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Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

151 points by ve55 8y ago

alexxgrin 8y ago
Thanks for the useful info! I'm going to apply to Uni this year. All I need is just to improve my writing skills. I always was bad at writing. But I've already found one writing service here https://uk.edusson.com/dissertation-help https://uk.edusson.com/dissertation-help for grammar and plagiarism check. Hope with their help I'll get good grades in English.
alpineidyll3 8y ago
The author is too humble. Should be titled: what everyone must know.
- skybrian 8y ago
  I disagree. It's great that Scott Alexander gathers all this information, and in the end admits he still doesn't know what the cause is. It leaves it open to further discussion.
  - alpineidyll3 8y ago
    Human behavior isn't always explicable. This is one of those deleterious behaviors which boils down to a bunch of smart people exploiting the cognitive, emotional biases of parents and students.
stemc43 8y ago
When I went to college - there were 30 people per 1 college placement for comp-sci. In order to even be considered u had to have top scores from high school (gold metal is better). And that was in regional college - I can only imagine what was happening in the capital. TIL - getting in harvard is easier. Americans have it easy.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  Which country are you from?
  - dominotw 8y ago
    i am guessing india ( regional college )
- alexibm 8y ago
  "Gold medal" ??? You are probably from Ex-Soviet countries or one of their ex-satellites. Limiting number of people who can attend undergraduate studies by setting bar so high that 99% people will fail either by failing entrance exam or grades to get in, is a dumbest given such a prevalence of Computers everywhere.
  - arrayThrowaway 8y ago
    You should look at graduates of Tsinghua and the IITs. The IITs, as the top engineering schools in India, have a 0.92% acceptance rate. [1] Meanwhile, Tsinghua accepts 0.92% of Beijing applicants and close to 0.1% from elsewhere in China. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A... [2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/share_p.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/...
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I've always wondered why we're so over the top about college admissions? It's weird. It's already really easy to get into our schools compared with other nations. And the data in this article really does agitate on the side of an uncompetitive application as the reason for any failure to gain admission. This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not that many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure. Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.
frontloadpro 8y ago
Being a graduate with 60 credits at the community college, and the rest from an unheard of University- there's plenty of quality education. I still learned math, I still got hired at 2 top companies. I don't value the name of your college, I'll listen to your answers to interview questions.
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cafard 8y ago
Back in the neolithic (1972), when I applied to college, most kids seemed to apply to two or three colleges at most. I'm not sure I even completed two applications. In the fall of 2006, my son was threatened with Saturday detention if he didn't have three safety school applications completed by the date the counselor preferred. He ended up applying to eight that I recall. A kid a year or so ahead of him at the same school applied to fourteen or eighteen. So if kids are encouraged to step up their applications to about 4x that of the boomers, will that not drive acceptance rates now? [Edit--added dates.]
- kd5bjo 8y ago
  Presumably, except at the boundary conditions, an increase in the number of applications per student comes with a corresponding decrease in the percentage of accepted applications that result in a student actually showing up to the university— in the end every student still picks only one to actually attend. These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.
  - ThrustVectoring 8y ago
    This is only true if you ignore the average rank preference of the school among applicants. Better-ranked college won't see as much decline in acceptance percentage, while worse-ranked colleges will see more than the expected decline. Some of the ways colleges can combat this on their own is by trying to jump the rest of the system through early admission (that creeps earlier and earlier over time), or by giving out exploding offers (I don't think this is nearly as common). The solution is to go to a deferred-acceptance algorithm such as Gale-Shapley. It's a relatively minor change, adding a third party that matches students to colleges algorithmically. The students send in a rank-ordering of the colleges they wish to attend, and colleges send in a rank-ordering of which students they'd prefer to admit (along with quantity). The students get their most-preferred college that likes them enough to admit them over others, and the colleges run zero risk of sending out too many offers.
  - busyant 8y ago
    >These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same. I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications. The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't know the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?" e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in. Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue. [1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.
lexpar 8y ago
We are thankful for SSC.
smrk007 8y ago
How much of dropping acceptance rates is simply due to students applying to more colleges? I know when I applied a few years ago, I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges simply because they all used a very similar electronic application form. [1] Were these sorts of services available, or as widely used in 2006? [1]: https://www.commonapp.org/ https://www.commonapp.org/
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    I applied first and visited later. Applying is cheaper than visiting, usually.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    you don't have to visit a school to apply. I didn't bother visiting most of my safety schools. also most of the schools I applied to either didn't do interviews or they were informational only (ie, they are only considered as an additional signal of interest).
