Acceptance rates are often used as a shorthand for how prestigious and elite a college is. This makes sense on a visceral level; after all, the more competitive a college is to get into, the more students vying for a limited number of seats, the more valuable those seats must be, right?
There are, however, some flaws and limits with this approach, which are caused by the colleges themselves, and the decisions they make when trying to attract applicants. In this article, we’ll look at how and why acceptance rates vary between schools, and why acceptance rates alone do not tell the full story of how prestigious a school is. We’ll also give you advice on calculating your true chances of acceptance to competitive colleges. Let’s get started!
Why Acceptance Rates are Dropping
Top schools are receiving more applications than ever before, and in turn, students are applying to more schools each year on average. At the same time, however, overall college enrollment is dropping. This seems a paradox, but has a clear explanation: students are more desperate to go to top colleges, but fewer students are applying to colleges overall.
Thus acceptance rates drop at top schools. At the same time, universities have realized that dropping acceptance rates make them seem more prestigious, and help their spot in the vaunted college rankings. We’ve discussed issues with college rankings before, but the incentives created by the ranking system have contributed to the rush for applicants among top schools.
Top schools are now actively seeking to increase the number of applicants each year, to lower their acceptance rates further. Not all schools do this, but many do. This is done primarily through advertising; the constant emails, physical letters, and other means of reaching out colleges use to attract students to apply.
At one point, the goal of this outreach was to find students who fit a certain niche colleges wanted; those with test scores within a certain range, from regions a school wanted to recruit more heavily from, or with demographics or academic interests a university was targeting.
By advertising more widely, however, colleges learned they could greatly increase the number of students who were applying to their schools. While there still is specifically targeted advertising, most schools send out advertisements broadly, targeting large swathes of students.
Some of these students are fully qualified to attend the universities in question, but many more are not. Acceptance rates are being artificially inflated by schools which are encouraging students to apply who do not have the qualifications needed to get accepted.
To further examine how this works (and when it doesn’t apply), let’s look at a pair of case studies.
Northeastern University
Northeastern is famous, or perhaps infamous, for its meteoric rise through the US News rankings, going from over a hundred to around the top 40-50 universities in the country in a fairly short spell. Of course, there was no single technique they undertook to accomplish this, but greatly increasing their number of applicants was certainly part of their approach.
Northeastern has advertised broadly, and has been rewarded with a greatly increased number of applicants. They received 96,327 applicants for fall of 2023, up from the 64,428 who applied in 2020; a growth of 49.5%. While all universities saw application numbers grow in this time, Northeastern’s has been staggering.
This growth has pushed their acceptance rate under 10%, joining a select group of schools normally limited to Ivy+ and related institutions, the most selective colleges. This does not mean Northeastern is suddenly an Ivy+ school. While you can get a great education there, their acceptance rate should not be the sole arbiter of their prestige.
Caltech
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Caltech. Caltech is another top school, but one which does not advertise as much. It relies on its student body being very self-selecting, and does not want unqualified students to apply. It is a far smaller school than Northeastern, and gets many fewer applicants as well.
While Caltech has not released the number of applicants they had in the past admissions cycle, in 2021 they received 13,026 applications. In turn, they admitted only 512 students, as Caltech operates at a far smaller scale than many other schools.
Caltech does still advertise and seek to attract applications from students, but they do not do so aggressively. They have no desire for unqualified students to apply, and do not want to burden their admissions officers with the additional work of rejecting them. Caltech is highly ranked regardless, and is seen as one of the top engineering programs in the country.
How to Judge a School by Acceptance Rates
The one thing you can truly judge by looking at a school’s acceptance rates is how many students want to apply relative to the number of spaces. While it is true there is some correlation between low acceptance rates and high prestige, this is because most colleges are actively trying to recruit applicants.
Even though this is true of all applicants, a student is more likely to respond to a letter from Yale than from a small private college they’ve never heard of. After all, it seems reasonable to assume that if a school is sending you mail, it’s because they really want you to attend. In some cases they might, but in others, they are simply trying to bolster their application numbers.
All top colleges engage in recruiting to some extent. UChicago went test optional pre-pandemic in part to increase their number of applicants. Columbia got caught recently gaming the US News rankings. When changes in a college’s ranking can mean bonuses or awkward conversations for university administrators, they tend to gain an outsized focus.
What This Means for You
There is, sadly, no way to be sure what percentage of a school’s applicants are fully qualified to attend. In some cases, admissions officers let something slip. MIT admissions officers revealed a number of years ago that around two thirds of the students who applied were qualified to attend based on the numbers alone. Of course, that was in 2005, but it gives a sense that many of the students who apply are not, in fact, fully qualified.
Most colleges do not release this information, or anything close to it. There is a sense, however, that many applicants to top schools are not qualified to attend. While there are still many more qualified applicants than there are spots, it is not so many as the size of the applicant pools implies.
What this means is that if you are fully qualified for a school, you have better chances of getting accepted than you may believe at first. Of course, what fully qualified means changes based on the school in question; check out our articles on grades and test scores for more information on what top colleges want to see from applicants.
This doesn’t mean admissions to top colleges is going to be easy by any stretch, but that you cannot judge your chances of getting into a school just by looking at their acceptance rate, nor should you think you have a better shot just because they sent you a letter in the mail. Some schools will try to recruit you legitimately, but many more seek to bolster application numbers by finding new applicants wherever they can.
We recommend being selective when building your list, carefully evaluating your own academic performance and preparation to find the right mix of reach, target, and safety schools for you. While you can find great schools through random emails they send, that should not be the only criteria to add one to your list.
Final Thoughts
College admissions is a very opaque field, with a great asymmetry in the amount of information held by students and colleges. We hope that this article has helped shed light into how and why colleges make the decisions they do, and given you a better understanding of your own chances of gaining acceptance to a top school.
Of course, it takes more than grades and test scores to get in. Admissions officers care about your essays, your activities, and want to know who you are as a person, to see how you would fit into their school. If you want help understanding the strategy of applying to colleges, or want to hear how we can help you craft the perfect essays, schedule a free consultation today. We have a deep understanding of how admissions works, and are always happy to help you find the perfect college for you.
