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Princeton admits record-low 3.98% of applicants

86 points by undefined1 5y ago

happytoexplain 5y ago
Context: It's because the students admitted last year requested to defer starting until this year due to COVID, limiting the available space for new applicants. Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.
- nunez 5y ago
  Admission rates have also been trending downwards per the graph posted on the article.
- jdhn 5y ago
  Looking at the graph that they provided, it seems that admittance rate has been slowly dropping for a few years now. I'd expect it to bounce up above 4% next year due to the lack of deferring students, but I wonder if their admittance percentage will hit 3.98% or less through natural growth in the upcoming years.
- hkmurakami 5y ago
  re: admittance rate trends. Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel. Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
  - fireattack 5y ago
    Personally I think absolute number of admitted students is a more useful metric, since you can't really control how many people apply, and your capacity is more or less fixed. From the graph in the article, that is also in decline, but not as sharp (except the outlier of this year, which is caused by other factors).
    - csa 5y ago
      Absolute number admitted is probably decreasing because the admissions committee is more effective at offering admissions to people who are more likely to accept the offer. There are a number of ways to do this. Without looking, I would guess that that the entering classes of Princeton and other elite schools largely stay fairly steady over time for a variety of reasons. As for the number of people who apply, this can be increased via outreach programs, marketing, etc.
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1cvmask 5y ago
So when we remove the legacies and school fund donators (roughly half) - about 40 to 50 percent of the class, athletes (affirmative action for rich whites with relatively lower credentials and scores) - about 10-20 percent of the class, and regular affirmative action ( about 15 percent of the class and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos). The remainder is the group based on traditional credentials. The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group. The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.
- blue5 5y ago
  >rich whites rich jews
- huitzitziltzin 5y ago
  >> and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
  - greenwich26 5y ago
    Spent a year at an Ivy League. I met dozens of affluent, politically connected racial minorities, mostly from Northeast prep schools. I met exactly 0 poor kids from the South, or inner city Chicago or Detroit, or some other such background. It was pretty obvious what was going on.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Dozens vs 0 would be an overstatement, but the disparity is still there. I suspect it was exacerbated by what social circles you were traveling in.
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    I am not sure about being politically connected, but it is known that universities accept rich black immigrants from places like Nigeria and consider it “affirmative action”. In Ivy League unis the percentage of immigrants among the black student body is over 40%, while in the general population it is near 15%. But I judging how the things are going I am sure this is going to get fixed soon. The colleges will ask you to do a DNA test to determine the purity of your black heritage and a proof of slave ancestors. Hooray, intersectionality.
endisneigh 5y ago
It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  We do not need to find this randomized-admission institution for your analysis. Just take an Ivy and several state universities of different rankings, and pick students with similar high-school backgrounds (top grades, similar family net worth, etc.). Such students of similar capability must exist, unless we think top universities admit all the top students and there is no one left for lower-rank schools. Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    What you're describing wouldn't work because the interactions between the students would influence the things you're measuring. Students don't exist in a vacuum. It would only be possible if the school's students were entirely random. Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
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csa 5y ago
In this particular year, the low number is due to the deferrals from last year and (most likely) reduced requirements in the admissions process. That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted, and that number seems to be increasing over time. To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.
ModernMech 5y ago
When looking at acceptance rates of Ivies, it's good to remember that the concept of a "reach school" that counselors push on students means that almost every kid is applying to some school they are not really qualified to get into. These disproportionately end up being top schools like Princeton and Harvard. If you're going to reach, why not really reach? Is the chance of getting into Princeton 4%? No, if you're well qualified to get in, the chance is much higher. If you're not qualified to get in, the chance is 0%. Average it out and you get the 4%-8%. I think PG said something similar with respect to the chance of getting accepted to YC. Or maybe it wasn't PG and I'm thinking of this: https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y-combinator-are-not-1-in-100-d28206fc543d https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y...
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  School counselors (at least those that are good, and care) are in kind of a tough spot. If they are realistic with kids about what they are qualified to do after high school, they catch shit from parents about "crushing dreams" and if they are not they create false hope by encouraging average students to do things like apply to Harvard or Princeton with some kind of message like "you can't get in if you don't apply."
- randcraw 5y ago
  There seems to be a trend toward students submitting ever more college applications. It's not uncommon for seniors to apply to a dozen schools or more, of which perhaps 1/3 are unlikely to accept. So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past? One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
- jean_tta 5y ago
  More broadly most applicants apply to several schools. If there are as many spots as applicants and each applicants apply to k schools, you could go as low as 1/k average admittance percentage (rates will be higher when colleges accept applicants that do not come: you could have 100% rate after all). With k = 12, you're at about a 8% lower bound for the average college. For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low. If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.
purple_ferret 5y ago
Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult. If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.
- abledon 5y ago
  and surrounded by way more screens/extended screen-time as your brain tries to develop... arghhh
- csa 5y ago
  > Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult. While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections. > If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now. It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  I can't imagine standardized testing being anything but a low pass filter for these schools. Roughly 2 million students take the SAT every year, which means 100,000 scores in the top 5%; 20,000 in the top 1%. Whittling down 20,000 high scores to 1500 isn't any easier.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    But you don't have 20000 applicants from the top 1%, because not all will apply to every top school.
    - nemothekid 5y ago
      Princeton's SAT score percentile, last year, ranged from 96%-99%. That is still, potentially, 80,0000 applicants. Furthermore, it's not like the applicants are ranked and accepted in order of test scores. My point is that having test scores doesn't make this process that much easier for a school like Princeton. They were already down weighting test scores after you scored in a certain range; you still needed to pile on extra curricular and recommendations (and maybe donate a building or two if your parents could afford it).