  - smrk007 8y ago
    None of them required an interview. Some offered an optional interview, which I would do if I was particularly interested in a college, but it was by no means required.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      If the admissions system is easy and you don't need to physically visit or interview to apply to a college, why doesn't everyone literally apply to all colleges to cast the net as wide as possible? If everyone did that it'd turn the system around and have the colleges bidding for and trying to attract you. In the UK they only let you apply to some small number of colleges (universities), and only let you apply to one elite college.
basetop 8y ago
What a great article. Loved the mix of historical references mixed with statistical data. Easily better than any news article I've read on college admissions issue. It's so rare that an article exceeds my expectations.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  Everything he writes is amazing - you should go back through his archives, you'll be shocked at how much you can learn from this guy.
- SonOfLilit 8y ago
  Everything Scott writes is like this, he's my and most of my friends' favorite blogger.
kestreloats 8y ago
Somehow the idea that this is all caused by people applying to more places doesn't cut it to me. It might account for some of it, but not all of it. A lot of this is probably fairly chaotic and complex. For example, the GI bill probably contributed directly somewhat also, but also probably led to cultural shifts because of the veteran population, which then in turn changed career and educational expectations, but the GI bill itself reflects WWII, which also reflects cataclysmic societal changes (that is, WWII caused many significant things, but was also caused by many significant things). Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit. The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not useless, but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit. Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/the-mueller-report-theranos-billions-american-scams/586297/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...). Something is broken. Probably many things.
- CompelTechnic 8y ago
  The SAT reliably correlates with IQ, and of any psychometric variable we are able to measure, IQ has the strongest correlation with long-term socioeconomic success. Insofar as it is useful to funnel smart people into college, using the SAT is a good way to filter them.
  - mj_olnir 8y ago
    Do you have a source on the first claim? I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2]. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-suggests-sat-under-or-overpredicts-first-year-grades-hundreds-thousands https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-...
pitt1980 8y ago
"3.4: Could the issue be that students are just trying harder?" ----- without making a value judgment about it, I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage. Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them. -------- I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  40 years sure. But 20? Was Zuck and his ilk that much more accomplished than the Harvard admit today? I think the greater “problem” is that merit is impossible to define. The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else.
  - pitt1980 8y ago
    other way, kids today have access to the resources that Zuck's generation built (I actually think youtube, twitter, wordpress, amazon, and even Hacker News are much for helpful for an ambitious kid than facebook is, but whatever) I definitely agree with the "The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else. " but I don't think that's the would we live in
    - akhilcacharya 8y ago
      Which is a shame! Certainly feels demotivating as a state school grad.
      - pitt1980 8y ago
        This isn't the right takeaway Schools like Harvard have become more and more adept at correlating themselves with success At the same time they cause it less and less Harvard is really a place for people who don't actually need Harvard to succeed You don't need Harvard either
yumraj 8y ago
IMHO the biggest problem with US college admissions is that it is very subjective and dependent on hidden variables. I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales. All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress. Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.
- tacomonstrous 8y ago
  There is a simple explanation: Academics is not the primary focus at most top schools outside of perhaps MIT, Caltech and Chicago. When it comes down to it, their goal is to develop the next generation of 'elites', and the basic MO is to get a bunch of current gen elites and surround them with a cross-section of the society, so that their education is 'well-rounded'. Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.
  - saint_fiasco 8y ago
    If school quality and resources are not evenly distributed, don't 'hollistic' admission policies make things worse? A poor person can study for the SATs just like the rich kids (expensive tutors don't actually raise the score very much), but there is no way they will have the same opportunities (money, time, connections) for the sort of fancy extracurriculars that rich kids do to impress admission committees.
    - tacomonstrous 8y ago
      Yes of course. My critique of the system as one meant for the fostering of elites carries the corollary that it's not a great one for underprivileged students. The actual solution is not messing around with admission criteria, but rather tackling the unequal distribution of opportunity at the primary and secondary school level.
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bigred100 8y ago
Perhaps my opinion is a bit stupid, but I frankly don’t view attending a top college as such an important thing. The point of a career is to eat and live with some dignity. I don’t think you need a top school for this. If you’re much more ambitious, maybe you want to contribute in a higher way to society with your career. If you’re on a path where it’s obvious to others you’re doing this and likely to be successful, you’ll probably end up at the top school naturally. If not, you’ll probably end up somewhere better fit for your level. I frankly consider the state school honors kids to be the intellectual elites of their communities and the top school kids to be some weird combination of academic parents, childhood interventions (extra math tutoring etc.), extreme striving, VERY abnormal talent in a specific academic area, or, as recent events have shown, nepotism
