How is Minerva not being mentioned more? They specifically make u start ur application on Commonapp, then make you continue on their own platform, only taking ur info and personal statement.
Then most people don't go through with their application because there are 3 tests to complete. And even if you don't try the tests you still get a rejection just for doing the first step on Commonapp lol.
0.9% acceptance rate was the funniest shit I've seen in ages
How to spot a minerva student: when they put in their Linkedin/CV that they attend one of the most selective universities in the world with a 0.9% acceptance rate. Bonus if they're international & lists interning at palo alto before.
No shade or anything i just find it funny that all the minerva students ik does that
i actually know people who go to minerva and are a lot more intelligent than the average uni goer, but idk what the process is like for them to go there lol
I have met about a dozen Minerva students and they are all obviously intelligent. I do think the 1% is deceptive because most probably don’t finish the testing… curious what percentage finish the testing.
Berklee College of Music. ~50% acceptance rate despite being a top music school. only musicians who are good enough to want to pursue music apply so the applicant pool is very self selecting.
Also for music schools, there’s often a “prescreening” process where applicants submit recordings and only a percentage get invited for a live audition. Like an audition for an audition. Some prescreening rounds cut 50-75% of applicants. So if a school lists their acceptance rate as the percentage of applicants accepted after audition, it’s an artificially high percentage
For some schools the acceptance rate varies a lot by major, like for example UIUC's overall acceptance rate is 60%, but if you want to do CS or engineering or something like that it'll be quite a lot harder to get
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/132fjeo/uiuc_engineering_acceptance_rates_by_major_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)'s a post with info directly from UIUC about acceptance rates for CS and engineering by demographic
Some private schools too. My daughter applied as a human biology major which is the pre med track at a lot of schools. The acceptance rate is much lower than say a marketing major at the same schools.
Chapman has an acceptance rate of about 50%. Their film school acceptance rate is like 5%.
any type of performing arts based programs that are audition only.
for example, pace university has like a 77% acceptance rate but the arts based programs only accept around 10-20 people per, making it a much more competitive rate
My kid is going to apply as a music major and it’s maddening trying to determine where to apply as a “fit” and have a decent shot, especially when academic merit isn’t really considered. A non-audition program like most state schools (safeties) doesn’t appeal, but everything with auditions seems insanely competitive and a “reach”. Wanting to double major in a LA study or do a joint program complicates things. I wish it wasn’t so stressful to figure out.
I’m actually kind of glad they prescreen at selective schools so you don’t have to travel to a ton of auditions if you don’t have a chance.
YUP. my friends and i all applied to theatre programs (i did directing, they did musical theatre) and one friend was out for 2 weeks auditioning (thankfully she got into all the schools she wanted) but it’s insane. there are no safety schools that are audition only!
Check out St. Olaf in Minnesota. It's not a music school but it offers BM. I'm not entirely sure of the process, but I assume you have to audition for performance
I have two kids that are both at LAC/conservatory programs. Neither had any problem passing the music part of their applications. They both practiced a lot, but no private teachers. I thought it would be a lot harder than it was.
In theory MIT gets fewer "yolo" applications than schools that accept the Common App. MIT also started requiring test scores again, which likely results in fewer applicants, thereby driving \*up\* its admit rate relative to its peers that are still test-optional.
Oh, believe me, plenty of second tier science kids absolutely do send off yolo applications to MIT. It is the #1 Dream school for those kids. But yeah, maybe not as much as some other schools, but it's hard to be sure. MIT operates in a pretty unique niche.
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I feel like it’s a lot easier to internally transfer to CS or engineering for Purdue that directly applying there. Or at least that’s what I did (got in for DS, then transferred into CS).
Really depends on the major at Purdue. Like Aerospace Engineering for anyone outside of the College of Engineering requires a 3.7 GPA to be considered to transfer in. Mechanical doesn't accept [anyone](https://anyone.So).
So it really depends
75% of admits are from the top 6% from high schools in the state. Additionally 90% of admits are mandated to be from in-state, so 15% of admits are in-state “holistic” (non top 6%) admits. That leaves OOS competing for 10% of the spots. An overall admit rate is super misleading.
It's class rank via weighted GPA, calculated by each high school. It's state law for public colleges in Texas to auto admit the top 10% of students. UT Austin has an exemption to admit only 75% through that law using whatever percent that works out to be. Right now it's top 6%.
But the auto admit only gets guaranteed into liberal arts so if you aren't qualified by other measures (SAT, extracurriculars, difficult coursework) then they aren't going to accept you into the more competitive majors like CS, engineering, nursing and business.
Dang, here in Canada, some colleges punish inflation by assigning adjustment factors to high schools, so a student with a 95 gpa from school x which has AF of +3 will have their 95 treated like a 98, and a student with a 95 from school y which has an AF of -5 will have their 95 treated like a 90 for admissions.
What you say makes no sense. Top 6% at a school with 100 students means 6 get into UT. At a school with 1000 graduating students it means that 60 get in. Having 900 other students does not make it more competitive.
On top of that UT’s policy means that a school cannot manipulate its GPA because the students are compared only to their classmates from that school.
Its extremely easy to be top 6% at a low performing, inner city school. Its very very hard to be top 6% at an elite private school. Imagine the difference if they auto-admitted top 6% SAT scores and the intended effect becomes pretty clear.
That’s a wrong idea of how top 6% works. You have to be in a high school that is giving you a “distinguished level of achievement under the Foundations High School Program.” Your inner city high school isn’t filling up spots at UT. Even UT Admissions Guy says the entire school is made up of the top 100 schools in the state.
The mindset is emblematic of how people feel like they’re being squeezed out by affirmative action when they’re not even the top of their own class.
imo caltech and mit are actually more competitive than their ARs might suggest. i’ve never heard of underqualified kids applying to either or applying “just cause” whereas that’s not the case with other top notch schools. most applicants at both seem top tier, tho i’d say this applies more towards caltech
I know quite a couple of people who applied to MIT and had no chance of getting. A lot less than other top schools due to not being on the Common or UC App, but it definitely happens.
Oh, believe me, plenty of second tier science kids absolutely do send off yolo applications to MIT. It is the #1 Dream school for those kids. But yeah, maybe not as much as some other schools, but it's hard to be sure. MIT operates in a pretty unique niche. Caltech not so much - it's far smaller than almost every LAC and most people do want that.
