Yields and Acceptance Rates for Elite Colleges this Year

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How much of the lower acceptance rate over the years at these places is due to the school genuinely being more competitive vs just having a lot more unqualified applicants because it's easier to apply to a lot of schools now? I attended Pomona in the mid 90's and if I remember, the acceptance rate at the time I got in was around 30%. I can't imagine the quality of education or school reputation has changed that much since then.

The Common App has driven a boost in applications to all schools, SLACs and Ivies and everything in between (except the few schools that don't accept it). Another factor is the intensive marketing that schools themselves do. I remember getting maybe some letters, and I was a NMSSF. My kids got reams of letters and postcards and brochures, and they said their email accounts were clogged with school promotional stuff to the point where they created new email accounts. Also nobody came by my high school to promote colleges, although that might have been a function of where I grew up. At my kid's public, multiple colleges visit every week.

[Anonymous]

Yeah, it's not just a Pomona thing. Acceptance rates have been declining everywhere. Stanford's acceptance rate in 1990 was 22%. Penn accepted 33% and Columbia 25%. USC admitted 70%, WashU 56%, and UChicago 71%. Northwestern 40%. Swarthmore 34%.

The common app, prominence of rankings, and increased marketing are all reasons for sharp declines in acceptance rates.

[Anonymous]

Nope. It's 27% for this year. And you try telling your public high school counselor that you want the school's support (records, letters of recommendation, statistics, push for your kid) if your child is only an A- students. All high schools, public and private, self-select which students are allowed to apply to UVA. There was no way McLean High school was going to help my A-student get into UVA. So we discussed other options. http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2017/03/uva-acceptance-rates-drop-for-regular-admission-decisions. Also the average GPA to get into UVA is now 4.26 and average ACT scores are 31-34. And 90% of class of 2021 is in the top 10% of their class. 94% of the class of 2020 was in the top 10% of their class. You cannot compare admit figures for UVA (and UCLA and Berkeley for that matter) to rates at SLACs which receive a very different pool of candidate.

Can you please help me and explain? I thought the student applies to which ever college they want to attend. I don't understand why the student needs the counselor's approval to apply to UVA. This is shocking news to me. My DC is a freshman so we are new to this but I have been reading this forum to learn about financial help. Your experience leaves me perplexed and rather annoyed with McLean High School.

[Anonymous]

^^ sorry, meant UVA's rate. Yes I can explain. We just went thru the process for the second time. It goes sorta like this. Langley and McLean have a senior class of 400-500 and one college counselor. You go in to talk to the counselor about colleges and universities you think would be good for daughter. Counselor has all of daughter's grades and school-related EC in front of her. I ask - after she suggests expensive privates - is she a candidate for UVA? Couonselor says no - you need over a 4.0 and daughter is a 3.5. You agree on which schools to apply and counselor arranges for the transcripts and letters of recommendations to go to those schools. UVA comes on campus and counselor notifies the 60 in the class who are ranked at the top of the class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^^ sorry, meant UVA's rate. Yes I can explain. We just went thru the process for the second time. It goes sorta like this. Langley and McLean have a senior class of 400-500 and one college counselor. You go in to talk to the counselor about colleges and universities you think would be good for daughter. Counselor has all of daughter's grades and school-related EC in front of her. I ask - after she suggests expensive privates - is she a candidate for UVA? Couonselor says no - you need over a 4.0 and daughter is a 3.5. You agree on which schools to apply and counselor arranges for the transcripts and letters of recommendations to go to those schools. UVA comes on campus and counselor notifies the 60 in the class who are ranked at the top of the class.

This also happens at private schools. There was a poster last week complaining that DS was allowed to only apply to ten schools and all of those will be reasonable fits.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Nope. It's 27% for this year. And you try telling your public high school counselor that you want the school's support (records, letters of recommendation, statistics, push for your kid) if your child is only an A- students. All high schools, public and private, self-select which students are allowed to apply to UVA. There was no way McLean High school was going to help my A-student get into UVA. So we discussed other options. http://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2017/03/uva-acceptance-rates-drop-for-regular-admission-decisions. Also the average GPA to get into UVA is now 4.26 and average ACT scores are 31-34. And 90% of class of 2021 is in the top 10% of their class. 94% of the class of 2020 was in the top 10% of their class. You cannot compare admit figures for UVA (and UCLA and Berkeley for that matter) to rates at SLACs which receive a very different pool of candidate.

