectation for many young people there's more pressure to achieve academically, which means the number of contenders for elite schools is itself also driven higher.
posted by phunniemee at 11:48 AM on April 27, 2022
I'm only 36. When I was born something like 20% of Americans were college grads and women were much less than half of that group. These days women outnumber men and the percent of college grads is in the high 30s.
There are simply more people attending college in general, and since college is an expectation for many young people there's more pressure to achieve academically, which means the number of contenders for elite schools is itself also driven higher.
posted by phunniemee at 11:48 AM on April 27, 2022
Best answer: One thing I've seen floated for low acceptance rates at elite schools is that students are applying to MORE schools.
Thinking of all students and all "openings" for students: If you have 50,000 prospective students and 48,000 positions one year and each student applies to 3 schools that's 150K applications, that's an overall acceptance rate of 32%. If each applies to 7 schools, that's an acceptance rate of 14%. The same goes for elite schools: If students applying to elite schools are applying to MORE schools and more students are attempting to apply to "reach" schools or applying to more reach schools, the acceptance rate goes down, EVEN IF the standards don't go up. It's just math.
Here are some numbers on that, though the source has gone 404.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:50 AM on April 27, 2022 [20 favorites]
Thinking of all students and all "openings" for students: If you have 50,000 prospective students and 48,000 positions one year and each student applies to 3 schools that's 150K applications, that's an overall acceptance rate of 32%. If each applies to 7 schools, that's an acceptance rate of 14%. The same goes for elite schools: If students applying to elite schools are applying to MORE schools and more students are attempting to apply to "reach" schools or applying to more reach schools, the acceptance rate goes down, EVEN IF the standards don't go up. It's just math.
Here are some numbers on that, though the source has gone 404.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:50 AM on April 27, 2022 [20 favorites]
In California, the superb UC opened 9 campuses between 1864 and 1965, and since then--in almost sixty years--has added just one more. They have grown in enrollment at existing schools but we're not keeping up.
When I attended many years ago, they acknowledged they weren't meeting their access guidelines and were shunting qualified students to the community college and state university systems. I don't know if we even have they even officially adhere to their old standards on who to admit.
posted by mark k at 11:58 AM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
When I attended many years ago, they acknowledged they weren't meeting their access guidelines and were shunting qualified students to the community college and state university systems. I don't know if we even have they even officially adhere to their old standards on who to admit.
posted by mark k at 11:58 AM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
I wonder if the Common Application (that allows students to apply to up to 20 schools with one application) has changed things as well, and caused more students to apply to more schools.
It just seems so much easier to apply to a bunch of schools via the Common Application than when I was kid and had to type out each application on a typewriter....
posted by avocado_of_merriment at 11:58 AM on April 27, 2022 [10 favorites]
It just seems so much easier to apply to a bunch of schools via the Common Application than when I was kid and had to type out each application on a typewriter....
posted by avocado_of_merriment at 11:58 AM on April 27, 2022 [10 favorites]
I don't know about the stats but I have two recent college grads (2021 and 2022).
IMO, one of the things driving up selectivity are application platforms like the Common App and the Coalition App. It is so much easier to apply to a bunch of schools with much less effort. You still have to pay the fees, but you don't have to submit individual applications. I live in DC where folks have more money than sense, and it's not uncommon to see kids apply to 25-50 schools.
I also think that there's also a good amount of international students with money who are applying.
posted by jraz at 11:59 AM on April 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
IMO, one of the things driving up selectivity are application platforms like the Common App and the Coalition App. It is so much easier to apply to a bunch of schools with much less effort. You still have to pay the fees, but you don't have to submit individual applications. I live in DC where folks have more money than sense, and it's not uncommon to see kids apply to 25-50 schools.
I also think that there's also a good amount of international students with money who are applying.
posted by jraz at 11:59 AM on April 27, 2022 [5 favorites]
Forgot to add in the yield protection factor. There are more "good" colleges out there and schools are not accepting students in a consistent way. Many times, qualified students are rejected because they are assuming they will go to a better college.
Because schools aren't accepting college in a more consistent way (like they did in the past), kids are applying to way more colleges just in case their "safety schools" don't pan out. It's a vicious cycle.
posted by jraz at 12:04 PM on April 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
Because schools aren't accepting college in a more consistent way (like they did in the past), kids are applying to way more colleges just in case their "safety schools" don't pan out. It's a vicious cycle.
posted by jraz at 12:04 PM on April 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
Just using those assumptions, would it be feasible to surmise that while it could be harder to get into some schools (b/c they are getting more applications), then other schools would become easier to get into?