manishsharan 8y ago
How about we drop all criteria for admitting students into colleges ? Instead we increase the coursework load and passing requirements ? They can all get in but they can't get out unless they are exceptional students ?
- shereadsthenews 8y ago
  Why would Yale exist under your proposal?
  - manishsharan 8y ago
    That is actually a good point. As an technology employer, I am looking for exceptional students as my business depends on solving hard problems of technical nature and I will be drawn to schools that have this reputation. However, there might be firms that require students with connections and other skills and they would recruit at Yale or similarly focused universities.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    It wouldn't, and perhaps we should discuss if that's really a bad thing.
- arrayThrowaway 8y ago
  This is exactly what happens at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. By law, ETH is required to admit any Swiss secondary school graduate - to compensate, the courses are designed to filter out students. As a result, about 50% [1] of the entering class will drop out. This system is not likely to be popular in the US. [1] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html
EvagohP5 8y ago
>be american >get in debt to attend college >work your ass out >get shot
commandlinefan 8y ago
When I was young and considering college in the 80's, I knew that they considered grades as well as extracurriculars - sports, clubs, activities, volunteerism, etc. Where I lived, there were few opportunities for that sort of thing and I couldn't afford the ones that there were, so I hoped my grades would be enough. I did OK, I suppose, but now that I'm a parent and coaching my own teenagers through college prep, I can't help but notice how expensive, time-consuming and out-of-reach all of these college-admissions-approved extracurricular activities are for all but the upper-middle class. My kids have done sports, band, dance, church and camps their whole lives, and all of those have been time consuming, expensive or both.
spenrose 8y ago
He titles it "college" and mostly uses Harvard as the example. About 0.1% of students attend Harvard, and their admissions experience is atypical.
shereadsthenews 8y ago
The author sort of casually dismisses foreign enrollment but then also focuses on UC which seems like cherry-picking. There are 6500 foreign nationals enrolled at UCB alone in 2018. That is up by 600% in the last 15 years alone. The entire UC system has 45k foreign nationals enrolled, up from only 8k in 1999.
graeme 8y ago
You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt: ------------- " But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive. Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe): Princeton: 5,336 Harvard: 6,658 Yale: 5,405 Columbia: 6,068 Stanford: 7,063 Chicago: 5,590 Duke: 6,655 MIT: 4,503 Upenn: 9,682 CIT: 997 Dartmouth: 4,193 That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students. By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities: McGill: 30,000 UBC: 47,500 UofT: 67,000 So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students." Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/ http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education... ---------- I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten. I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money. I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.
- rellui 8y ago
  Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.
paulpauper 8y ago
http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ In spite of increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.--do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, college is more expensive but also more necessary, partially due to the continued decline of manufacturing jobs, but the failure of middle-class, medium-skill jobs such as construction and auto to recover to their pre-crisis peaks . This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still provided a positive ROI https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of-wealth https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-o... And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  Note that this is an argument for sending your child to college. It is not an argument for sending more children to college. A large portion of what makes a college degree valuable is that companies preferentially allocate white-collar jobs to college graduates. The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate. I'm pretty sure the market clearing quantity of college-educated labor increases with supply just like most goods and services, so, yes, the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs (and reduces rather than exacerbates the positional advantage, because in addition to increasing market clearit quantity, increased supply reduces market clearing price.)
davemp 8y ago
A solution to an increased number of applications per candidate is to use a modified version of the stable marriage problem. [1] This is how medical rotations and a few other positions are filled. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
aiddun 8y ago
I’m a high school senior who just went through the process. Feel free to ask me any questions if you have any.
- arrayThrowaway 8y ago
  Ok, where are you planning to go, and why? What will be your major?
alexhutcheson 8y ago
Re-posting my SSC comment here: I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore. At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources. Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable. In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships. In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages. [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-announces-sweeping-middle-income-initiative/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-annou...
gumby 8y ago
I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the common application) but it is likely easy to test for. Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high). As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.