pratik661 5y ago
Scott Galloway once proposed taxing the endowments of universities that don’t expand their accepted admissions pool in accordance with population growth at a higher rate. The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.
supernova87a 5y ago
First of all, a major issue here is that we don't have enough good universities to accept all the talented kids applying. That holds true for high schools, etc. wherever there is contentious debate over "equity" or merit-based admissions. Just increase the number of good schools (which has not been done in proportion to population growth) and many things are solved. Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved. Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar? These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions. I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders. Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.
- analog31 5y ago
  Indeed, I don't think there's a social or economic reason why higher education should be a scarce good. Likewise health care. There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities. The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty. I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.
wnevets 5y ago
Am I the only one who hates it when headlines use the phrase "X admits Y"? It always frames the story in a certain way regardless of the actually context.
- mewse-hn 5y ago
  Headline is referring to university admissions not factual admissions
  - wnevets 5y ago
    I'm an idiot.
dalbasal 5y ago
Admission rates may or may not be a long term indicator of anything, but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive. That aside, a lot is covid related. On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade
- csa 5y ago
  > but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive. Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications. I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.
jplr8922 5y ago
It brings in my mind Bryan Caplan research ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education basically, people educate themselves because it looks good, not because you learn usefull stuff. Thoughts?
azhenley 5y ago
As a prof, I'm terrified of the exploding enrollment in CS. My 2021 enrollment for a juniors/seniors course is up 70% from recent years and still growing. Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.
- csa 5y ago
  I’m not sure what the leadership of your department and university want your enrollment to be, but a very tough (reasonable, but tough) required weeder class early in the CS sequence will clean out the people who like the idea of being a CS major/grad more than the actual reality of being a CS major. This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
  - azhenley 5y ago
    Weeder classes mean less tuition dollars flowing in...
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OliverJones 5y ago
As a long-ago grad of one of these fancy-schmancy schools with vast endowments and big revenue streams from application fees, I have this question, and complaint: Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections. They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population. So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity. </rant>
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  Why does Spanner use a fixed shard size instead of scaling shards to the size of the dataset?
wkoury 5y ago
Last year I made an app for a professor that tells you your chances of getting into Harvard based on your high school circumstances. The results are pretty crazy: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/ https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/
- jnwatson 5y ago
  That's quite interesting. That's the kind of information that should be provided to high school freshmen.
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  Wow, if you have a perfect SAT, perfect grades, and are of a race which is more likely to get in, you still only have a ~50% chance. It really seems like a lot of these admissions are purely random, unless you're a legacy kid or football player. I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.
jnwatson 5y ago
I wonder how this impacts lower-tier schools. My n=1 data point: my child just received a rejection notice from a middle-tier out-of-state university. Top test scores, top of her class, International Baccalaureate (IB). Obviously not a lot of activities. I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.
- el_benhameen 5y ago
  Was just reading about how common that trend is this year. It seems that the n is much greater than 1: https://news.yahoo.com/uc-explains-admissions-decisions-record-120037901.html https://news.yahoo.com/uc-explains-admissions-decisions-reco... I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.
  - jnwatson 5y ago
    Thank you for that link. From the article, it seems there's also a longer-trend issue that is at play in my daughter's case. If more students are applying for the same 10 STEM majors, there's an additional selection bias against those.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  I'd be curious to know more, since 'top' means different things to different folks. Is 'top' 1480 SAT or 1580? If your child is at the top of an IB high school, that is certainly impressive in its own right. One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
  - jnwatson 5y ago
    1480. Good guess!
flowerlad 5y ago
College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions. Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated. Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized. Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ). Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... ) Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school. So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.
finexplained 5y ago
It blows my mind that a record-low acceptance rate is held up as an achievement, and not a structural failure. Why is the metric not "we are able to educate X% of students who meet this well-defined bar"? There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible. And they do that with substantially fewer resources than many of these Ivies. Why, as a society, do we tolerate universities selling "exclusivity" instead of education?
- beojan 5y ago
  A low acceptance rate just means either there were more applications than usual or fewer places than usual. A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications. > There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.
jean-malo 5y ago
I've always thought that the French model for top-tier engineering schools was cruel but it might have some merits. You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit. Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.
- granshaw 5y ago
  It’s also 100% based on academic and test taking skill - would be good if a more well rounded assessment could be used instead
  - amznthrowaway5 5y ago
    Can you name a "well-rounded" assessment that doesn't just end up being a measure of privilege?
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      With these tests, you are still selecting for privilege, just differently. More stable situation at home (so a better study environment) tutoring and, especially for language-based "soft" exams, gravitating in the right social circles will teach someone the "right" culture to reference in his essays...
      - amznthrowaway5 5y ago
        At least for tests like the SAT, this is not correct. SES and coaching don't affect SAT scores much. A major reason why elites hate it so much and instead want "wholistic evaluations". Instead the ceiling of the test should be raised.
- chakerb 5y ago
  I went through program like this (french-speaking country). My concern after doing those two years are: 1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US. 2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program. 3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life! 4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!! 5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).
jean_tta 5y ago
% of applicants admitted is not super informative. Two more interesting metrics would be: * how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college) * related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?