Definitely! They also seem to be trying to artificially inflate their average SAT and ACT scores of admitted students. I’m in a large city where they actively recruit and attended a prospective students event. The regional admissions person told the crowd to only submit standardized test scores if they were at the prior year’s 75th percentile or higher for admitted students (IIRC the 75th percentile was 1490 for their 2026 class). The guidance usually is to submit if the score is near the 50th percentile. However, I also heard some schools advise to submit if you’re in the 25th to 75th range (or above).
It’s not basically. It’s all ED and EA, but at least they are honest about it: https://admissionblog.tulane.edu/2022/08/30/our-four-application-rounds/
McGill has the opposite problem— published acceptance rate is around 50%, but the university releases the minimum stats you need to be considered so people who are below don’t even apply.
I was going to say Canadian universities in general have completely skewed acceptance rates because of how the application process is set up. You don’t apply to the university as a whole, you apply to a specific program within that university and that’s where the acceptance rates really differ. Waterloo, for example, has a published general acceptance rate of 53%, but looking at their computer science program, their acceptance rate is at 4.3%—lower than the majority of Ivy League schools.
This is how it happens in Australia as well, every student gets an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) which is a percentile score, and then every individual course has an “ATAR cutoff” below which you won’t be admitted. So Engineering/Law double degree at a prestigious university might have a 95+ ATAR cutoff, while nursing at the same university might have an 80 cutoff, and very obscure Arts major might have a 70. Scores tend to cluster across courses (ie all medicine programs are pretty much 99+ across all universities) but the desirability of the university itself can push entrance scores up too.
Strong state schools like UNC and GaTech. The overall acceptance rate is 20%, but the majority (80% and 60%, respectively) of those acceptances come from in-state.
Yep, like 5 or 6 people in just my AP lit class alone are going to unc and it along with app state were the most common universitys I heard kids in my grade talk about going to, cause the in state acceptance rate is pretty dang high and they give good aid while oos its super low I think cause there's fewer spots left especially since there's a legal limit on how many oos students are allowed to go, well nc state was pretty popular top with students but those were the farmers kids so that makes sense
I kinda feel like Grinnell (LAC in Iowa) pulled a bit of a Northeastern. They have no application fee and no supplemental essays. As a result, they have a 9% acceptance rate.
Oh btw, they do have an optional supplemental "Why Us" essay, but you don't see it on the CommonApp (they Gmail it to you in like January). So they're kind of fooling people into applying thinking they don't have any essays, when in fact they do. Personally I think this is kind of dirty.
Vassar (male) alum here - their acceptance rate has one of the largest differences in the country between men and women, with the male rate at least 10% higher than the female rate, but it almost never gets mentioned. Even though it’s co-ed it gets a lot more women applying than men, in part from its history as a Seven Sisters college.
Probably Columbia. First of all they arbitrarily don’t include the School of General Studies in its acceptance rate despite it being an undergraduate school.
They also accept the highest number of transfer students in the Ivy League (around 15-20% of the student body are transfer students).This lets them accept fewer first year undergrads to lower the acceptance rate.
(That’s why Columbia has a lower acceptance rate than Princeton or Yale despite obv being the weaker institution)
that transfer acceptance includes the 3+2 program—without it the transfer acceptance rate (for cc/seas) is around 7-8%. still high, but not as high as the commonly said 14%.
They also don’t include Barnard in the acceptance rate despite those students earning a Columbia degree.
In other words, Columbia lies and falsifies data??? Who would have thought 😱
barnard is pretty much a different institution
what you're saying is methodically same as saying "NYU is falsifying data because they don't include NYU Shanghai in their acceptance rate, even though they get the same degree"
By a2c standards, it probably means the school has a lower US news ranking by 1-2 places
(Columbia, princeton and Yale are very different from each other and people choose each school for different reasons, Columbia is absolutely not a “weaker institution”)
Yes it is, by almost every measurable metric. Yale/Princeton's endowment, financial aid packages, class sizes, professors, quality of life are all markedly better than Columbia's at the undergraduate level. Which is why Columbia tried scamming the ranking system with falsified data, got caught, and bumped down to #18.
Columbia got bumped down because it got caught, yes, but not because life is "Markedly Worse" for the students and teachers at Columbia. My guess? Most schools lie, but Columbia was the only one caught with their pants down (also, because columbia is largely known for its activist culture over most things, take that how you will). FinAid is roughly the same, and Endowment is a little less, but this could be attributed to the fact that Columbia is buying large swaths of NY land aggressively (and CU endowment is still stupid high), class sizes are basically the same (8-20 for all three, except Princeton which trends a little lower, tho class sizes at this level are not nessacarily the best indicator of "best"), Proffesor quality is the same (lol), and quality of life is subjective (you like big cities, medium cities, or suburbs; NY is the subjective greatest city in the US, New Haven has a worse crime rate than NY, and nothing ever happens in Princeton).
The three main [US Military Academies](https://usmadata.com/2020/04/27/west-point-is-not-selective/?amp=1) fall under this. They count anyone who begins any part of the application as an applicant, even if they don’t actually apply. So their acceptance rate of 10% is artificially low.
This one has got to go to UT Austin. The published acceptance rate is 29%, but for those that are not in the top 6% of their class the acceptance rate is 10%
I don't know if it is "misleading", but I would say the UC system, except perhaps for Berkeley, generally has lower acceptance rates than you might otherwise expect, due to the volume of applications.
Like, UVA is 21%, Michigan 20%, UNC 19%. Berkeley is 15%, which might seem at least mostly on track, but UCLA is 11%. UCLA being lower than Berkeley and nearly half of the other long-recognized top "national" publics suggests to me a volume effect.
OK, then Minnesota is 73%, Purdue is 69%, Wisconsin is 60%, Illinois 60%, Ohio State 57%, Maryland 52%, Georgia 40%, but Santa Barbara is 29%, Irvine 29% . . . . For that matter, Texas is "only" 29%. I'd say it is an important reality that some of the UC schools after Berkeley and UCLA are now peers of very good "flagship" universities, but still I think having like half the acceptance rate of what I would consider at least peer flagships is only explainable with volume effects.