151 points by ve55 8y ago

Thanks for the useful info! I'm going to apply to Uni this year. All I need is just to improve my writing skills. I always was bad at writing. But I've already found one writing service here https://uk.edusson.com/dissertation-help https://uk.edusson.com/dissertation-help for grammar and plagiarism check. Hope with their help I'll get good grades in English.

alpineidyll3 8y ago

The author is too humble. Should be titled: what everyone must know.

skybrian 8y ago
I disagree. It's great that Scott Alexander gathers all this information, and in the end admits he still doesn't know what the cause is. It leaves it open to further discussion.
- alpineidyll3 8y ago
  Human behavior isn't always explicable. This is one of those deleterious behaviors which boils down to a bunch of smart people exploiting the cognitive, emotional biases of parents and students.

stemc43 8y ago

When I went to college - there were 30 people per 1 college placement for comp-sci. In order to even be considered u had to have top scores from high school (gold metal is better). And that was in regional college - I can only imagine what was happening in the capital. TIL - getting in harvard is easier. Americans have it easy.

pitt1980 8y ago
Which country are you from?
- dominotw 8y ago
  i am guessing india ( regional college )
alexibm 8y ago
"Gold medal" ??? You are probably from Ex-Soviet countries or one of their ex-satellites. Limiting number of people who can attend undergraduate studies by setting bar so high that 99% people will fail either by failing entrance exam or grades to get in, is a dumbest given such a prevalence of Computers everywhere.
- arrayThrowaway 8y ago
  You should look at graduates of Tsinghua and the IITs. The IITs, as the top engineering schools in India, have a 0.92% acceptance rate. [1] Meanwhile, Tsinghua accepts 0.92% of Beijing applicants and close to 0.1% from elsewhere in China. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Entrance_Examination_–_A... [2] https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/share_p.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7841444d78457a6333566d54/...
bilbo0s 8y ago
I've always wondered why we're so over the top about college admissions? It's weird. It's already really easy to get into our schools compared with other nations. And the data in this article really does agitate on the side of an uncompetitive application as the reason for any failure to gain admission. This article is hitting the nail on the head. It's not a glut of international students taking up all the spots because they'll pay more. That's not why you didn't get in. It's not legacies taking your spot in the class. There really are not that many unqualified legacies at Yale and Harvard. It's not blacks or latinos taking your spot via affirmative action. The blacks and latinos at Yale, Harvard or MIT likely outclass you along any dimension on which we'd care to take a truly objective comparative measure. Here's reality, there are just a whole lot more people trying to get into college now. It was easy before, but if you want that spot today, you have to beat out a lot more people to get it. That's why we have all the bribes and whatnot going on. If a thousand people or whatever are all going after the same spot, it's not likely yours will be the winning application. So people try to game the system instead. But even with the increased competition, our schools are relatively easy to get into. In America, you can always get into some school.

frontloadpro 8y ago

Being a graduate with 60 credits at the community college, and the rest from an unheard of University- there's plenty of quality education. I still learned math, I still got hired at 2 top companies. I don't value the name of your college, I'll listen to your answers to interview questions.

deleted 8y ago

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cafard 8y ago

Back in the neolithic (1972), when I applied to college, most kids seemed to apply to two or three colleges at most. I'm not sure I even completed two applications. In the fall of 2006, my son was threatened with Saturday detention if he didn't have three safety school applications completed by the date the counselor preferred. He ended up applying to eight that I recall. A kid a year or so ahead of him at the same school applied to fourteen or eighteen. So if kids are encouraged to step up their applications to about 4x that of the boomers, will that not drive acceptance rates now? [Edit--added dates.]