86 points by undefined1 5y ago

Context: It's because the students admitted last year requested to defer starting until this year due to COVID, limiting the available space for new applicants. Edit: Also exacerbated by more applicants this year, I suppose due to reduced entry requirements, again due to COVID.

nunez 5y ago
Admission rates have also been trending downwards per the graph posted on the article.
jdhn 5y ago
Looking at the graph that they provided, it seems that admittance rate has been slowly dropping for a few years now. I'd expect it to bounce up above 4% next year due to the lack of deferring students, but I wonder if their admittance percentage will hit 3.98% or less through natural growth in the upcoming years.
hkmurakami 5y ago
re: admittance rate trends. Low admittance rate is a plus for most college rankings so institutions are incentivized to engage in efforts to increase the size at the top of the funnel. Disclaimer: Princeton alumnus.
- fireattack 5y ago
  Personally I think absolute number of admitted students is a more useful metric, since you can't really control how many people apply, and your capacity is more or less fixed. From the graph in the article, that is also in decline, but not as sharp (except the outlier of this year, which is caused by other factors).
  - csa 5y ago
    Absolute number admitted is probably decreasing because the admissions committee is more effective at offering admissions to people who are more likely to accept the offer. There are a number of ways to do this. Without looking, I would guess that that the entering classes of Princeton and other elite schools largely stay fairly steady over time for a variety of reasons. As for the number of people who apply, this can be increased via outreach programs, marketing, etc.

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1cvmask 5y ago

So when we remove the legacies and school fund donators (roughly half) - about 40 to 50 percent of the class, athletes (affirmative action for rich whites with relatively lower credentials and scores) - about 10-20 percent of the class, and regular affirmative action ( about 15 percent of the class and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos). The remainder is the group based on traditional credentials. The academic reputation of these schools is disproportionately from that remainder group. The rest of the world just has an exam system. Interesting way of comparing the systems.