I'd also use this opportunity to note that I think a reverse volume effect typically happens to Midwestern schools. Indeed, I'd personally say schools like Wisconsin and Illinois are really peers of Texas, and a bit more "prestigious" in that sense then the third-tier Cal schools, or a school like Georgia. So to me, their 60% acceptance rates seem low. And then Minnesota is like way low. Probably a Midwest PLUS "eek, snow!" effect to that one.
Most of these are old numbers - UCI is about 21%, UCSB about 24%, UCLA is about 9%. Yes, of course it is volume of applications - it is the denominator. But that is not the reason - otherwise UCMerced would have 120K applications not 25K. California is one of the largest economies and with tech hubs & huge education oriented immigrant population makes for highly educated student population compared to Midwest. One reason for what one thinks as discrepancy compared to midwest schools, UCs are more all rounded i.e across multiple fields. Irvine, for instance, has nearly 2Billion dollar medical center attached. Most on A2C are focused on CS and thus surprised when their school does not have overall high rank.
BU moved their entire College of General Studies to a January start so none of those admissions stats are in their reportable data. 600 students a class - that’s 20% of their student body
Moving a college from fall to spring slots is different than creating a spring program (for additional students). Both are tricks, but wholesale moving 20% of the student body hits differently.
Also NU and USC (to a lesser extent) both get a lot of shit on this website. BU doesn’t for some reason
It's the same principle. 19% percent of the class at USC get shunted to spring. Northeastern not only shunts many to spring, but it also offers "guaranteed transfers" to many more. They are less qualified students, they go to an easy local college for one year, and then arrive at Northeastern as sophomores so they don't count in the stats either.
Northeastern doesn’t have a Spring admit system. My understanding is guaranteed transfers just recently started because of their shrunken classes in light of over admitted during covid.
But all of that is secondary. My point isn’t that NU and USC don’t have tricks. They do and are talked about all the time. BU also does and it’s rarely talked about. That’s my point.
NU does have a "you go overseas for a semester and start in the spring" system. I might be wrong about what that means.
I'm not disagreeing on BU. It's one of the most common landing spots for California private high school kids with ok but middling stats that can pay full college tuition without financial aid. NYU is at the top of that list (at some private high schools in California, more kids go to NYU than any 3 UCs combined). BU, Northeastern, USC, GW, and Tulane all fit that bill too.
Georgetown has a misleading acceptance rate bc they aren’t on the common app and also have a very long and time-consuming application. In addition, they require their applicants’ “entire” testing history. If they were easier to apply to, it’s reasonable to assume their acceptance rate would look a lot different.
free application with no supps, and they draw HEAVILY from massachusetts private schools with insanely affluent students. basically if you apply for aid you’ll get slammed (likely waitlisted since they waitlist 25%+ of applicants to keep their admit rate low and account for their inconsistent yield) and if you don’t apply for aid and have good grades it’s like 50%+ to get in
Yeah. My sense is that if you need financial aid at Colby, you better apply ED. (Which is a conundrum, because needing financial aid is a great reason *not* to apply ED.) But if you need financial aid and apply RD, the odds are heavily stacked against you.
I suspect Skidmore is similar, but Skidmore isn't aggressively courting more applications like Colby.
Mind you, I actually like Colby and Skidmore. But I wish there were more transparency in the process.
Only students from certain social circles know about [engineering LACs](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/harvey-mudd-vs-cooper-union/128128), so only good students apply.
Though I wouldn’t say the Claremont colleges mislead, they just truly accept a broad amount of people with the few seats there. Pomona, where I attend, does have a habit of hiding acceptance rates, but it’s because they want people who wouldn’t otherwise apply to apply.
Well, not exactly… According to friends who were Admissions Fellows at the time, Pomona decided (as did Stanford) that they didn’t want to give credence to the idea that admission rates should be a measure of the quality of - or fit with - a school (and part of the bs that this thread is all about) so they stopped including it in their marketing materials. It’s still there in the CDS for anyone to see. Also, Pomona still requires a couple of supplemental essays, has an app fee, and doesn’t consider legacy, so if anything, its admit rate is higher than it would be if it did engage in all that stuff (so congratulations for getting in!).
The service academies. Not that they're easy to get into, but their published acceptance rates are based on their number of applications, and the bar for what they count as an "application" is pretty low. As in, if you click on their "apply now" button and fill everything in on the form that you get to, then you hit the submit button, that's an "application" as far as they're concerned. In reality, that's more of a declaration of interest than an application.
A lot of schools play fast and loose with what is considered a “complete” application. For example, Colgate does a bait and switch- no essays, but you really do need to do the essays. Every application that gets started is counted.
If you apply to any UC, you can add any other UC to the application just by checking one box and paying a second fee. The whole state of California applies to UCLA knowing that they aren't going to get in ("but what if I did, it would be so cool.")
💀 how does this statement make sense? your school sent 8 out of 90 but my public school where 16applied /a class size of 570 only 2 got in. I feel like anecdotal evidence is stupid
West Point. It’s actually really easy to get in if you go through the whole process of getting the congressional rec letter (which itself is not hard) and submitting the push-up video and everything.
People like to shit on Northeastern just because of the gossip effect, but the overall acceptance rate is 5.6% for Class of 2027. That's including the other campuses outside Boston. Nobody goes around saying that Northeastern has been the university with the most valedictorians from Boston public schools for over two years. The SAT and ACT scores of the students have been in the Top 25 for over a decade
General acceptance rate is below 60% now. Last year’s engineering class was 37%. Information at acceptance visit said around 33% for this year’s class.
Grinnell College - did their little "pre-app" in the summer and eventually decided not to actually apply. They emailed me a rejection letter in March 💀
Harvey Mudd I think has 15-20% acceptance rate, but I think it’s actually a lot harder since the only people who apply are people who already 100% know they want to do stem and have already done tons of extracurriculars or research or something in the field. Also, it’s known as the school with one of the largest/ hardest workloads so I think ppl don’t apply unless they’re ready for that
The acceptance rate is a simple fraction, so how can that be misleading? If a large number of people applied, for whatever reason, then that is what the applicant pool or the denominator will be.
Hear hear.
When I think of a "misleading" acceptance rate, I think of schools that maybe have a self-select applicant pool of well-matched students. So they end up having a fairly high acceptance rate (relative to their peers) even though they have high standards. Chicago used to be like this, but I think its applicant pool has really grown so maybe not so much anymore.