kd5bjo 8y ago
Presumably, except at the boundary conditions, an increase in the number of applications per student comes with a corresponding decrease in the percentage of accepted applications that result in a student actually showing up to the university— in the end every student still picks only one to actually attend. These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same.
- ThrustVectoring 8y ago
  This is only true if you ignore the average rank preference of the school among applicants. Better-ranked college won't see as much decline in acceptance percentage, while worse-ranked colleges will see more than the expected decline. Some of the ways colleges can combat this on their own is by trying to jump the rest of the system through early admission (that creeps earlier and earlier over time), or by giving out exploding offers (I don't think this is nearly as common). The solution is to go to a deferred-acceptance algorithm such as Gale-Shapley. It's a relatively minor change, adding a third party that matches students to colleges algorithmically. The students send in a rank-ordering of the colleges they wish to attend, and colleges send in a rank-ordering of which students they'd prefer to admit (along with quantity). The students get their most-preferred college that likes them enough to admit them over others, and the colleges run zero risk of sending out too many offers.
- busyant 8y ago
  >These should mostly cancel out and keep the university’s acceptance rate (offers extended per application received) about the same. I agree w/ your argument, but there are probably other factors that have changed w/ college applications. The article seems to disagree w/ my point below, but from my anecdotal vantagepoint, I think there is a kernel of truth to my opinion: I see many 2nd and 3rd tier schools near me (I'm in the eastern US) opening themselves up to foreign undergrads. I don't know the reason for this, but my suspicion is that these schools need to stave off the onslaught from entities like Coursera and edX. As such, they are trawling from bodies, wherever they can get them. I've met numerous foreign undergrads who can barely speak English and my thought is usually "How could the University of _______ accept you in good conscience and move you toward graduation when you can't even understand your lecturers?" e.g., I taught a class at a local university a few years ago. Class saw an influx of students from 1 particular country over a few years. Most of the foreign students from this country could barely speak English and it was obvious from "pop" quizzes that they didn't understand the material (which is understandable if you can't understand the language). They all tried to cheat on the exams (using a remarkably elaborate scheme). Eventually, I figured it out and I failed them. The mastermind emailed me and said that he knew he did not deserve to pass, but if he failed he would need an additional semester to complete his engineering degree.[1] IMO, the university behaved unethically by admitting these students into a system that they are not equipped to legitimately succeed in. Anyway, I assume that if you increase your applicant pool from outside the US, the acceptance rates will drop--at least for a little while. I know that's not the only reason for the drop, but it might be part of the issue. [1] After that, I stopped getting students from that country in my class.

lexpar 8y ago

We are thankful for SSC.

smrk007 8y ago

How much of dropping acceptance rates is simply due to students applying to more colleges? I know when I applied a few years ago, I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges simply because they all used a very similar electronic application form. [1] Were these sorts of services available, or as widely used in 2006? [1]: https://www.commonapp.org/ https://www.commonapp.org/

chrisseaton 8y ago
> I was able to apply to over a dozen colleges How did you find time to visit over a dozen colleges?
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  I applied first and visited later. Applying is cheaper than visiting, usually.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  you don't have to visit a school to apply. I didn't bother visiting most of my safety schools. also most of the schools I applied to either didn't do interviews or they were informational only (ie, they are only considered as an additional signal of interest).
- smrk007 8y ago
  None of them required an interview. Some offered an optional interview, which I would do if I was particularly interested in a college, but it was by no means required.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    If the admissions system is easy and you don't need to physically visit or interview to apply to a college, why doesn't everyone literally apply to all colleges to cast the net as wide as possible? If everyone did that it'd turn the system around and have the colleges bidding for and trying to attract you. In the UK they only let you apply to some small number of colleges (universities), and only let you apply to one elite college.

basetop 8y ago

What a great article. Loved the mix of historical references mixed with statistical data. Easily better than any news article I've read on college admissions issue. It's so rare that an article exceeds my expectations.

commandlinefan 8y ago
Everything he writes is amazing - you should go back through his archives, you'll be shocked at how much you can learn from this guy.
SonOfLilit 8y ago
Everything Scott writes is like this, he's my and most of my friends' favorite blogger.