blue5 5y ago
>rich whites rich jews
huitzitziltzin 5y ago
>> and mainly affluent politically connected blacks and latinos Where in the world do you get that idea? I challenge you to provide a good source for the claim that the AA students are either affluent OR politically connected.
- greenwich26 5y ago
  Spent a year at an Ivy League. I met dozens of affluent, politically connected racial minorities, mostly from Northeast prep schools. I met exactly 0 poor kids from the South, or inner city Chicago or Detroit, or some other such background. It was pretty obvious what was going on.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Dozens vs 0 would be an overstatement, but the disparity is still there. I suspect it was exacerbated by what social circles you were traveling in.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  I am not sure about being politically connected, but it is known that universities accept rich black immigrants from places like Nigeria and consider it “affirmative action”. In Ivy League unis the percentage of immigrants among the black student body is over 40%, while in the general population it is near 15%. But I judging how the things are going I am sure this is going to get fixed soon. The colleges will ask you to do a DNA test to determine the purity of your black heritage and a proof of slave ancestors. Hooray, intersectionality.

endisneigh 5y ago

It's a shame that we're here in 2021 and the best we can do is basically just "selection bias." Basically all universities have no statistical proof that they can educate people beyond this. This is not to say that the schools are bad, but most of the education is simply due to the types of peers you have, not really due to the school itself. Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability. Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects. You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.

warkdarrior 5y ago
We do not need to find this randomized-admission institution for your analysis. Just take an Ivy and several state universities of different rankings, and pick students with similar high-school backgrounds (top grades, similar family net worth, etc.). Such students of similar capability must exist, unless we think top universities admit all the top students and there is no one left for lower-rank schools. Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  What you're describing wouldn't work because the interactions between the students would influence the things you're measuring. Students don't exist in a vacuum. It would only be possible if the school's students were entirely random. Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
- deleted 5y ago
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csa 5y ago

In this particular year, the low number is due to the deferrals from last year and (most likely) reduced requirements in the admissions process. That said, over the long term, the number of Hail Mary applications is most likely the bulk of the gradual increase in applications. There are a very large number of applications to elite schools that effectively zero chance of being accepted, and that number seems to be increasing over time. To be fair, I do think that the overall quality of admitted student is increasing as well, but the improvements are largely seen in the marginal admits rather than the core admits.

ModernMech 5y ago

When looking at acceptance rates of Ivies, it's good to remember that the concept of a "reach school" that counselors push on students means that almost every kid is applying to some school they are not really qualified to get into. These disproportionately end up being top schools like Princeton and Harvard. If you're going to reach, why not really reach? Is the chance of getting into Princeton 4%? No, if you're well qualified to get in, the chance is much higher. If you're not qualified to get in, the chance is 0%. Average it out and you get the 4%-8%. I think PG said something similar with respect to the chance of getting accepted to YC. Or maybe it wasn't PG and I'm thinking of this: https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y-combinator-are-not-1-in-100-d28206fc543d https://medium.com/@robhunter/your-chances-of-getting-into-y...

throwawayboise 5y ago
School counselors (at least those that are good, and care) are in kind of a tough spot. If they are realistic with kids about what they are qualified to do after high school, they catch shit from parents about "crushing dreams" and if they are not they create false hope by encouraging average students to do things like apply to Harvard or Princeton with some kind of message like "you can't get in if you don't apply."
randcraw 5y ago
There seems to be a trend toward students submitting ever more college applications. It's not uncommon for seniors to apply to a dozen schools or more, of which perhaps 1/3 are unlikely to accept. So my question is, what is the larger context of applicants this year? Has a year of COVID sequestration altered the numbers? Are elite schools admitting fewer students? Has the total number of applications gone up? Is each student sending out more applications? Are kids applying to more elite schools than in years past? One bare statistic really doesn't tell a useful story.
jean_tta 5y ago
More broadly most applicants apply to several schools. If there are as many spots as applicants and each applicants apply to k schools, you could go as low as 1/k average admittance percentage (rates will be higher when colleges accept applicants that do not come: you could have 100% rate after all). With k = 12, you're at about a 8% lower bound for the average college. For elite colleges that will attract more applications and will have fewer admitted-but-does-not-come applicants, 4% is not that low. If the marginal cost of an extra application is lowering (say, because we went from typewriting & mailing everything to copy-pasting & online applications), the number of applications per applicant will go up and thus the admission rate will go down.

purple_ferret 5y ago

Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult. If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now.