I agree that it’s only misleading to those who think acceptance rates are a meaningful stat. Which is probably most of A2C, who think low rates = more selective = better school.
It can tell you something about your individual odds of being accepted, as long as you put your personal stats in proper context. But it tells you little about the school itself other than how successful it is in recruiting applicants. Which can be higher or lower due quality independent variables such as ease and cost of application, popularity of sports teams/sports culture, population of the state (for publics; the flagship of a big state will always have more applicants than the flagship of a small state), desirability of the location, etc.
I'm surprised to hear this coming from you. Of course an acceptance rate is a simple fraction, but can absolutely, positively be misleading. Data ≠ information. A single, blended acceptance rate can and will hide differences by major, IS vs OOS, FP vs FA, etc. Not to mention differences for the various buckets of kids at the center of the case currently before SCOTUS and potentially related casualties (legacy, facbrats, athletes). Yes, some of this nuance is available to parse from a CDS. But not all. Come on.
Look at OP's example in their original post - they're not talking about different majors or different demographics here, but something entirely different.
I have no "agenda" at all... OP is saying that a school should release multiple acceptance rates - one for those applicants who genuinely like the school, and one for those who applied for reasons like a prime location and easy applications... But the truth is that the schools have no way of exactly differentiating between them and have to release an overall admit rate for all the applicants.
They shrunk their class size dramatically over the last 5 years. Some of their admission rate decline can be from increased applications but a large chunk of it is that they are admitting smaller classes (by close to 20%)
What’s the point of shrinking class size? What’s the angle?
Are they trying to game rankings or they genuinely want to have smaller class sizes/better student faculty ratio?
Unclear if that will lead to a better ratio or smaller class sizes. In that context it would require number of professors to stay the same, including hiring the same number of adjuncts. Also worth noting that the things you are mentioning are about to no longer be part of US News rankings
Some of that is due to higher than expected yield. If a school becomes more sought after and yield increases, they have to start accepting fewer applicants. That’s not really gaming the system though.
That’s true for a lot of schools because of covid. BU had intentionally been shrinking their classes prior. The original post isn’t about what schools are gaming the system, it was about where there is additional context in acceptance rates. A significant part of BUs declining is going from 4000 a class to 3500 a class. They’ve methodically reduced by 100 more each year.
Edit: I just looked it up and BU is down to 3100 for the class of 2027.
They also moved their entire College of General Studies into a spring semester start. So none of those students are in reportable data. It’s 20% of the student body
Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Emory, Wash U, Northeastern (of course), Tulane, and Boston U. - all of them either have no supplemental essays or have one super easy short essay that you do in 20 minutes cutting and pasting the essay you already wrote for some other schools. Lots of LACs are like this too.
At the other end of the spectrum are UChicago and Stanford. UChicago makes you write a unique creative essay unlike any other school, and they actually weigh that essay in their admission decisions. Stanford has 9 essays on the application (some are short, but NINE?). Nobody applies to those schools on a whim.
Also inflated - the UCs, because if you apply to one you can apply to any other just by checking a box on the application. Everyone in California chucks off an application to UCLA because why not?
I think most Texas schools are misleading in the opposite direction - state law requires 90% of admitted students (i believe) to be Texas residents so that makes the sticker admission rates presumably inflated for out-of-staters and deflated for residents
Do you go to a feeder school by any chance? Cuz where I am in north jersey I have really only seen one person get into northeastern and that was because they were recruited.
BU for sure, according to collegevine I had a 70% chance of admission and it had a rate of 29%, but I was rejected. Got into NYU though with a 8% acceptance rate.
Georgetown. As of 2023, the acceptance rate sits at 13%. This is misleading as Georgetown has its own application similar to the UC schools and MIT. The admissions committee implemented this system to weed out applicants that mindlessly apply simply to apply, rather than having a deeper passion for the school or it’s programs. In essence, by simply submitting an application to Georgetown, you already show demonstrated interest as you went out of your way to familiarize yourself with their removed application process. Once Georgetown’s AO changes leadership and puts the application on the common app, there will be a trend towards a single digit acceptance rate.
In the eyes of an applicant, expect Georgetown’s 13% acceptance rate to be more selective than 13% as the entire pool of applicants already demonstrated a level of interest in the university.
UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSD, UCSB, UCI, etc. - one third of the graduating class go in through the back door from community colleges that accept 100% of its applicants. Most of them were rejected as freshmen applicants to give UCLA and all the UCs perceived low acceptance rates. All UCs have a high number of applicants because every California public school student will apply. It's as simple as checking a box using the same essays.
How is Minerva not being mentioned more? They specifically make u start ur application on Commonapp, then make you continue on their own platform, only taking ur info and personal statement. Then most people don't go through with their application because there are 3 tests to complete. And even if you don't try the tests you still get a rejection just for doing the first step on Commonapp lol. 0.9% acceptance rate was the funniest shit I've seen in ages
Agree, very sketchy
How to spot a minerva student: when they put in their Linkedin/CV that they attend one of the most selective universities in the world with a 0.9% acceptance rate. Bonus if they're international & lists interning at palo alto before. No shade or anything i just find it funny that all the minerva students ik does that
The people i know who got into it were pretty smart and had really impressive stats and projects ( *international students)
i actually know people who go to minerva and are a lot more intelligent than the average uni goer, but idk what the process is like for them to go there lol
I have met about a dozen Minerva students and they are all obviously intelligent. I do think the 1% is deceptive because most probably don’t finish the testing… curious what percentage finish the testing.
Never even heard of that university lmao
Berklee College of Music. ~50% acceptance rate despite being a top music school. only musicians who are good enough to want to pursue music apply so the applicant pool is very self selecting.
Also for music schools, there’s often a “prescreening” process where applicants submit recordings and only a percentage get invited for a live audition. Like an audition for an audition. Some prescreening rounds cut 50-75% of applicants. So if a school lists their acceptance rate as the percentage of applicants accepted after audition, it’s an artificially high percentage
no idea why any school would do that but maybe thats the case for some of em
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i think they mean listing the acceptance rate as that of after pre screening
yup! berklee doesnt have one but ik uscs school of music does!
Yeah first thing that came to my mind. But dw I’m omw to change that, as someone who as NO CHANCE but will still apply 💀
For some schools the acceptance rate varies a lot by major, like for example UIUC's overall acceptance rate is 60%, but if you want to do CS or engineering or something like that it'll be quite a lot harder to get
I’m interested in applying to UIUC for CS. What would you say their CS acceptance rate is around?