kestreloats 8y ago

Somehow the idea that this is all caused by people applying to more places doesn't cut it to me. It might account for some of it, but not all of it. A lot of this is probably fairly chaotic and complex. For example, the GI bill probably contributed directly somewhat also, but also probably led to cultural shifts because of the veteran population, which then in turn changed career and educational expectations, but the GI bill itself reflects WWII, which also reflects cataclysmic societal changes (that is, WWII caused many significant things, but was also caused by many significant things). Speaking as someone who has done research on selection and standard testing, and whose first-hand experiences support what I see from the theory and research, this is kind of horrifying, because it inevitably leads to increases in bullshit. The accuracy of any of the selection methods we use in education is very poor. It just is. Standardized tests, "holistic review", all of it. It's not useless, but it is poor. It's the sort of thing that works well for a certain level of selectivity, but not past it. Once you go past it, you're selecting on well-impressioned noise, and incentivizing bullshit. Somehow this all seems related in my mind to the rise of concerns about replicability in science, college admissions scams, and the age of fraud in general (https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/the-mueller-report-theranos-billions-american-scams/586297/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/04/th...). Something is broken. Probably many things.

CompelTechnic 8y ago
The SAT reliably correlates with IQ, and of any psychometric variable we are able to measure, IQ has the strongest correlation with long-term socioeconomic success. Insofar as it is useful to funnel smart people into college, using the SAT is a good way to filter them.
- mj_olnir 8y ago
  Do you have a source on the first claim? I'm curious, as someone who was slightly involved with a documentary [1] exposing pitfalls of standardized testing. Generally the SAT only has shown a weak correlation between test scores and first year (some studies I read showed only first semester, but I don't have them on hand right now) collegiate performance [2]. [1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3393042/ [2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-suggests-sat-under-or-overpredicts-first-year-grades-hundreds-thousands https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/26/new-research-...

pitt1980 8y ago

"3.4: Could the issue be that students are just trying harder?" ----- without making a value judgment about it, I think an underappreciated aspect of our current spot in history is that we've had an explosion of resources that ambitious, resourceful people can leverage. Increasingly these resources don't have gatekeepers around them, and there isn't anything keeping highschoolers from accessing them. -------- I suspect the kids actually in the running for Harvard similar places, have accomplished much more than those kids would have accomplished 20 years or so ago.

akhilcacharya 8y ago
40 years sure. But 20? Was Zuck and his ilk that much more accomplished than the Harvard admit today? I think the greater “problem” is that merit is impossible to define. The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else.
- pitt1980 8y ago
  other way, kids today have access to the resources that Zuck's generation built (I actually think youtube, twitter, wordpress, amazon, and even Hacker News are much for helpful for an ambitious kid than facebook is, but whatever) I definitely agree with the "The risk of not joining the elites at 18 should be lowered if anything else. " but I don't think that's the would we live in
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    Which is a shame! Certainly feels demotivating as a state school grad.
    - pitt1980 8y ago
      This isn't the right takeaway Schools like Harvard have become more and more adept at correlating themselves with success At the same time they cause it less and less Harvard is really a place for people who don't actually need Harvard to succeed You don't need Harvard either

yumraj 8y ago

IMHO the biggest problem with US college admissions is that it is very subjective and dependent on hidden variables. I still don't understand why someone can apply with no major but has to write essays about life experiences and aspirations and what they want to do in life. And, test scores matter but not really and also different classes of people (race, gender, legacy, sports, economic) have different score scales. All this makes it very unclear and hidden causing additional stress. Why can SAT/ACT and perhaps school GPA be the sole criteria? And for sports, affirmative action,.. just have separate additional seats.

tacomonstrous 8y ago
There is a simple explanation: Academics is not the primary focus at most top schools outside of perhaps MIT, Caltech and Chicago. When it comes down to it, their goal is to develop the next generation of 'elites', and the basic MO is to get a bunch of current gen elites and surround them with a cross-section of the society, so that their education is 'well-rounded'. Edit: this comment, while obviously passing some judgment on elite schools, should not be taken as an endorsement of the parent comment. Admitting based on test scores has severe issues in a society where schooling quality and resources are so unevenly distributed.
- saint_fiasco 8y ago
  If school quality and resources are not evenly distributed, don't 'hollistic' admission policies make things worse? A poor person can study for the SATs just like the rich kids (expensive tutors don't actually raise the score very much), but there is no way they will have the same opportunities (money, time, connections) for the sort of fancy extracurriculars that rich kids do to impress admission committees.
  - tacomonstrous 8y ago
    Yes of course. My critique of the system as one meant for the fostering of elites carries the corollary that it's not a great one for underprivileged students. The actual solution is not messing around with admission criteria, but rather tackling the unequal distribution of opportunity at the primary and secondary school level.