Anecdotally, I can tell you that this is exactly what happened at our mid-sized (R2) public university this year. With fewer applicants to the flagship state schools, students who might have normally come to us went there, leaving us with more space to fill, leaving us admitting students who might have normally been shoved out the bottom of the scramble. We didn't change standards (we've been told), but we filled with more middle and lower quintile students than we normally would have.
posted by joycehealy at 12:08 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Anecdotally, I can tell you that this is exactly what happened at our mid-sized (R2) public university this year. With fewer applicants to the flagship state schools, students who might have normally come to us went there, leaving us with more space to fill, leaving us admitting students who might have normally been shoved out the bottom of the scramble. We didn't change standards (we've been told), but we filled with more middle and lower quintile students than we normally would have.
posted by joycehealy at 12:08 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I am a former Ivy League admissions professional, and in my experience, at least at the top 25 schools, the Common App resulted in the biggest jump in applications as others have mentioned above. Schools obviously didn't add thousands of spots in the class to account for the huge increase in applications. When schools started taking the Common App, the admit rate instantly went down, giving schools a bump in the US News rankings.
posted by Shazbot at 12:13 PM on April 27, 2022 [13 favorites]
posted by Shazbot at 12:13 PM on April 27, 2022 [13 favorites]
Also anecdotally, the state school I attended in 1995 had 24000 students. Their current enrollment is 42,000 and is nearing the limit. This rise is because the better, even larger state schools maxxed out, and for them, acceptance rates are also falling. This is driving better students to my 3rd place school.
Some actual stats on Harvard:
1960: accepted 1370 of 5200
Harvard Crimson
1988: accepted 1605 of 14430
Harvard Crimson
2000: accepted 2035 of 18691
Harvard Crimson
2021: accepted of 2320 of 57786
Harvard Admissions Statistics
I don't know when the common application launched, but it does seem it could be driving the admission numbers. But if you read those articles, basically every admissions year since 1965 has been setting new records.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:23 PM on April 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
Some actual stats on Harvard:
1960: accepted 1370 of 5200
Harvard Crimson
1988: accepted 1605 of 14430
Harvard Crimson
2000: accepted 2035 of 18691
Harvard Crimson
2021: accepted of 2320 of 57786
Harvard Admissions Statistics
I don't know when the common application launched, but it does seem it could be driving the admission numbers. But if you read those articles, basically every admissions year since 1965 has been setting new records.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:23 PM on April 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
2021 and 2022 rates are also extremely high as most top tier schools have removed test scores as a requirement for admission due to the pandemic. My very selective state school that I went to increased 25% number of applications.
posted by sandmanwv at 12:28 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by sandmanwv at 12:28 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: This article suggests that total college enrollment has fallen by 1m students since 2019 (ie: pre-pandemic) and that community college enrollment is falling faster than 4 year college enrollment.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Seconding the "no test scores required" issue just since Covid started meant students could take wild stabs at schools they might not have otherwise, so ended up applying to more schools. (Source: my kid -- currently a college freshman -- and his friends, who were in the 1st cohort of "hey, all our testing options got canceled because of Covid" days.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:38 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by BlahLaLa at 12:38 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Best answer: A number of people have said "Common App," and that - plus a number of colleges allowing test-optional applications, waiving application fees, and post-covid returns - is our anecdotal experience too.
And the utter randomness of financial aid adds to it. For many smaller liberal arts schools, the sticker price is between $60K and $75K. But depending on your test scores and extracurriculars and demographics you might get a merit scholarship of $5000 from school A and $25000 from school B and $50000 from school C. Your neighbor might get $50000 and $5000 and $25000. And you other neighbor might get $0 and $0 and $0. If you don't know the net price until you are admitted, to have the best chance at an "affordable" school you need to get offers from a lot of them and hope one sticks out.
It creates a sort of vicious cycle: kids and parents hear "my niece with a 1500 SAT got rejected from 3 out of 5 schools that should have been easy admits and got a lowball offer from 2 others. If we could do it over we'd apply to more schools." So then the kids behind them apply to a few extra schools, which continues or even ratchets up the overall number of applications and perpetuates the low acceptance numbers.
posted by AgentRocket at 12:47 PM on April 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
And the utter randomness of financial aid adds to it. For many smaller liberal arts schools, the sticker price is between $60K and $75K. But depending on your test scores and extracurriculars and demographics you might get a merit scholarship of $5000 from school A and $25000 from school B and $50000 from school C. Your neighbor might get $50000 and $5000 and $25000. And you other neighbor might get $0 and $0 and $0. If you don't know the net price until you are admitted, to have the best chance at an "affordable" school you need to get offers from a lot of them and hope one sticks out.