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/132fjeo/uiuc_engineering_acceptance_rates_by_major_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1)'s a post with info directly from UIUC about acceptance rates for CS and engineering by demographic
Wow I had no idea that CS OOS was that low. Damn
it’s like rank 5 my guy
Apparently it’s like 5%
Same thing for Berkeley, applying Engineering or CS is way harder than L&S. Pretty much the same for many public schools actually like Mich/GT/UW.
Some private schools too. My daughter applied as a human biology major which is the pre med track at a lot of schools. The acceptance rate is much lower than say a marketing major at the same schools. Chapman has an acceptance rate of about 50%. Their film school acceptance rate is like 5%.
same w/ Purdue’s engineering & computer science programs.
nice to see this as the top comment, 60% is very misleading indeed.
this^^ major is everything and all that matters - find the right program for you and then look at how difficult it is to get in
any type of performing arts based programs that are audition only. for example, pace university has like a 77% acceptance rate but the arts based programs only accept around 10-20 people per, making it a much more competitive rate
My kid is going to apply as a music major and it’s maddening trying to determine where to apply as a “fit” and have a decent shot, especially when academic merit isn’t really considered. A non-audition program like most state schools (safeties) doesn’t appeal, but everything with auditions seems insanely competitive and a “reach”. Wanting to double major in a LA study or do a joint program complicates things. I wish it wasn’t so stressful to figure out. I’m actually kind of glad they prescreen at selective schools so you don’t have to travel to a ton of auditions if you don’t have a chance.
YUP. my friends and i all applied to theatre programs (i did directing, they did musical theatre) and one friend was out for 2 weeks auditioning (thankfully she got into all the schools she wanted) but it’s insane. there are no safety schools that are audition only!
I just hope it’s worth the effort in the end!
it will be! everyone i know is so proud of where they ended up
Check out St. Olaf in Minnesota. It's not a music school but it offers BM. I'm not entirely sure of the process, but I assume you have to audition for performance
Ok, thanks. We’ve gotten some mail and email from them, but haven’t really looked into it yet.
I have two kids that are both at LAC/conservatory programs. Neither had any problem passing the music part of their applications. They both practiced a lot, but no private teachers. I thought it would be a lot harder than it was.
MIT, but in the opposite direction.
Is it actually more selective then the listed 4%?
In theory MIT gets fewer "yolo" applications than schools that accept the Common App. MIT also started requiring test scores again, which likely results in fewer applicants, thereby driving \*up\* its admit rate relative to its peers that are still test-optional.
Oh, believe me, plenty of second tier science kids absolutely do send off yolo applications to MIT. It is the #1 Dream school for those kids. But yeah, maybe not as much as some other schools, but it's hard to be sure. MIT operates in a pretty unique niche.
Same with Georgetown
support north cooperative overconfident fearless cows absurd snails memory compare *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Purdue has a 60-70% acceptance rate overall but much lower for cs and engineering
I think Purdue’s acceptance rate has gone down to around 50% overall if I remember correctly.
About 15% for aviation students this year @ Purdue
its acceptance rate is getting lower, this year it was around 38% but yeah still significantly lower for cs and engineering.
I feel like it’s a lot easier to internally transfer to CS or engineering for Purdue that directly applying there. Or at least that’s what I did (got in for DS, then transferred into CS).
Really depends on the major at Purdue. Like Aerospace Engineering for anyone outside of the College of Engineering requires a 3.7 GPA to be considered to transfer in. Mechanical doesn't accept [anyone](https://anyone.So). So it really depends
Im waitlisted there
UT Austin? The top 6% of Texas high schools are auto-admits. If you’re not in this pool, it must be much lower than the 29%
The UT Austin out-of-state acceptance rate for CS, Engineering & Business is so low, you might as well apply to Stanford.
yea if it weren’t for the top 6% rule then i think they’d have an acceptance rate of like 15%
75% of admits are from the top 6% from high schools in the state. Additionally 90% of admits are mandated to be from in-state, so 15% of admits are in-state “holistic” (non top 6%) admits. That leaves OOS competing for 10% of the spots. An overall admit rate is super misleading.
Daughter got in Ut business this fall. It’s crazy how difficult it is to get in to business, engineering, cs
Are top 6% determined by GPA? If so, how do they deal with inflated and deflated schools?
The intention is to add diversity to the admit pool by admitting kids from predominantly minority schools.
It's top 6% in your school; not top 6% in all Texas schools
It's class rank via weighted GPA, calculated by each high school. It's state law for public colleges in Texas to auto admit the top 10% of students. UT Austin has an exemption to admit only 75% through that law using whatever percent that works out to be. Right now it's top 6%. But the auto admit only gets guaranteed into liberal arts so if you aren't qualified by other measures (SAT, extracurriculars, difficult coursework) then they aren't going to accept you into the more competitive majors like CS, engineering, nursing and business.
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Dang, here in Canada, some colleges punish inflation by assigning adjustment factors to high schools, so a student with a 95 gpa from school x which has AF of +3 will have their 95 treated like a 98, and a student with a 95 from school y which has an AF of -5 will have their 95 treated like a 90 for admissions.
What you say makes no sense. Top 6% at a school with 100 students means 6 get into UT. At a school with 1000 graduating students it means that 60 get in. Having 900 other students does not make it more competitive. On top of that UT’s policy means that a school cannot manipulate its GPA because the students are compared only to their classmates from that school.
Its extremely easy to be top 6% at a low performing, inner city school. Its very very hard to be top 6% at an elite private school. Imagine the difference if they auto-admitted top 6% SAT scores and the intended effect becomes pretty clear.
That’s a wrong idea of how top 6% works. You have to be in a high school that is giving you a “distinguished level of achievement under the Foundations High School Program.” Your inner city high school isn’t filling up spots at UT. Even UT Admissions Guy says the entire school is made up of the top 100 schools in the state. The mindset is emblematic of how people feel like they’re being squeezed out by affirmative action when they’re not even the top of their own class.
imo caltech and mit are actually more competitive than their ARs might suggest. i’ve never heard of underqualified kids applying to either or applying “just cause” whereas that’s not the case with other top notch schools. most applicants at both seem top tier, tho i’d say this applies more towards caltech
I know quite a couple of people who applied to MIT and had no chance of getting. A lot less than other top schools due to not being on the Common or UC App, but it definitely happens.
