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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Son is a straight-A STEM kid, loves sports and California. Otherwise pretty ordinary, doesn't have great extra-curriculars aside from team sports. He's planning to study engineering or physics and is applying to UMD, Michigan, Purdue, and the UC system. He's also interested in Santa Clara because it's in CA and easy to get into. I don't know anything about it, and it's one of the priciest schools he's applying to. We're trying to discourage privates as we can't afford most of them. Any thoughts on whether it's worth the cost? Do they give merit aid? What kind of vibe?[/quote]

[b]I wouldn’t be so sure about the easy to get into pa[/b]rt. I know a straight-A STEM kid who was rejected last year.

Your son should apply to Wisconsin too. The kid I referred to above eventually ended up at Wisconsin after getting in off the waitlist in late spring. [/quote]

It accepts half of its applicants at 48.8%.  Not selective at all[/quote]

That number entirely depends on who applies, though.[b] People are not doing the lottery-type admissions for schools like Santa Clara, so a larger percentage of the pool that does apply is competitive for the school. It’s a common pattern for a lot of the schools in the 35-65% admissions rate. What that means is that they will accept 48% or so but the half that doesn’t get in are also generally competitive for the class. Essentially admissions pool patterns change for schools below T30 and selectivity becomes a much less useful metric. [/b][/quote]

Op here. PP I don't understand what you wrote there, can you please clarify?[/quote]

What this means is that schools in the T30-T100 range are much less likely to get a shotgun blast of applications from competitive kids who are shooting their shot. There are many schools in the T30 range where kids know they probably won’t get in but kids also know there is a lottery aspect to admissions, and so are willing to buy a lottery ticket by submitting an application. And this [i]can[/i] work, especially in a test optional world, so the problem feeds on itself: kids all know a kid who got lucky the year before, who maybe was competitive but not any more so than any other competitive kid, so then they decide to buy their own lottery ticket, thus driving more applications to the school. There are a lot of schools in the T30 where kids would just go based on rank alone, even if they have no particular interest in the school. That leads to enormous application pools and very low selectivity metrics for the T30s.

But as you move out of the T30s, applicant behavior changes. There are going to be fewer kids who attend a T30-100 based on rank alone. That means the applicant pool for the T30-100 schools tend to have kids who have some realistic chance of getting in and also have a more personalized interest in the school. So, a school like Santa Clara and others in that range are going to be more likely to admit the students who apply because of who makes it into their applicant pool. That means their admissions rate will go up.

You can see this pattern throughout the T30-100 range. Look at University of Oregon. It is the flagship in Oregon and really the only place that outstanding students in Oregon who want instate schools apply. It also draws a strong student population from other West Coast states. University of Oregon on any resume is going to be respected, and its graduates are well-regarded. In fact, if you are a competitive student looking for a job in the northwest, you are probably much better off with a degree from Oregon than much higher-ranked schools on the east coast. But it had an admissions rate of 86-93% in recent years. Why? Because it is a huge school, and really one of the only good destinations on the West Coast for kids who want a big football flagship school. That means that it attracts a group of highly qualified applicants. But at the same time, it’s not going to get a lot of kids looking for a lottery ticket. That combination of factors leads to a very high admissions rate.

I don’t really understand why anybody looks at admissions rates as a serious metric of academic quality, to be honest. It seems like a low-quality signal. [/quote]

Interesting, thanks. But to argue the other side, for a place like SCU, if it has a reputation as being easy to get into, wouldn't it attract lower quality candidates, ie people who wouldn't even bother to apply to T30 schools? If SCU is automatically attracting from a lesser pool as a result of this dynamic, then the 80% acceptance rate is even more problematic, because their pool is not great to begin with, no?[/quote]
With your caliber-of-student argument, you are leaving out the high-scoring children of donut-hole families who must chase merit aid at places like Santa Clara.[/quote]

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