Delving Deeper Into the "What are my Chances?" Question

I have had some recent discussions with both students and parents about “chances” of getting into various institutions. Unfortunately, there is no easy nor absolute way to determine a student’s chance to get into a particular college. While looking at a student’s GPA and test scores used to be the two primary indicators of acceptance, there are a whole lot of other confounding factors that may affect chances. In order to put colleges in an admission category, data needs to be analyzed and not just taken at face value. Many of these categories may have students that overlap, so the percentages will not add up to 100%. A prospective student should understand how each of these categories apply to them when assessing whether they have a good chance for admission.

I personally do not like the “reach, target, safety” designations that many people use for admission chances. The stigma of the word “safety” in terms of college admissions is that the school itself is undesirable. One student’s reach is another’s safety, but that doesn’t mean that the safety school is not an amazing institution! I prefer to use the terms “highly probable, probable, and less probable”. From a psychological point, it becomes a more positive scale. It is no longer a “safety” SCHOOL but a “highly probable” ADMISSION to a certain college.

 Now on to data. I love data, but there is so much more to a number than just the number. Let’s look at a small to medium school with a female:male ratio of 60%:40%. Colleges generally have close to a 50%:50% ratio for their student body. Does this mean that the school admits more female than males? Does this mean more females actually apply? Does the school like female more than males? Or could this be that the school has a dedicated School of Nursing? The predominance of nursing students (certainly not all) are female. Could this possibly be the reason that there are more females than males on a smallish campus? This is one example of looking deeper into a college statistic.

 I decided to do a case study on an NCAA athletic DI and academically “more selective” (admission around 30%) small liberal arts college located in the United States. Although all of the data is factual (taken from the college website or the Common Data Set), I will not divulge the name of the college. I will also round numbers to a small degree so that this college cannot be pinpointed. The class of 2022 for this college had about 730 students enrolled. There were about 9250 applications submitted for a spot in this class, and about 2720 were accepted (giving us the 29% acceptance rate). Not all students who are accepted will attend. The approximately 730 students who did enroll show that this school has a “yield” of about 27%. So, just about one quarter of the students who were accepted actually decided to attend. Schools take this “yield” into consideration when they accept students. Numbers and percentages for students who were accepted will be different than the ones enrolled. Please note that there isn’t information in every category for both accepted and enrolled, and there is a difference.

 This college is not unique, and many schools have very similar data points. This is simply an exercise in looking closely at how a student may fit in as part of a freshman class. Colleges are not looking for one type of student. They need gender diversity, geographic diversity, ethnic diversity, area of study diversity, and other diversity. It would be very silly for a college to admit 95% Biology majors into their freshman class even if all of those students are the most qualified.

 Some statistics for the Class of 2022 (HS graduating class of 2018) at ?? University:

Early Decision acceptance rate: >50%

Overall acceptance rate: 29%

            How we can analyze: At first glance, the ED acceptance rate seems to be so much higher than the RD rate. Everyone who wants to go here as a first choice should apply ED, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. This school has recruited athletes to play on the DI teams. There were approx. 150 athletes for this class (about 20%). DI recruited athletes apply ED, so they can sign their Letters of Intent. They are pre-screened and basically guaranteed admission through ED. So, this number is skewed because it DOES NOT mean that a general applicant has a >50% chance to be admitted ED.

Admitted students: 2720. What this means: approximately 1360 female and 1360 males WORLDWIDE were accepted. Acceptance rate overall is 29% (total applicants: 9250).

International students: From the website, about 16% of each enrolled class is made up of international students. So, approximately 117 students are international in the class of 2022.

 First Generation students: about 15% of enrolled students are first generation students. That means that 110 students are first generation.

Underrepresented minorities: 33%. Translated to numbers that means that about 240 students are underrepresented minorities.

Domestic geographic diversity: 39 states represented. This means that at least 1 student from each of the 39 states are enrolled. Students from more states could have been admitted but decided not to attend.

 A critical look at the ACT scores:

 Mid-50% ACT scores: 30-34. Looking at a local high school Naviance scattergram for this school shows that there were some admissions in the past few years that are significantly lower than the mid 50%. That means that in order to keep the average high, students with even higher than average scores MUST offset the lower ones. For example, a real student was admitted with an 18 ACT score. (Reasons for this admission are not known.) In order to bring the average up to 32 (the middle of the schools mid 50% range), two students with perfect 36 scores have to be admitted and attend to keep the 32 average and offset the 18. If a small school admits students with a much lower score than the “average”, they need to balance it with extremely high scores. Therefore, the normal student applicant with a 30 may think that they are within that sweet spot of the mid 50%, but they are probably too low to help offset lower admissions.

 This process can be applied to the mid 50% of GPA as well. This school’s mid 50% GPA (calculated on a 4.0 scale) is 3.10 – 3.75 (average is 3.5).

 I realize that analyzing the data takes time and an understanding of the big picture of the unpredictability of college admissions, but it is important to not take college statistics at face value. Each student will be able to see him/herself in relation to these numbers.