Five percent of applicants were accepted by Stanford University last year. Compare that to seven percent in 2012 and 13 percent in 2005. This trend doesn’t only apply to Stanford. Schools such as Harvard, UC Berkeley and Princeton are following suit.
It has never been harder to get into the nation’s top colleges. Many think that there are more qualified high school students applying to college each year. Others believe that colleges are becoming increasingly selective. The underlying reason, however, is that the number of people applying to individual colleges is consistently expanding, making the proportion of the number admitted to the number applied smaller.
With this is in mind, we should realize that admission rates don’t tell the whole story. They can be misleading.
We are all aware of these record-low admission rates. What is a growing complication, however, is that students resort to applying to more colleges as a result. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling from 1990 to 2012, the percentage of students applying to seven or more colleges increased from nine to twenty-eight. That’s in an attempt to avoid the devastation of not getting into a “good” college and having to attend a back-up school. It’s this fear that drives acceptance rates so low. More and more students are applying to more and more colleges. But there are only so many spots available.
The popularization of the Common Application, which makes it far easier to apply to different universities, has largely contributed to this problem. The U.S. World and News Report states that the efficiency and standardization of college applications has influenced students to apply to more schools.
It’s a feedback loop. Students see low admissions rates in top colleges and apply to more colleges to cushion a rejection letter they predict they will get. But this just increases the applicant pool and again, lowers the admission rate. The admission rate of a certain college is not so much dictated by how selective it is or how many qualified applicants there are. Rather, it’s shaped more by the amount of applicants, applicants who are deceived by statistics.
But there’s another reason. Colleges are recruiting more applicants just to reject them. David Hawkins, executive director of education content and policy at the NACAC, reports that colleges recruit and email many students with marketing techniques, then turn most of them down. This benefits colleges because their admission rates decrease, making them seem prestigious and distinguished. Washington Monthly reports that Northeastern university in Boston sends almost 200,000 personalized letters to high school students each year, making it seem like students are personally wanted. Nearly 50,000 students applied to Northeastern for 2,800 spots in the fall 2014 class ratio of 18 applicants per admittance. This factor also contributes to the feedback loop. People are swayed by college advertisements and apply to more schools. This, again, lowers the admission rates and repeats the cycle.
So when all of these factors propel us to increase the number of colleges we apply to, we are taken advantage of. Money becomes an imminent concern. Schools profit immensely off of students who wish to apply. According to the U.S. News and World Report, the average cost of applying to a single college is about $40. If students apply to 25 colleges, they will have spent on average $1,000. Money is yet another number to consider when applying to colleges.
Numbers can deceive us, so understanding what statistics really show about colleges can assist in the efficiency of college applications. When students look to quantify the educational worth of a college, they look at admission rates, average GPA and SAT, and national ranking rather than the faculty to staff ratio, the size of the campus, the amount of individual attention received from professors or internship or research opportunities. In a survey of MVHS seniors, when applying to colleges, 11 percent considered internship or research opportunities, six percent considered campus size and five percent considered faculty to staff ratio.
Furthermore, applying to college is a numbers game from our side as well. We should use numbers as a conscience in college applications and be realistic. Collegexpress, an educational publisher, states that a challenging high school curriculum, grades and SAT or ACT scores are the top three things colleges look at.
These numbers are directly offered through our Naviance accounts. At the beginning of everyone’s freshman year at MVHS, students are given a Naviance account. Not until junior year are students required to log-in to Naviance and do an activity in which they examine average SAT scores and GPAs of certain colleges. We’ve all done the same thing at one point: search up Stanford, Harvard or any one of the nation’s top colleges to see how we compare. We open up the graph and we are immediately overwhelmed by an array of red and green dots, representing rejected and admitted students. Suddenly, we feel a glimmer of hope. We see a marvelous green dot aligned almost perfectly with our own statistics. After a period of excitement, we add a prestigious university to our college list, thinking we have a chance. Some, perhaps five percent, do get in, but letís be realistic for a minute. Most don’t.
And even those who appear to be the most ideal applicants students that have earned a 4.0 GPA or 2400 on the SAT, are often rejected.
Even though a college’s average GPA may match up with ours, nothing is guaranteed. The numbers are not conclusive. There are so many factors involved in getting in from how many grammatical mistakes you made in your essay to what you wore to the interview to your race and religion and even your parents’ occupations. The truth is that no one knows the exact requirements to get into a certain college. There are certain courses of action one may take to increase their chances of admission, but in the end, it’s essential to realize that college admissions are not a straightforward.
There are 2,364 colleges in the U.S. Each of them are unique, catering to the needs of very particular sets of students. The best fit for a top student may not be the Harvards or Stanfords of the world. These are the kinds of details that cannot be quantified. Finding what colleges are suitable for us particularly is a long process that requires attention to much more than just numbers.
We are being misled by college statistics. But more than anything, we are misled by their perceived importance. We live in an age of impatience, an age in which we can harness a world of information at our fingertips. It is extremely easy to assign numbers and ranking systems to a complicated process, but this often hinders personal progression and evaluation. Personal research to discover the underlying statistics of colleges is extremely useful, regardless of where one applies.
Throughout the college application process, itís important to understand your personal portfolio when applying to specific colleges. Know that admission rates don’t correlate with the number of qualified applicants. Know that a green dot on Naviance doesn’t guarantee anything.
It’s important to evaluate the validity of these numbers and decisions made in response to them. Numbers tell many stories. Let’s not let numbers take advantage of us.