It creates a sort of vicious cycle: kids and parents hear "my niece with a 1500 SAT got rejected from 3 out of 5 schools that should have been easy admits and got a lowball offer from 2 others. If we could do it over we'd apply to more schools." So then the kids behind them apply to a few extra schools, which continues or even ratchets up the overall number of applications and perpetuates the low acceptance numbers.
posted by AgentRocket at 12:47 PM on April 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
Best answer: I just finished a great book on this topic called "Who Gets In and Why?" and the long and short of it is that it is extremely hard to impossible to get into the most selective schools, but that it has never been easier to get into college. In fact, 60% of college students got into their first choice! I can't recommend this book enough for trying to wrap your head around how college admissions work.
posted by stinker at 12:55 PM on April 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by stinker at 12:55 PM on April 27, 2022 [8 favorites]
Best answer: +1 for Common App, plus some sketchy marketing practices: The University of Chicago, for example, sent my son upwards of 15 pieces of mail, which would lead the average 17-year-old to believe that they really wanted him (and wouldn't bother to send all that info if they didn't think he could get in - which he could not have). They intentionally target students who are just outside the lower range of their admissions criteria, in order to drive their application numbers up and their yield/selectivity ratio down.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 12:58 PM on April 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Sweetie Darling at 12:58 PM on April 27, 2022 [7 favorites]
Best answer: You're right that elite college admittances don't have much to do with whether it's "hard to get into college" in general. There are plenty of schools with 100% admission rates. If you can pay the tuition (admittedly, a big if), you can go to college.
There are different factors at play for different schools. jraz mentioned increasing numbers of international students. This is especially important at state schools, because a lot of them pay full tuition (no grants or loans), and public schools' budgets have been slashed recently. Taking on full-pay international students is one way state schools have made up for that budget shortfall.
Schools have also tried to diversify their applicant pool. In some ways (women, Jews, people of color), this is obvious, but there are less obvious ways too. Southern public schools have really started recruiting the Northeast hard. I live in New Hampshire, and I literally know more people who have gone to the University of South Carolina than who went to UNH. I also know people who went to Clemson, UNC-Chapel Hill, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Not too long ago, applications to schools like that would have been primarily from in-state kids, but now they're chasing that out-of-state tuition money. Northeasterners, for their part, are happy to leave for sunnier climates, so everyone wins, except mid-tier in-state applicants I guess. I don't have data to back this up, but I would expect regional mobility is higher than before. (To clarify: for college only. I know it's not the case for the general public.)
Everybody has pointed out the Common Application, and that's undoubtedly part of it, but I would take a step back and say the whole "college admissions" industrial complex bears some of the blame. When I was in high school 25 years ago, the process wasn't nearly such a big deal. I applied to one school, the flagship public school of my home state. I'd purchased the US News college issue, I knew what a safety school was, I knew there were test prep classes, I knew some of my classmates were resume-fillers, I had heard the term "early decision", but none of that seemed important to either me or my parents. I just filled out my application. I had good grades and good test scores, and the school wasn't terribly selective (and still isn't, although it's more selective than when I applied), so I didn't really care. I considered applying to Harvard so that I could flex on the off chance I somehow got in, but I had no intention of going there. I don't remember any of my friends applying to dozens of schools, either. Nearly all of them applied to either in-state public schools or schools to which they had an existing personal connection (one was a legacy at Williams; another was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and wanted to go to IU; they both got in).
I was probably a little behind the times - I started noticing the admissions stories in the national media when I was in college, so they'd probably been going on for a while by that point, but my point is that whatever it was in the mid- to late-90s, it's blown up exponentially since then. There's a chicken and egg question here, but I do believe that the industry has inflated the number of applications, at least partially for the purpose of making their own services more necessary.
There's an economic problem here, too. There might be fewer kids in this generation, but college is the bottleneck for social mobility, and there are always more people in the social class below you than in your current social class, let alone the one above you.