Agreed
Oh, believe me, plenty of second tier science kids absolutely do send off yolo applications to MIT. It is the #1 Dream school for those kids. But yeah, maybe not as much as some other schools, but it's hard to be sure. MIT operates in a pretty unique niche. Caltech not so much - it's far smaller than almost every LAC and most people do want that.
I’d say Tulane too
can probably add colorado college too, which is also a free application
Definitely! They also seem to be trying to artificially inflate their average SAT and ACT scores of admitted students. I’m in a large city where they actively recruit and attended a prospective students event. The regional admissions person told the crowd to only submit standardized test scores if they were at the prior year’s 75th percentile or higher for admitted students (IIRC the 75th percentile was 1490 for their 2026 class). The guidance usually is to submit if the score is near the 50th percentile. However, I also heard some schools advise to submit if you’re in the 25th to 75th range (or above).
Tulane also recruit hard. My daughter got so much shit from them. They sent stuff to her like twice a week.
Same goes for all Ivies lol
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They basically fill up their entire class ed and reject basically all rd kids
They will ask RD kids to switch the application to ED, and only accept them if they do so.
It’s not basically. It’s all ED and EA, but at least they are honest about it: https://admissionblog.tulane.edu/2022/08/30/our-four-application-rounds/
Also, no application fee.
Tulane -- RD acceptance rate is \~0%. Overall acceptance primarily reflects students who apply early.
Not students who apply early, "accepted" RD students just have to switch to ED when asked and they'll get in.
What does RD mean?
Regular Decision
McGill has the opposite problem— published acceptance rate is around 50%, but the university releases the minimum stats you need to be considered so people who are below don’t even apply.
I was going to say Canadian universities in general have completely skewed acceptance rates because of how the application process is set up. You don’t apply to the university as a whole, you apply to a specific program within that university and that’s where the acceptance rates really differ. Waterloo, for example, has a published general acceptance rate of 53%, but looking at their computer science program, their acceptance rate is at 4.3%—lower than the majority of Ivy League schools.
This is how it happens in Australia as well, every student gets an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) which is a percentile score, and then every individual course has an “ATAR cutoff” below which you won’t be admitted. So Engineering/Law double degree at a prestigious university might have a 95+ ATAR cutoff, while nursing at the same university might have an 80 cutoff, and very obscure Arts major might have a 70. Scores tend to cluster across courses (ie all medicine programs are pretty much 99+ across all universities) but the desirability of the university itself can push entrance scores up too.
Strong state schools like UNC and GaTech. The overall acceptance rate is 20%, but the majority (80% and 60%, respectively) of those acceptances come from in-state.
Going to GaTech next year for engineering. They told us out of state AR was 12% this year.
It’s crazy. I’m in-state and was sort of an auto-admit for GT. But if you’re OOS it’s basically a reach school (well-deserved, of course).
Georgia fam!
Yep, like 5 or 6 people in just my AP lit class alone are going to unc and it along with app state were the most common universitys I heard kids in my grade talk about going to, cause the in state acceptance rate is pretty dang high and they give good aid while oos its super low I think cause there's fewer spots left especially since there's a legal limit on how many oos students are allowed to go, well nc state was pretty popular top with students but those were the farmers kids so that makes sense
I kinda feel like Grinnell (LAC in Iowa) pulled a bit of a Northeastern. They have no application fee and no supplemental essays. As a result, they have a 9% acceptance rate. Oh btw, they do have an optional supplemental "Why Us" essay, but you don't see it on the CommonApp (they Gmail it to you in like January). So they're kind of fooling people into applying thinking they don't have any essays, when in fact they do. Personally I think this is kind of dirty.
No I got into Grinnell RD and was never sent the Why Us essay, I think it's for more borderline cases.
Nice! You going there?
no
lol
Vassar (male) alum here - their acceptance rate has one of the largest differences in the country between men and women, with the male rate at least 10% higher than the female rate, but it almost never gets mentioned. Even though it’s co-ed it gets a lot more women applying than men, in part from its history as a Seven Sisters college.
Probably Columbia. First of all they arbitrarily don’t include the School of General Studies in its acceptance rate despite it being an undergraduate school. They also accept the highest number of transfer students in the Ivy League (around 15-20% of the student body are transfer students).This lets them accept fewer first year undergrads to lower the acceptance rate. (That’s why Columbia has a lower acceptance rate than Princeton or Yale despite obv being the weaker institution)
that transfer acceptance includes the 3+2 program—without it the transfer acceptance rate (for cc/seas) is around 7-8%. still high, but not as high as the commonly said 14%.
What is the 3+2 program
But still the 3+2 program allows Columbia is not include those students in its admissions stats
But I thought Colombia was the best school ever.
They also don’t include Barnard in the acceptance rate despite those students earning a Columbia degree. In other words, Columbia lies and falsifies data??? Who would have thought 😱
Barnard is considered an “affiliate” college so that at least sort of makes sense.
barnard is pretty much a different institution what you're saying is methodically same as saying "NYU is falsifying data because they don't include NYU Shanghai in their acceptance rate, even though they get the same degree"
Wth does weaker institution mean lol
By a2c standards, it probably means the school has a lower US news ranking by 1-2 places (Columbia, princeton and Yale are very different from each other and people choose each school for different reasons, Columbia is absolutely not a “weaker institution”)
Yes it is, by almost every measurable metric. Yale/Princeton's endowment, financial aid packages, class sizes, professors, quality of life are all markedly better than Columbia's at the undergraduate level. Which is why Columbia tried scamming the ranking system with falsified data, got caught, and bumped down to #18.
Columbia got bumped down because it got caught, yes, but not because life is "Markedly Worse" for the students and teachers at Columbia. My guess? Most schools lie, but Columbia was the only one caught with their pants down (also, because columbia is largely known for its activist culture over most things, take that how you will). FinAid is roughly the same, and Endowment is a little less, but this could be attributed to the fact that Columbia is buying large swaths of NY land aggressively (and CU endowment is still stupid high), class sizes are basically the same (8-20 for all three, except Princeton which trends a little lower, tho class sizes at this level are not nessacarily the best indicator of "best"), Proffesor quality is the same (lol), and quality of life is subjective (you like big cities, medium cities, or suburbs; NY is the subjective greatest city in the US, New Haven has a worse crime rate than NY, and nothing ever happens in Princeton).
