The Story Behind Plummeting Admissions Rates
Photo by Riho Kroll at Unsplash
Every year when schools publish their admissions rates, people shake their heads and wonder: how is it possible that they get lower every year?
While some procedural changes around how schools calculate their admission rates and international student matriculation have nudged rates up at a few selective schools, there are many schools now with admissions rates below 20%. If you just look at just regular decision admit rates, many dip below 10%. These are nationally known colleges that have long been very selective, but not ones that you might traditionally think of as part of the most selective cohort. Think Boston College, Barnard, and NYU.
Why do admissions rates keep dropping at more and more schools? And staying so low at others?
The answer starts (and ends) with rankings. Admissions rates—and another critical data point, yield—factor heavily into rankings. And, a college’s ranking has implications for endowment size as well as for the number of applications they receive in subsequent cycles. A high rank helps universities keep funding high and admission rates low, which helps secure a strong ranking in the future. In short, it’s a negative feedback loop.
So how do they keep their rates down? Mostly, it’s a game of averages.
Let’s start with yield. This is the most significant force currently being exerted on admissions rates. ED gets colleges close to 100% yield, so the more students they take in the early round, the higher their yield rate will be. Except at the hyper-selective schools, students accepted via regular decision have a lower probability to yield (more on why in a minute), so high yield in ED can mitigate the impact of low yield in RD.
This is why you see many schools accepting 50-60% of their incoming freshmen class via ED. Of course, this leaves increasingly few spots for the masses of candidates who apply via regular decision, which works out well for colleges focused on optimizing their numbers. A higher acceptance rate in the ED round averages with a miniscule one in the RD round to keep the overall admission rate down.
You might wonder why any of this matters. After all, we are advocates of fit over prestige and skeptical of the correlation between quality and admissions rate. But whether you care about prestige or not, the plummeting admissions rates have problematic implications for everyone. Here is why.
Imbalanced Lists: We often tell students: That would be a target for early decision but a reach or high reach for regular decision. This is because of the differential between ED admit rates and RD admit rates; it is not uncommon for the latter to be in the 20-30+% range and the former to be <10%. When fewer schools are “targets” or “likelies” come regular decision, you get increasingly lopsided lists. Generally, we recommend that students apply to roughly a 5:4:3 reach:target:likely ratio, but when the reach category covers everything from Harvard and Stanford to Tulane, Northeastern, Boston University, and Wake Forest, it’s difficult for students to keep it to five.
List Length: Imbalanced lists are usually longer lists. You can’t eliminate the target and likely schools because everyone needs a safety net (and ideally a safety net that they are excited about!). So, that 5:4:3 ratio often ends up looking more like 8:4:3 or even 10:4:3.
Unpredictable Yield: When students apply to more schools, it’s harder for schools to predict who is coming and who is not. (See? We told you we’d come back to this.) So, they hedge, admitting a small number of applicants and waitlisting a ton in an effort to hit their target class size.
Increasing Reliance on ED: When schools can’t predict who is coming in the regular decision round, they re-assert control over their incoming class by relying more heavily on ED, perhaps going from taking 40% of the incoming class via ED to 55%. As a result, admissions rates go down, and we are back at the top of the negative feedback loop.
An important cultural effect of this trend is that it increases advantages for already privileged applicants. These applicants (1) tend to have the support (and funds) to apply to more schools; (2) are less cost sensitive so willing and able to commit via ED, and (3) have a school or independent counselor coaching them on how to play the demonstrated interest game to improve their chances of admission.
If this article has you spinning a little bit, it's not all bad news. If you're smart about balancing your list, realistic about your chances in the regular decision round, and thoughtful about your early strategy, you will, in all likelihood, have a lot of schools to choose from come spring!
