Hey everyone,
I realize there has been about 2000 posts on here recently about college and college acceptance, but I wanted to make it 2001 just for fun.
I found this article which discussed the lack of acceptance in elite schools (obviously), but acceptance rates at such schools have dropped so low that even the dean of Stanford was shocked. Some may say it's due to the increase in schools which use the common app (517) or because of the increased overseas competition. Regardless, the fact that 95% of applicants are turned away from Stanford is kind of crazy if you ask me. The article discussed that the amount of schools the average student applies to has increased over the years and by 2011 29% of students applied to seven or more schools. Students feel the need to apply to more schools because of the decrease in acceptance rates, but oddly enough this may be why the acceptance rates are dropping. More applications means there is a higher level of exceptional applicants, which causes colleges to lower their acceptance rates and fuels the cycle for the following year. The increase in out of state, foreign, and even domestic applicants, is rising at a rapid rate and decreasing your chances of getting into colleges, elite or not. To provide you with some examples of how this affects your chances of getting in, many schools' acceptance rates have decreased to 20% or even 10% or less. The University of Chicago's acceptance rate has fallen from 40% to 8%, and other schools' acceptance rate has decreased to about half of what it once was 10 years ago. This post isn't meant to stress you out even more or make you freak out because now you figure there's no way you can possibly get into college. It's to show you that if you don't get into the school of your dreams it's not because you're inadequate or you should've taken more AP's and extracurriculars, it's simply because acceptance rates and colleges are changing rapidly. There's more people applying and colleges can't accept a high percentage of applicants if they receive 86,000 applicants, such as UCLA. Colleges can only accept so many people out of the thousands that apply and no matter what happens I'm sure you'll get into a great school! The stress will be over in about 10 months we'll be okay!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-colleges-acceptance-rates-hit-new-lows.html
It might not only be the increase in amount of applications to universities but also the size of the population of students in a given year. For example, Mr. Stewart showed us a graph of the births in the United States for each of the past 50 or so years. There was, I believe, a dip in the 1980s which ostensibly contributed to a much more lax college entrance atmosphere in the late 1990s. The class of 2016, in particular, was one of the largest class sizes in many years (considering they had to put us out on the football field).
ReplyDeleteYes, the baby boom could be assumed to be a cause of the increase in applications, since there are now more high school college prospects. The population is most definitely directly proportional to the amount of individuals trying to get into college. And about the football field, yes it was packed, yet the class sizes only seem to be getting even bigger!
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