abledon 5y ago
and surrounded by way more screens/extended screen-time as your brain tries to develop... arghhh
csa 5y ago
> Parsing through 37,601 (and accepting only 1500) applications without standardized testing sounds incredibly difficult. While the task is daunting, it’s not quite as bad as you think when well over half of the applications are almost instant rejections. > If I were a teenager trying to get into a top school these days, my anxiety would be through the roof. Can't imagine the extracurricular work you have to put in now. It’s quality not quantity. So many people miss this point.
nemothekid 5y ago
I can't imagine standardized testing being anything but a low pass filter for these schools. Roughly 2 million students take the SAT every year, which means 100,000 scores in the top 5%; 20,000 in the top 1%. Whittling down 20,000 high scores to 1500 isn't any easier.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  But you don't have 20000 applicants from the top 1%, because not all will apply to every top school.
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    Princeton's SAT score percentile, last year, ranged from 96%-99%. That is still, potentially, 80,0000 applicants. Furthermore, it's not like the applicants are ranked and accepted in order of test scores. My point is that having test scores doesn't make this process that much easier for a school like Princeton. They were already down weighting test scores after you scored in a certain range; you still needed to pile on extra curricular and recommendations (and maybe donate a building or two if your parents could afford it).

pratik661 5y ago

Scott Galloway once proposed taxing the endowments of universities that don’t expand their accepted admissions pool in accordance with population growth at a higher rate. The logic being that these universities are essentially providers of a “Veblen Good” (elite, exclusive status in society) and should be taxed as such.

supernova87a 5y ago

First of all, a major issue here is that we don't have enough good universities to accept all the talented kids applying. That holds true for high schools, etc. wherever there is contentious debate over "equity" or merit-based admissions. Just increase the number of good schools (which has not been done in proportion to population growth) and many things are solved. Just like how you never hear people in countries with great broadband access complain about usage caps. That's a purely US (or other country) phenomenon when you have shitty supply of broadband. Increase the supply, competition, and problem solved. Secondly, a question for those who feel that colleges have a duty to "shape our future generation leaders who should look like the people they represent". Tell me, for all the mental contortions, evaluations, interviews, processes to make flawed judgement calls on whether people "contribute by their diversity" to the student body, how different an outcome does that achieve over just using an objective test, and then admitting everyone above a certain bar? These colleges receive enough applicants to admit 3-4 classes worth of valedictorians. Yet they seem to think their admissions scrutiny and processes make their classes a much better place than if they had a simpler process. Is that true? Judge people on skill and talent, for every type of academic program a university offers. Simple rules and processes allow people do creative things. Contorted rules and processes incentivize people to do stupid things. Like having 17 year olds compete in an essay contest to see who is the most disadvantaged and worthy therefore of admissions. I don't think they've tried serious alternatives, yet they believe these complicated admissions systems to be correct. And you look to other countries that have purely exam-based admissions, yet they are not producing classes full of socially inept, non-contributing, non-leaders. Maybe it's worth a rethink. Or some new kinds of institutions.

analog31 5y ago
Indeed, I don't think there's a social or economic reason why higher education should be a scarce good. Likewise health care. There was a recent article suggesting that Stanford should just replicate itself in multiple states. My own preferred route would be bottom-up: Start by bolstering the community and technical colleges, then the regional public colleges, and finally large state universities. The "elite" private colleges have a dilemma, which is that they have to basically curate their student populations, because any simplistic admission filter will turn the college into a freak show and destroy its own brand. A college that consists of nothing but valedictorian concertmaster robotic-club-leaders, concentrated in three or four "hot" majors, would even have a hard time retaining faculty. I propose letting them do exactly that -- a decade of no-holds-barred private college admissions -- and then figure out what we want to do about higher education.

wnevets 5y ago

Am I the only one who hates it when headlines use the phrase "X admits Y"? It always frames the story in a certain way regardless of the actually context.

mewse-hn 5y ago
Headline is referring to university admissions not factual admissions
- wnevets 5y ago
  I'm an idiot.

dalbasal 5y ago

Admission rates may or may not be a long term indicator of anything, but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive. That aside, a lot is covid related. On-campus education is a good that has been underproduced... this is excess demand. Maybe we'll be graduating fewer doctors, nurses, and such than expected over the coming decade

csa 5y ago
> but it doesn't take an indicator to know that elite-exclusive college has been getting more exclusive. Or maybe there are just a lot more “reach school” applications. I agree that the overall applicant pool is improving, but it is not improving nearly as much as the admissions numbers alone suggest. The number of applications from applicants who are very unlikely to be admitted are increasing substantially.

