Reply to Acceptance rate is not a great measure of selectivity

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Acceptance rate is not a great measure of selectivity"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I often see educated people casually evaluating schools based on the acceptance rate. This is a stupid thing to do. Allow me to explain why.

A school can have a "lower" acceptance rate, but be less selective than a school with a "higher" one. This is because the pool of applicants, for some schools, includes larger numbers of unqualified candidates than others. The only way to evaluate a school's selectivity is to check the stats for admitted freshman. And even then you have to distinguish between "admitted" vs "enrolled" freshman. Obviously, schools with single digit acceptance rates are probably far more selective than schools with 90% acceptance rates, but when School A has a 50% acceptance rate and School B as a 40% acceptance rate, you really have to look at the details to know what's what.

Feel free to ignore this, but know that when you talk about how School A can't be all that great because the acceptance rate is higher than School B, informed people will know that you are a bit of a prat. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics