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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There will people who will tell you acceptance rate means nothing and you should not even look at it, but it means a ton. You just need to get used to calibrating raw acceptance rates with yield, ED admissions rate, and percent of class filled ED (and factor in the huge percentage of ED athletes in certain SLACs. Tulane is obviously now underrated by US News, even if you calibrate the acceptance rate by doubling it. Georgetown is underrated, because it has no ED etc. [/quote]

But how do you factor all of this in? Do schools make all of this information readily available? How does DD know what schools are within a realistic range for her?[/quote]

How to factor it in?  Ask what is important to you and your kid.  Strength of individual departments? Location? Class size? Being taught by a professor vs a TA? Big athletics or Greek life? Size? Urban? Rural?  Salary— for a major or department, not the whole school (engineering / CS strong schools always have higher salaries. This does not help your history major heading to law school)? PhD production?  Law school/ med school admission rates? Etc. Etc.

Plus, look at data that is important and hard to manipulate— freshman retention, percent of kids who transfer out, 4 and 6 year graduation rate.

Look at a variety of sources and rankings and patterns emerge on some of the softer areas, like related be department strength.

Do schools make this available. They should make the hard data available in their common data set (Google “school name common data set”) and the US Dept of Education College Report card. For things like first destination of Bio majors after college, they should make it available if you ask. They certainly gather it. If they say they don’t or are hesitant to provide it, move on.

Realistic range?  Part of the CDS is 25%/50%/75% for SAT and ACT. Below 25%, most kids need a legacy/athletics/URM who knows anymore/ national winner of something prestigious hook. Realize GPAs are calculated differently in different places.  Once you get access to Naviance, you can set what GPAs are admitted from your school. Remember: these are usually end of senior year GPAs. If AP and honors are weighted, most kids go up .1-.2 senior year.

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