Essentially, it's a Nash equilibrium problem. If you're just interested in sitting in a lecture hall studying Chaucer, there are plenty of opportunities for you to do so. But that's not all college is for.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:09 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
There are different factors at play for different schools. jraz mentioned increasing numbers of international students. This is especially important at state schools, because a lot of them pay full tuition (no grants or loans), and public schools' budgets have been slashed recently. Taking on full-pay international students is one way state schools have made up for that budget shortfall.
Schools have also tried to diversify their applicant pool. In some ways (women, Jews, people of color), this is obvious, but there are less obvious ways too. Southern public schools have really started recruiting the Northeast hard. I live in New Hampshire, and I literally know more people who have gone to the University of South Carolina than who went to UNH. I also know people who went to Clemson, UNC-Chapel Hill, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Not too long ago, applications to schools like that would have been primarily from in-state kids, but now they're chasing that out-of-state tuition money. Northeasterners, for their part, are happy to leave for sunnier climates, so everyone wins, except mid-tier in-state applicants I guess. I don't have data to back this up, but I would expect regional mobility is higher than before. (To clarify: for college only. I know it's not the case for the general public.)
Everybody has pointed out the Common Application, and that's undoubtedly part of it, but I would take a step back and say the whole "college admissions" industrial complex bears some of the blame. When I was in high school 25 years ago, the process wasn't nearly such a big deal. I applied to one school, the flagship public school of my home state. I'd purchased the US News college issue, I knew what a safety school was, I knew there were test prep classes, I knew some of my classmates were resume-fillers, I had heard the term "early decision", but none of that seemed important to either me or my parents. I just filled out my application. I had good grades and good test scores, and the school wasn't terribly selective (and still isn't, although it's more selective than when I applied), so I didn't really care. I considered applying to Harvard so that I could flex on the off chance I somehow got in, but I had no intention of going there. I don't remember any of my friends applying to dozens of schools, either. Nearly all of them applied to either in-state public schools or schools to which they had an existing personal connection (one was a legacy at Williams; another was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and wanted to go to IU; they both got in).
I was probably a little behind the times - I started noticing the admissions stories in the national media when I was in college, so they'd probably been going on for a while by that point, but my point is that whatever it was in the mid- to late-90s, it's blown up exponentially since then. There's a chicken and egg question here, but I do believe that the industry has inflated the number of applications, at least partially for the purpose of making their own services more necessary.
There's an economic problem here, too. There might be fewer kids in this generation, but college is the bottleneck for social mobility, and there are always more people in the social class below you than in your current social class, let alone the one above you.
Essentially, it's a Nash equilibrium problem. If you're just interested in sitting in a lecture hall studying Chaucer, there are plenty of opportunities for you to do so. But that's not all college is for.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:09 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
When I was in high school 25 years ago, the process wasn't nearly such a big deal. I applied to one school, the flagship public school of my home state.
Disagree and I'm slightly older than you. My flagship state school university representative straight up said at "college preview day" (I am blanking on what this is called!) that not all valedictorians would be getting in and that you would be taking an additional test to get into certain colleges even if they did admit you. So for lots of state schools, as long as you had the basics and a 'good enough' SAT score, you would get in. That is still true today. But even in 1995, there were plenty of schools more selective than that.
Because of admissions requirements, I knew plenty of people in my tiny rural high school that applied to multiple universities. Upper middle class people who could afford whatever certainly stretched and applied to more schools.
I also know people who went to Clemson, UNC-Chapel Hill, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Not too long ago, applications to schools like that would have been primarily from in-state kids, but now they're chasing that out-of-state tuition money.
All the states you are mentioning (South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, but also Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and much of the non-coastal west) have serious brain-drain issues, extremely low overall internal college graduation rates, but are not broke and thus you have the direction kind of backwards. They are giving giant scholarships to increase their middle-class and up incomes, as they don't have enough people in their own states to compete with the higher income states. Problem is so many people leave after graduating so they are trying to figure out how to retain college graduates too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
Disagree and I'm slightly older than you. My flagship state school university representative straight up said at "college preview day" (I am blanking on what this is called!) that not all valedictorians would be getting in and that you would be taking an additional test to get into certain colleges even if they did admit you. So for lots of state schools, as long as you had the basics and a 'good enough' SAT score, you would get in. That is still true today. But even in 1995, there were plenty of schools more selective than that.
Because of admissions requirements, I knew plenty of people in my tiny rural high school that applied to multiple universities. Upper middle class people who could afford whatever certainly stretched and applied to more schools.