deleted 8y ago

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bigred100 8y ago

Perhaps my opinion is a bit stupid, but I frankly don’t view attending a top college as such an important thing. The point of a career is to eat and live with some dignity. I don’t think you need a top school for this. If you’re much more ambitious, maybe you want to contribute in a higher way to society with your career. If you’re on a path where it’s obvious to others you’re doing this and likely to be successful, you’ll probably end up at the top school naturally. If not, you’ll probably end up somewhere better fit for your level. I frankly consider the state school honors kids to be the intellectual elites of their communities and the top school kids to be some weird combination of academic parents, childhood interventions (extra math tutoring etc.), extreme striving, VERY abnormal talent in a specific academic area, or, as recent events have shown, nepotism

manishsharan 8y ago

How about we drop all criteria for admitting students into colleges ? Instead we increase the coursework load and passing requirements ? They can all get in but they can't get out unless they are exceptional students ?

shereadsthenews 8y ago
Why would Yale exist under your proposal?
- manishsharan 8y ago
  That is actually a good point. As an technology employer, I am looking for exceptional students as my business depends on solving hard problems of technical nature and I will be drawn to schools that have this reputation. However, there might be firms that require students with connections and other skills and they would recruit at Yale or similarly focused universities.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  It wouldn't, and perhaps we should discuss if that's really a bad thing.
arrayThrowaway 8y ago
This is exactly what happens at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. By law, ETH is required to admit any Swiss secondary school graduate - to compensate, the courses are designed to filter out students. As a result, about 50% [1] of the entering class will drop out. This system is not likely to be popular in the US. [1] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html

EvagohP5 8y ago

>be american >get in debt to attend college >work your ass out >get shot

commandlinefan 8y ago

When I was young and considering college in the 80's, I knew that they considered grades as well as extracurriculars - sports, clubs, activities, volunteerism, etc. Where I lived, there were few opportunities for that sort of thing and I couldn't afford the ones that there were, so I hoped my grades would be enough. I did OK, I suppose, but now that I'm a parent and coaching my own teenagers through college prep, I can't help but notice how expensive, time-consuming and out-of-reach all of these college-admissions-approved extracurricular activities are for all but the upper-middle class. My kids have done sports, band, dance, church and camps their whole lives, and all of those have been time consuming, expensive or both.

spenrose 8y ago

He titles it "college" and mostly uses Harvard as the example. About 0.1% of students attend Harvard, and their admissions experience is atypical.

shereadsthenews 8y ago

The author sort of casually dismisses foreign enrollment but then also focuses on UC which seems like cherry-picking. There are 6500 foreign nationals enrolled at UCB alone in 2018. That is up by 600% in the last 15 years alone. The entire UC system has 45k foreign nationals enrolled, up from only 8k in 1999.

