"Every year the most selective colleges report that acceptance rates are at an all-time low, which freaks out the next class of high school juniors to no end," says Kevin Carey in his Chronicle opinion piece "Real College-Acceptance Rates Are Higher Than You Think."
In Carey's six-point article he explains how getting into highly selective colleges (as a highly qualified applicant at least) is not as hard as it seems.
Point #1: Just because acceptance rates have gone down doesn't mean that it's harder to get into a given school.
Point #2: Declining acceptance rates could be attributed to:
(a) A larger and more highly qualified applicant pool, but a fixed number of acceptance slots.
(b) An increase in the number of highly unqualified applicants.
(c) The fact that highly qualified applicants are sending applications out to more and more schools each year, yet the number of acceptance spots remains static.
Point #3: It's only the case of (a) above that makes getting into top universities harder for a highly qualified applicant. If you're highly qualified, then it really doesn't matter how many unqualified students (case (b)) apply to a program; they won't stand a chance to securing a spot that should instead be yours. And regarding (c)—highly qualified applicants may gain acceptance to the growing list of schools they apply to, but they can only say yes to one school. That won't change no matter what, which means there will still be slots open at all the schools that a highly qualified student turns down.
Point #4: To truly determine if a school's acceptance rates have gone down, the admissions committees would have to do some serious, long-term analyses of the applicant pools to see if each case falls into (a), (b), or (c) above. Since no schools are putting effort or money into such a project, we can assume, due to the fact that most application cases fall into the (b) or (c) categories, that most of the apparent admission rate declines are due to cases (b) and (c), and not to (a).
Point #5: The lower a school's acceptance rate the higher its academic prestige. As the application to student ratio increases and as the desire to maintain a low acceptance rate increases, Carey predicts that "[e]ventually, colleges may have no choice but to run the selective undergraduate admissions process as an actual lottery, as medical residency programs are run today."
Point #6: Students who are qualified to attend a highly selective college will likely get in to and then attend such a school. The majority of students don't fall into this category at all.
College-Related Accepted.com Resources:
- Submit a Stellar Application: 42 Terrific Tips
- Submit a Stellar Application II: 56 Additional Tips
- How to Write Great College Application Essays and STAY SANE!, an ebook.
- "Do's and Don'ts for Your College Admissions Essay," a free article.
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