I also know people who went to Clemson, UNC-Chapel Hill, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Not too long ago, applications to schools like that would have been primarily from in-state kids, but now they're chasing that out-of-state tuition money.
All the states you are mentioning (South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, but also Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and much of the non-coastal west) have serious brain-drain issues, extremely low overall internal college graduation rates, but are not broke and thus you have the direction kind of backwards. They are giving giant scholarships to increase their middle-class and up incomes, as they don't have enough people in their own states to compete with the higher income states. Problem is so many people leave after graduating so they are trying to figure out how to retain college graduates too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
On top of all of that there's also land. For a university to grow it tends to buy up nearby land displacing the local population. UC Berkeley is in a fight with the town over expansion. My university bought out all the surrounding neighborhood displacing tons of people for new dorms and new offices. Universities would have to grow, and that means kicking locals out to build dorms where their house or local market used to be. I know all too well my university's history of expanding the campus. It's a serious fight sometimes, or at least something to think about. More students == more space. Where does that space come from?
posted by zengargoyle at 3:28 PM on April 27, 2022
posted by zengargoyle at 3:28 PM on April 27, 2022
Southern public schools have really started recruiting the Northeast hard. I live in New Hampshire, and I literally know more people who have gone to the University of South Carolina than who went to UNH. I also know people who went to Clemson, UNC-Chapel Hill, Alabama, and Ole Miss. Not too long ago, applications to schools like that would have been primarily from in-state kids, but now they're chasing that out-of-state tuition money.
Sort of. University of Alabama is chasing ranking positions by offering scholarships to out of state students with high scores. In the long run this will make them an attractive destination for out of state students and their tuition dollars, but not in the short term. University of Georgia did this about 10-15 years ago, and no longer needs to put up the same amount of scholarship money. Other colleges that appear to have used this tactic and moved on are Tulane University, Case Western Reserve University, Washington University of St Louis, Michigan State University, maybe Ole Miss. All of those places still have decent merit aid but it's not a generous as it was a decade or so ago.
Arizona and New Mexico universities are trying to tap into the unmet demand in southern California for reasonably priced public college by offering decent subsidies to students who are in the top 3/4 of their applicant pool. Oklahoma is deliberately targeting Texas high school graduates shut out of UT-Austin and Texas A&M, somewhat similarly.
Interestingly, UNC Chapel Hill has an imposed cap on the number of out of state students it admits. It also ranks very highly. It's very popular anyway and one of the colleges in the south explicitly not doing what you're suggesting, similarly with the University of Virginia.
posted by plonkee at 5:05 AM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
Sort of. University of Alabama is chasing ranking positions by offering scholarships to out of state students with high scores. In the long run this will make them an attractive destination for out of state students and their tuition dollars, but not in the short term. University of Georgia did this about 10-15 years ago, and no longer needs to put up the same amount of scholarship money. Other colleges that appear to have used this tactic and moved on are Tulane University, Case Western Reserve University, Washington University of St Louis, Michigan State University, maybe Ole Miss. All of those places still have decent merit aid but it's not a generous as it was a decade or so ago.
Arizona and New Mexico universities are trying to tap into the unmet demand in southern California for reasonably priced public college by offering decent subsidies to students who are in the top 3/4 of their applicant pool. Oklahoma is deliberately targeting Texas high school graduates shut out of UT-Austin and Texas A&M, somewhat similarly.
Interestingly, UNC Chapel Hill has an imposed cap on the number of out of state students it admits. It also ranks very highly. It's very popular anyway and one of the colleges in the south explicitly not doing what you're suggesting, similarly with the University of Virginia.
posted by plonkee at 5:05 AM on April 28, 2022 [2 favorites]
I've seen a number of media claims that use the Ivy League schools' admittance rates (a miniscule fraction of colleges) and maybe other highly ranked schools as evidence that college is harder to get into than it used to be.
I think the thing that is absolutely true it is harder to get into colleges you have heard of. As discussed, The University of California is harder to get into than it used to be because the number of high school graduates in California is larger than it used to be. In 1997 UT-Austin guaranteed admission to anyone ranked in the top 10% of their high school. They have had to limit that to the top 6% since 2019. On the other hand, there are colleges you have never heard of. Some of them are closing down or at risk of doing so. These are mainly the victims of demographic changes - the midwest has a lot of colleges and college capacity, but its population of high schoolers is shrinking - and they are also the weakest of the herd, small, private and financially vulnerable.