graeme 8y ago

You may be interested in the view from up North. Joseph Heath, a Canadian academic has commented on how the top three Canadian schools teach more students than the top ten American schools. I'll excerpt: ------------- " But of course there’s a reason that it’s so difficult to get into Yale – it’s because Yale has only 5,400 students, in a country of over 315 million people! By contrast, McGill has over 30,000, and University of Toronto has 67,000 undergraduates, serving a country of only 35 million people. That means there’s roughly one spot at Yale for every 58,000 Americans, compared to one spot at McGill for every 1,100 Canadians. No wonder American life is more competitive. Furthermore, all of the best schools in the United States are tiny. Here is a list of the top 10, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, along with the number of students (undergraduate, I believe): Princeton: 5,336 Harvard: 6,658 Yale: 5,405 Columbia: 6,068 Stanford: 7,063 Chicago: 5,590 Duke: 6,655 MIT: 4,503 Upenn: 9,682 CIT: 997 Dartmouth: 4,193 That means the top 10 universities in the United States – a country of over 315 million people – at any given time are educating a grand total of only 62,150 students. By contrast, here are the rough numbers of undergraduates at the top 3 Canadian universities: McGill: 30,000 UBC: 47,500 UofT: 67,000 So the top 3 Canadian schools are at any given time educating a grand total of 144,500 students – more than twice the total of the top 10 U.S. schools. (In fact, the University of Toronto alone has more student capacity than the top 10 U.S. schools combined.) The United States has almost exactly 9 times the population of Canada, so in order to have the same sort of capacity in higher education, the top 27 schools in the United States would have to have 1.3 million students." Full article here: http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education/ http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education... ---------- I should also add that U of T, McGill and UBC are extremely good schools, and the people who go to them are very smart. I teach LSAT prep, and find that students at those schools tend to have high average scores, comparable to the US top ten. I have no idea why US schools don't take more students. Whichever one of them broke ranks would make untold amount of money. I wonder if part of the issue is that they're generally non-profits and so money motivation doesn't work the same way it would in the private sector. Meanwhile, the US government system is generally broken and so no one pushes the universities to expand the same way Canadian ones do.

rellui 8y ago
Artificial scarcity (like diamonds) to keep their rank and prestige. If everybody gets to go to MIT, then it's just another regular college and the prestige of being the "best" in order to get in will be lost. I want to know what rest of the ranks after top 10 look like and how many students they're taking.

paulpauper 8y ago

http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ http://greyenlightenment.com/college-a-necessary-evil/ In spite of increased debt and tuition, no matter how you crunch the numbers, college grads--especially 'high-ROI' subjects such as computer sci, econ, math etc.--do better than non-grads. And the gap in wages and employment between grads and non-grads, especially since 2009, is the widest it has ever been and shows no signs of narrowing. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, college is more expensive but also more necessary, partially due to the continued decline of manufacturing jobs, but the failure of middle-class, medium-skill jobs such as construction and auto to recover to their pre-crisis peaks . This guy ran the numbers and found even the worse-ranked college still provided a positive ROI https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-of-wealth https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-bermuda-triangle-o... And this is the WORST university we give a ranking to? A $309,000 estimated return on investment, not-adjusted-for-major. You have to visit Payscale, click “See Full List”, and scroll past 1,752 colleges before you find one that doesn’t have a positive RoI — not-adjusted-for-major.

ThrustVectoring 8y ago
Note that this is an argument for sending your child to college. It is not an argument for sending more children to college. A large portion of what makes a college degree valuable is that companies preferentially allocate white-collar jobs to college graduates. The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > The marginal college graduation merely exacerbates this positional advantage, rather than generating more white-collar jobs to allocate. I'm pretty sure the market clearing quantity of college-educated labor increases with supply just like most goods and services, so, yes, the marginal college graduation should increase the number of white-collar jobs (and reduces rather than exacerbates the positional advantage, because in addition to increasing market clearit quantity, increased supply reduces market clearing price.)

davemp 8y ago

A solution to an increased number of applications per candidate is to use a modified version of the stable marriage problem. [1] This is how medical rotations and a few other positions are filled. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

aiddun 8y ago

I’m a high school senior who just went through the process. Feel free to ask me any questions if you have any.

arrayThrowaway 8y ago
Ok, where are you planning to go, and why? What will be your major?

alexhutcheson 8y ago

Re-posting my SSC comment here: I think this analysis is excellent, but I don't think the Common App explains the increase in applications-per-admission. There's another significant factor that causes students to apply to dozens of schools: No one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore. At some point (I believe in the late '00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Harvard announced this in 2007[1], Yale and Princeton followed quickly, and most other elite schools seem to have done similar things, albeit with more constrained resources. Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable. In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of "elite" private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily "discounted", but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the "discount" came from a mix of "need-based aid" and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships. In this system, you don't know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it's difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to "play the lottery" by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages. [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-announces-sweeping-middle-income-initiative/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/12/harvard-annou...

gumby 8y ago

I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the common application) but it is likely easy to test for. Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high). As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.