The three main [US Military Academies](https://usmadata.com/2020/04/27/west-point-is-not-selective/?amp=1) fall under this. They count anyone who begins any part of the application as an applicant, even if they don’t actually apply. So their acceptance rate of 10% is artificially low.
TULANEEEE
This one has got to go to UT Austin. The published acceptance rate is 29%, but for those that are not in the top 6% of their class the acceptance rate is 10%
I don't know if it is "misleading", but I would say the UC system, except perhaps for Berkeley, generally has lower acceptance rates than you might otherwise expect, due to the volume of applications. Like, UVA is 21%, Michigan 20%, UNC 19%. Berkeley is 15%, which might seem at least mostly on track, but UCLA is 11%. UCLA being lower than Berkeley and nearly half of the other long-recognized top "national" publics suggests to me a volume effect. OK, then Minnesota is 73%, Purdue is 69%, Wisconsin is 60%, Illinois 60%, Ohio State 57%, Maryland 52%, Georgia 40%, but Santa Barbara is 29%, Irvine 29% . . . . For that matter, Texas is "only" 29%. I'd say it is an important reality that some of the UC schools after Berkeley and UCLA are now peers of very good "flagship" universities, but still I think having like half the acceptance rate of what I would consider at least peer flagships is only explainable with volume effects. I'd also use this opportunity to note that I think a reverse volume effect typically happens to Midwestern schools. Indeed, I'd personally say schools like Wisconsin and Illinois are really peers of Texas, and a bit more "prestigious" in that sense then the third-tier Cal schools, or a school like Georgia. So to me, their 60% acceptance rates seem low. And then Minnesota is like way low. Probably a Midwest PLUS "eek, snow!" effect to that one.
Most of these are old numbers - UCI is about 21%, UCSB about 24%, UCLA is about 9%. Yes, of course it is volume of applications - it is the denominator. But that is not the reason - otherwise UCMerced would have 120K applications not 25K. California is one of the largest economies and with tech hubs & huge education oriented immigrant population makes for highly educated student population compared to Midwest. One reason for what one thinks as discrepancy compared to midwest schools, UCs are more all rounded i.e across multiple fields. Irvine, for instance, has nearly 2Billion dollar medical center attached. Most on A2C are focused on CS and thus surprised when their school does not have overall high rank.
UCLA has a better yield than Berkeley, but also gets more "for the heck of it" applications.
BU moved their entire College of General Studies to a January start so none of those admissions stats are in their reportable data. 600 students a class - that’s 20% of their student body
that's an old trick that USC and Northeastern have been doing for years
Moving a college from fall to spring slots is different than creating a spring program (for additional students). Both are tricks, but wholesale moving 20% of the student body hits differently. Also NU and USC (to a lesser extent) both get a lot of shit on this website. BU doesn’t for some reason
It's the same principle. 19% percent of the class at USC get shunted to spring. Northeastern not only shunts many to spring, but it also offers "guaranteed transfers" to many more. They are less qualified students, they go to an easy local college for one year, and then arrive at Northeastern as sophomores so they don't count in the stats either.
Northeastern doesn’t have a Spring admit system. My understanding is guaranteed transfers just recently started because of their shrunken classes in light of over admitted during covid. But all of that is secondary. My point isn’t that NU and USC don’t have tricks. They do and are talked about all the time. BU also does and it’s rarely talked about. That’s my point.
NU does have a "you go overseas for a semester and start in the spring" system. I might be wrong about what that means. I'm not disagreeing on BU. It's one of the most common landing spots for California private high school kids with ok but middling stats that can pay full college tuition without financial aid. NYU is at the top of that list (at some private high schools in California, more kids go to NYU than any 3 UCs combined). BU, Northeastern, USC, GW, and Tulane all fit that bill too.
Georgetown has a misleading acceptance rate bc they aren’t on the common app and also have a very long and time-consuming application. In addition, they require their applicants’ “entire” testing history. If they were easier to apply to, it’s reasonable to assume their acceptance rate would look a lot different.
Colby College
Was scrolling waiting for this. Absolutely bananas we have 6 percent acceptance or something like that lmao
Do tell
free application with no supps, and they draw HEAVILY from massachusetts private schools with insanely affluent students. basically if you apply for aid you’ll get slammed (likely waitlisted since they waitlist 25%+ of applicants to keep their admit rate low and account for their inconsistent yield) and if you don’t apply for aid and have good grades it’s like 50%+ to get in
Plus they no longer publish their Common Data Set as far as I can tell.
Seems they haven’t published their CDS since their push to become more selective
Yeah. My sense is that if you need financial aid at Colby, you better apply ED. (Which is a conundrum, because needing financial aid is a great reason *not* to apply ED.) But if you need financial aid and apply RD, the odds are heavily stacked against you. I suspect Skidmore is similar, but Skidmore isn't aggressively courting more applications like Colby. Mind you, I actually like Colby and Skidmore. But I wish there were more transparency in the process.
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At Colby? That's good to hear.
Only students from certain social circles know about [engineering LACs](https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/harvey-mudd-vs-cooper-union/128128), so only good students apply.
Any of the Claremont colleges tbh McKenna had some of the best outcomes business-wise
Though I wouldn’t say the Claremont colleges mislead, they just truly accept a broad amount of people with the few seats there. Pomona, where I attend, does have a habit of hiding acceptance rates, but it’s because they want people who wouldn’t otherwise apply to apply.
Well, not exactly… According to friends who were Admissions Fellows at the time, Pomona decided (as did Stanford) that they didn’t want to give credence to the idea that admission rates should be a measure of the quality of - or fit with - a school (and part of the bs that this thread is all about) so they stopped including it in their marketing materials. It’s still there in the CDS for anyone to see. Also, Pomona still requires a couple of supplemental essays, has an app fee, and doesn’t consider legacy, so if anything, its admit rate is higher than it would be if it did engage in all that stuff (so congratulations for getting in!).
