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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good grief. Do you know how easy it is to send off 15 applications today with the Common app? High stats kids apply everywhere. Of course the schools latch onto to those ADMIT stats. The more important stats should be the students ATTENDING the college.[/quote]

Yep. It's largely the same pool of applicants applying to all the highly selective colleges. I know a gazillion kids who applied to both the ivies AND Pomona or other LACs, like my own current Columbia student. (Pomona's essay question 4 years ago was to write about something interesting on your street.) I also know kids attending Amherst and Middlebury because they didn't get into HYPS. There are simply too many highly qualified kids with great stats and ECs, and they're all anxious and shooting off many Common App applications.

If you want to make an argument for LACs being harder to get into than meets the eye,  you should look closely at the individual LACs. For example, I read that Amherst recruits heavily for sports and a large share of the supposed entry seats are actually taken by recruited athletes. This probably translates into lower "effective" admissions rates there.[/quote]

Even if SLACs accept the Common App, a much smaller percentage of students are going to apply to SLACs compared to universities they've heard about. The vast majority of kids out there haven't heard of AWS, but everyone knows about HY and maybe Stanford. DH who grew up in the Midwest went to a decent highschool with a great state university (think Michigan, Wisconsin), but the college counseling there was an afterthought. It was simply assumed that most kids would go to the state university, and if you wanted to go to a private university you'd apply to Northwestern. This is how most kids applying to college face applications. DH didn't even know about AWS until he went to a top law school and met classmates who went to SLACs. Now he finds himself in a different environment than the one he grew up in (which is probably how much of American lives), in a small social circle in DC full of law firm partners, where there are a lot of alum from AWS, our kids attend a big-3, and we are strongly suggesting that our kids consider applying to SLACs for college. It's a much smaller group of students with a certain background who are actively encouraged to pursue a college education at a SLAC.[/quote]

Ok, but you're just saying:

Admissions rate = acceptances / applications

And you're saying the denominator is smaller at LACs than at Ivies, because LACs have fewer applicants.

But you're ignoring that the numerator--acceptances--is also lower at LACs. Last year Pomona admitted 970 out of 8091 applications, or 10%. Compare to Harvard which accepted maybe 2000 out of 37,000 applications, for an acceptance rate of 5%.

5% is still less than 10%.

Nor does it follow that the 2000 accepted by Harvard are necessarily of lower caliber than the 970 accepted by Pomona.
[/quote]

You miss the point--which is that the pool of applicants from which SLACs draw is a *qualitatively* different pool than the pool from which HYPS draw. It's not just about the numbers, which are negligible. It's the fact that most kids who apply to SLACs tend already to come from a background with relatively high SES. SLACs try very hard to get students from lower and middle SES communities, but it is very, very hard for kids who are perhaps the first in their families to attend college to choose to apply to--much less attend--a school that has no brand recognition in their home communities compared to HYS. [/quote]

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