The increase in admission competition has been a longer term trend. What I think the media are picking up on and stressing though is that for people who are parenting high school students, college is noticeably more competitive than it was when they themselves were applying (in the 80s/90s). It's not clear that things will continue to get worse, except for public universities in Texas, California and maybe Florida, where students have fewer affordable alternatives within a reasonable travelling distance.
posted by plonkee at 6:10 AM on April 28, 2022
I think the thing that is absolutely true it is harder to get into colleges you have heard of. As discussed, The University of California is harder to get into than it used to be because the number of high school graduates in California is larger than it used to be. In 1997 UT-Austin guaranteed admission to anyone ranked in the top 10% of their high school. They have had to limit that to the top 6% since 2019. On the other hand, there are colleges you have never heard of. Some of them are closing down or at risk of doing so. These are mainly the victims of demographic changes - the midwest has a lot of colleges and college capacity, but its population of high schoolers is shrinking - and they are also the weakest of the herd, small, private and financially vulnerable.
The increase in admission competition has been a longer term trend. What I think the media are picking up on and stressing though is that for people who are parenting high school students, college is noticeably more competitive than it was when they themselves were applying (in the 80s/90s). It's not clear that things will continue to get worse, except for public universities in Texas, California and maybe Florida, where students have fewer affordable alternatives within a reasonable travelling distance.
posted by plonkee at 6:10 AM on April 28, 2022
As an old school person, I’m of the opinion that EVERYTHING today is more difficult and complicated, college admissions included.
Among the reasons - demand which is skyrocketing, the number of applicants (including many foreigners) and the fierce competition among schools. Not to forget the constant raise in tuition cost.
Today is also more difficult for new graduates to land a job in their field. In the past, collage graduates were (almost) guaranteed a reasonable job. That’s not the case anymore.
posted by oberon_1 at 9:15 PM on April 28, 2022
Among the reasons - demand which is skyrocketing, the number of applicants (including many foreigners) and the fierce competition among schools. Not to forget the constant raise in tuition cost.
Today is also more difficult for new graduates to land a job in their field. In the past, collage graduates were (almost) guaranteed a reasonable job. That’s not the case anymore.
posted by oberon_1 at 9:15 PM on April 28, 2022
Per the article that The Vegetables linked above, dated Jan 2022, saying that there were fewer college students since 2019... this is anecdata, but it's fairly likely that there has been a big bump in the admission season that's just coming to an end, from those prospective college students who put off applying for a year or so due to covid.
I have a high school senior with a strong application profile who didn't get nearly the kind of acceptances that anyone expected. As her mom, I'm hardly unbiased here--but I've also heard similar from a number of other parents with kids in this process, and read an essay to this effect in the Boston Globe by a teacher who was sadly surprised by the results that a standout student was getting.
My older child is graduating college this year. When he applied four years ago, there was helpful reality-checking data in Naviance that shared de-identified information about GPAs and standardized scores and admission, from kids in his school. There were at least several years of data and it was possible to kinda get a sense of which schools were in reach and which were real stretches.
As my younger headed into the process, both the GPA calculations had been scrambled by covid effects on high school, and standardized tests were essentially irrelevant, so that informational resource was completely absent. (We were advised by admissions professional at her favorite school that they suggested not sharing scores unless they were really stratospheric, otherwise could work against you. We told my kid to just skip it.)
I would guess this pertains to elite schools, per your question, and also less competitive schools as well.
posted by Sublimity at 8:10 AM on May 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I have a high school senior with a strong application profile who didn't get nearly the kind of acceptances that anyone expected. As her mom, I'm hardly unbiased here--but I've also heard similar from a number of other parents with kids in this process, and read an essay to this effect in the Boston Globe by a teacher who was sadly surprised by the results that a standout student was getting.
My older child is graduating college this year. When he applied four years ago, there was helpful reality-checking data in Naviance that shared de-identified information about GPAs and standardized scores and admission, from kids in his school. There were at least several years of data and it was possible to kinda get a sense of which schools were in reach and which were real stretches.
As my younger headed into the process, both the GPA calculations had been scrambled by covid effects on high school, and standardized tests were essentially irrelevant, so that informational resource was completely absent. (We were advised by admissions professional at her favorite school that they suggested not sharing scores unless they were really stratospheric, otherwise could work against you. We told my kid to just skip it.)
I would guess this pertains to elite schools, per your question, and also less competitive schools as well.
posted by Sublimity at 8:10 AM on May 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by corb at 11:47 AM on April 27, 2022 [21 favorites]