jplr8922 5y ago

It brings in my mind Bryan Caplan research ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education basically, people educate themselves because it looks good, not because you learn usefull stuff. Thoughts?

azhenley 5y ago

As a prof, I'm terrified of the exploding enrollment in CS. My 2021 enrollment for a juniors/seniors course is up 70% from recent years and still growing. Can't imagine what it'll look like in two or three years.

csa 5y ago
I’m not sure what the leadership of your department and university want your enrollment to be, but a very tough (reasonable, but tough) required weeder class early in the CS sequence will clean out the people who like the idea of being a CS major/grad more than the actual reality of being a CS major. This will allow the faculty to teach the upper class courses at an appropriate level in terms of difficulty and level of engagement with students (versus classroom management and handling weak students).
- azhenley 5y ago
  Weeder classes mean less tuition dollars flowing in...

deleted 5y ago

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OliverJones 5y ago

As a long-ago grad of one of these fancy-schmancy schools with vast endowments and big revenue streams from application fees, I have this question, and complaint: Why haven't they expanded their number of students in proportion to population growth? Why shouldn't their product be available to more people? Yeah, small class size? BS. They've mastered the art of large lectures and small sections. They enjoy government subsidies: tax exemptions on endowment profits and revenue streams. That's because they're considered educational institutions serving the common good. Maybe those tax exemptions should be scaled back for institutions that don't scale up with population. So, Ivy League, make like Cal and other public universities: Make it your mission to educate lots of people. Quit bragging about your selectivity. </rant>

CheezeIt 5y ago
Why does Spanner use a fixed shard size instead of scaling shards to the size of the dataset?

wkoury 5y ago

Last year I made an app for a professor that tells you your chances of getting into Harvard based on your high school circumstances. The results are pretty crazy: https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/ https://wkoury.github.io/harvard-admissions/

jnwatson 5y ago
That's quite interesting. That's the kind of information that should be provided to high school freshmen.
HDMI_Cable 5y ago
Wow, if you have a perfect SAT, perfect grades, and are of a race which is more likely to get in, you still only have a ~50% chance. It really seems like a lot of these admissions are purely random, unless you're a legacy kid or football player. I'm not American (Canada), and I beat myself up over not applying in the US, because of intangibles like "networking" and "small class sizes". Now I'm glad I didn't, this seems fucked up.

jnwatson 5y ago

I wonder how this impacts lower-tier schools. My n=1 data point: my child just received a rejection notice from a middle-tier out-of-state university. Top test scores, top of her class, International Baccalaureate (IB). Obviously not a lot of activities. I am curious what kind of students are getting accepted.

el_benhameen 5y ago
Was just reading about how common that trend is this year. It seems that the n is much greater than 1: https://news.yahoo.com/uc-explains-admissions-decisions-record-120037901.html https://news.yahoo.com/uc-explains-admissions-decisions-reco... I’m sorry about your kid’s rejection letter. Larger societal trends aside, that’s not a fun experience.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  Thank you for that link. From the article, it seems there's also a longer-trend issue that is at play in my daughter's case. If more students are applying for the same 10 STEM majors, there's an additional selection bias against those.
gnicholas 5y ago
I'd be curious to know more, since 'top' means different things to different folks. Is 'top' 1480 SAT or 1580? If your child is at the top of an IB high school, that is certainly impressive in its own right. One thing I would note is that some schools 'manage' their acceptances in order to keep their yield numbers looking good. That is, they may have determined that your child was overqualified for their school and very unlikely to come. They'd rather reject/wait-list applicants like this because then their yield numbers (percent of accepted students who matriculate) look better.
- jnwatson 5y ago
  1480. Good guess!