Can you please help me and explain? I thought the student applies to which ever college they want to attend. I don't understand why the student needs the counselor's approval to apply to UVA. This is shocking news to me. My DC is a freshman so we are new to this but I have been reading this forum to learn about financial help. Your experience leaves me perplexed and rather annoyed with McLean High School.


The college counselor will show you your child's chances of getting into, say, UVA, on Naviance. Depending on which stats you look at, you will need an average of 4.26 GP and 31 to 34 ACT test scores to get in. B+/A- students need not apply.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hi all, I compiled this table a few days ago (with a few updates recently) and thought it would be useful for folks here. It includes yields and acceptance rates across top schools with a comparison to the year before. Most of these numbers account for wait-list activity and "summer melt", though a few do not. I'm missing data for some schools like NU, Vanderbilt, and UChicago, hence their exclusion.

Interesting piece of trivia: Yale, MIT, Caltech, and Pomona organize some college visits together (http://cmpytour.org/). Incidentally, they also happen to be right next to one another in terms of acceptance rates.

Interesting that Pomona and Barnard (Columbia, sort of) are the only SLACs with >50% yield.

[Anonymous]

That is because it is harder for SLACs to collude and pick which school will take which kid. If a kid gets into just one ivy, then that ivy will have a large yield. If a kid gets into 3 SLACs and goes to one, the average yield for the 3 SLACs will be 33%.

[Anonymous]

Who cares? Fanning the flames to get into your psyche by a rigged money hungry group of people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Who cares? Fanning the flames to get into your psyche by a rigged money hungry group of people.

Lots and lots of people care. Obviously.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That is because it is harder for SLACs to collude and pick which school will take which kid. If a kid gets into just one ivy, then that ivy will have a large yield. If a kid gets into 3 SLACs and goes to one, the average yield for the 3 SLACs will be 33%.

Is there any evidence that ivy league schools collude on admissions? Sound pretty nutty to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:That is because it is harder for SLACs to collude and pick which school will take which kid. If a kid gets into just one ivy, then that ivy will have a large yield. If a kid gets into 3 SLACs and goes to one, the average yield for the 3 SLACs will be 33%.

Proof of collusion among Ivies, please!

[Anonymous]

The mere fact that elite schools have yield rates so high means that many students cannot be facing multiple acceptances from Ivies. After all, they can only choose one school to which to go. Collusion was quite open until the 1990s, when the government allegedly put a stop to it.

See: http://news.mit.edu/1992/history-0903

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^ sorry, meant UVA's rate. Yes I can explain. We just went thru the process for the second time. It goes sorta like this. Langley and McLean have a senior class of 400-500 and one college counselor. You go in to talk to the counselor about colleges and universities you think would be good for daughter. Counselor has all of daughter's grades and school-related EC in front of her. I ask - after she suggests expensive privates - is she a candidate for UVA? Couonselor says no - you need over a 4.0 and daughter is a 3.5. You agree on which schools to apply and counselor arranges for the transcripts and letters of recommendations to go to those schools. UVA comes on campus and counselor notifies the 60 in the class who are ranked at the top of the class.

This also happens at private schools. There was a poster last week complaining that DS was allowed to only apply to ten schools and all of those will be reasonable fits.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to help explain to me. I am shocked at this scam that only benefits the college and high school numbers. At first I have decided none of my children will apply to UVA; but further thinking, all my children will apply to UVA and decline to attend so it will ruin their yield percentage.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The mere fact that elite schools have yield rates so high means that many students cannot be facing multiple acceptances from Ivies. After all, they can only choose one school to which to go. Collusion was quite open until the 1990s, when the government allegedly put a stop to it.

See: http://news.mit.edu/1992/history-0903

That was not collusion with respect to individual known applicants. To the contrary it was collusion to establish uniform policies.