flowerlad 5y ago

College admissions in the US are messed up. There is no way for a student to be in control of their destiny through hard work, because there are far too many variables and randomness in college admissions. Ideally what colleges should do is to use a standardized test and go strictly by the results of the standardized test. Standardized tests are not perfect, but if there are flaws in standardized tests then fix them, because it is better than the alternatives. The advantage for students would be predictability and being in control of their own destiny. Students would not have to apply to 12 to 15 colleges, instead the would apply to 2 to 3. The benefits for colleges would be better predictability as well. Today colleges use complex mathematical models to predict who is likely to accept their admission offers. Then they use "yield protection" to avoid admitting highly qualified students who are unlikely to accept admission offers. It is complicated. Colleges can use complex data analysis to guess which students are likely to accept but hapless students can’t run data analysis to determine which colleges are likely to accept. Colleges, especially public ones, ought to minimize the guesswork and use more objective criteria to admit students. Students need to be able to control their own destiny through hard work. That’s only possible if guesswork and data analytics and so on is minimized. Other countries such as UK use test scores for college admissions. At one time the US too used scores. But US colleges introduced subjective criteria ("holistic reviews") because far too many Jewish people were getting admitted when they used objective criteria. (Not kidding, see https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/history-privilege-elite-college-admissions/585088/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor... ). Even public universities perform complex gymnastics to decide which 4.0 GPA student to admit. Even when two students have taken the exact same courses (including AP courses) and have the same GPA, colleges do not consider them the same. (See here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-college-admissions-season-brings-rejection-heartbreak https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/covid-co... ) Excerpts: UC admissions directors stressed that they evaluated students in the context of their own schools and communities to assess how much they challenged themselves and took advantage of available opportunities. A student who took all six AP classes offered at her school might be more impressive than the one who took six at a school that offered twice as many. A campus might admit a student with a 4.0 GPA who ranked at the top of an underserved school over one with a higher GPA but lower class rank at a more high-achieving school. So basically it is better to be a bright student in a dumb school than to be a bright student in a bright school. This is messed up. Students shouldn't have to do these calculations and move to areas with dumb schools to improve their chances. We need to bring back objectivity and predictability back to college admissions.

finexplained 5y ago

It blows my mind that a record-low acceptance rate is held up as an achievement, and not a structural failure. Why is the metric not "we are able to educate X% of students who meet this well-defined bar"? There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible. And they do that with substantially fewer resources than many of these Ivies. Why, as a society, do we tolerate universities selling "exclusivity" instead of education?

beojan 5y ago
A low acceptance rate just means either there were more applications than usual or fewer places than usual. A record high number of applications is, of course, an achievement in terms of encouraging those applications. > There are some departments in institutions (think CS) who, in the face of exploding enrollments, have made every effort to scale their courses to accommodate as many students who are capable as possible I would be very surprised if they could do this without lowering the standard of the education provided to each student.

jean-malo 5y ago

I've always thought that the French model for top-tier engineering schools was cruel but it might have some merits. You essentially study for two years post high-school to take a competitive exam, your ranking in this exam determines where you can go (first place chooses, then the second place gets to pick etc.) You suffer for two years but at the end it's based mostly on merit. Obviously it's not entirely based on merit as privileged kids have a huge head start but you at least get a chance to catch up during those two years.

granshaw 5y ago
It’s also 100% based on academic and test taking skill - would be good if a more well rounded assessment could be used instead
- amznthrowaway5 5y ago
  Can you name a "well-rounded" assessment that doesn't just end up being a measure of privilege?
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    With these tests, you are still selecting for privilege, just differently. More stable situation at home (so a better study environment) tutoring and, especially for language-based "soft" exams, gravitating in the right social circles will teach someone the "right" culture to reference in his essays...
    - amznthrowaway5 5y ago
      At least for tests like the SAT, this is not correct. SES and coaching don't affect SAT scores much. A major reason why elites hate it so much and instead want "wholistic evaluations". Instead the ceiling of the test should be raised.
chakerb 5y ago
I went through program like this (french-speaking country). My concern after doing those two years are: 1- You learn a lot of useless subjects!! I'm a software engineer now but I studied organic chemistry for two freaking years!! And I don't plan to use that knowledge (most of which I totally forgot) anywhere in the future. Something that I wouldn't have picked if I was studying CS in the US. 2- You're using the same filter for everyone, and people can have different type of intelligence which can go unnoticed via such program. 3- You don't get to chose the thing you love if you don't rank well! Actually you may end up with something that you hate, because that's what's left! And you only know this after you spent two years of your life! 4- It's mostly about hard work and luck!! 5- You get out with almost only theoretical skills in the first two years. A good thing if you're looking to continue in the research track afterword but a bit of disadvantage (compared to people who used those two years to master the required skill for the job market).

jean_tta 5y ago

% of applicants admitted is not super informative. Two more interesting metrics would be: * how many applicants admitted actually enroll (and not go to some other college) * related, bu what is the "rank" of the last admitted applicant: how far do they need to reach to fill their spots?