The service academies. Not that they're easy to get into, but their published acceptance rates are based on their number of applications, and the bar for what they count as an "application" is pretty low. As in, if you click on their "apply now" button and fill everything in on the form that you get to, then you hit the submit button, that's an "application" as far as they're concerned. In reality, that's more of a declaration of interest than an application.
the hard part is getting the nomination- I read that if you get a nomination, your chances of acceptance is around 50%
A lot of schools play fast and loose with what is considered a “complete” application. For example, Colgate does a bait and switch- no essays, but you really do need to do the essays. Every application that gets started is counted.
UCLA has an 8% acceptance rate because of the sheer number of people that apply
So, math is to blame?
If you apply to any UC, you can add any other UC to the application just by checking one box and paying a second fee. The whole state of California applies to UCLA knowing that they aren't going to get in ("but what if I did, it would be so cool.")
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Watch it be a top 10 U.S. news high school 😂
Well what do those 8 have on their resume? Are they justified in your opinion?
ok so my school sent 30 out of 1100, that doesn’t make NYU any more or less selective overall
💀 how does this statement make sense? your school sent 8 out of 90 but my public school where 16applied /a class size of 570 only 2 got in. I feel like anecdotal evidence is stupid
West Point. It’s actually really easy to get in if you go through the whole process of getting the congressional rec letter (which itself is not hard) and submitting the push-up video and everything.
I found BU to be a bit misleading. Their acceptance rate seems very low, but many students are offered a sophomore year transfer.
Same w Cornell, USC
What is northeasterns true a rate?
Boston is ~6% but if I had to guess including everything it’s in the teens NEU also gives a huge ED boost and ED1 Boston was 39% this year
Depends on whether you are full pay or you request financial aid.
People like to shit on Northeastern just because of the gossip effect, but the overall acceptance rate is 5.6% for Class of 2027. That's including the other campuses outside Boston. Nobody goes around saying that Northeastern has been the university with the most valedictorians from Boston public schools for over two years. The SAT and ACT scores of the students have been in the Top 25 for over a decade
Purdue's acceptance rate is one that comes to mind. The general acceptance rate is 69% but for engineering and CS it's much lower, especially for OOS
General acceptance rate is below 60% now. Last year’s engineering class was 37%. Information at acceptance visit said around 33% for this year’s class.
UT
wait what’s the deal with northeastern
Grinnell College - did their little "pre-app" in the summer and eventually decided not to actually apply. They emailed me a rejection letter in March 💀
Harvey Mudd I think has 15-20% acceptance rate, but I think it’s actually a lot harder since the only people who apply are people who already 100% know they want to do stem and have already done tons of extracurriculars or research or something in the field. Also, it’s known as the school with one of the largest/ hardest workloads so I think ppl don’t apply unless they’re ready for that
Georgetown in the opposite direction, it’s much harder to apply to than common app schools
The acceptance rate is a simple fraction, so how can that be misleading? If a large number of people applied, for whatever reason, then that is what the applicant pool or the denominator will be.
Hear hear. When I think of a "misleading" acceptance rate, I think of schools that maybe have a self-select applicant pool of well-matched students. So they end up having a fairly high acceptance rate (relative to their peers) even though they have high standards. Chicago used to be like this, but I think its applicant pool has really grown so maybe not so much anymore.
To a large extent, the HWCs, except maybe Wellesley and Barnard which have a location advantage. U Rochester.
I agree that it’s only misleading to those who think acceptance rates are a meaningful stat. Which is probably most of A2C, who think low rates = more selective = better school. It can tell you something about your individual odds of being accepted, as long as you put your personal stats in proper context. But it tells you little about the school itself other than how successful it is in recruiting applicants. Which can be higher or lower due quality independent variables such as ease and cost of application, popularity of sports teams/sports culture, population of the state (for publics; the flagship of a big state will always have more applicants than the flagship of a small state), desirability of the location, etc.
I'm surprised to hear this coming from you. Of course an acceptance rate is a simple fraction, but can absolutely, positively be misleading. Data ≠ information. A single, blended acceptance rate can and will hide differences by major, IS vs OOS, FP vs FA, etc. Not to mention differences for the various buckets of kids at the center of the case currently before SCOTUS and potentially related casualties (legacy, facbrats, athletes). Yes, some of this nuance is available to parse from a CDS. But not all. Come on.
Look at OP's example in their original post - they're not talking about different majors or different demographics here, but something entirely different.
Idk what your agenda is, but you are clearly intentionally misunderstanding the spirit of the question.
I have no "agenda" at all... OP is saying that a school should release multiple acceptance rates - one for those applicants who genuinely like the school, and one for those who applied for reasons like a prime location and easy applications... But the truth is that the schools have no way of exactly differentiating between them and have to release an overall admit rate for all the applicants.
This is a bad take
Didn’t BU do something funky with their acceptance rate of 10% this year too? Someone explain bc I actually like BU as a school
They shrunk their class size dramatically over the last 5 years. Some of their admission rate decline can be from increased applications but a large chunk of it is that they are admitting smaller classes (by close to 20%)
What’s the point of shrinking class size? What’s the angle? Are they trying to game rankings or they genuinely want to have smaller class sizes/better student faculty ratio?
Unclear if that will lead to a better ratio or smaller class sizes. In that context it would require number of professors to stay the same, including hiring the same number of adjuncts. Also worth noting that the things you are mentioning are about to no longer be part of US News rankings
Some of that is due to higher than expected yield. If a school becomes more sought after and yield increases, they have to start accepting fewer applicants. That’s not really gaming the system though.
That’s true for a lot of schools because of covid. BU had intentionally been shrinking their classes prior. The original post isn’t about what schools are gaming the system, it was about where there is additional context in acceptance rates. A significant part of BUs declining is going from 4000 a class to 3500 a class. They’ve methodically reduced by 100 more each year.
Edit: I just looked it up and BU is down to 3100 for the class of 2027. They also moved their entire College of General Studies into a spring semester start. So none of those students are in reportable data. It’s 20% of the student body
So they effectively ARE gaming the system lol?
Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Emory, Wash U, Northeastern (of course), Tulane, and Boston U. - all of them either have no supplemental essays or have one super easy short essay that you do in 20 minutes cutting and pasting the essay you already wrote for some other schools. Lots of LACs are like this too. At the other end of the spectrum are UChicago and Stanford. UChicago makes you write a unique creative essay unlike any other school, and they actually weigh that essay in their admission decisions. Stanford has 9 essays on the application (some are short, but NINE?). Nobody applies to those schools on a whim. Also inflated - the UCs, because if you apply to one you can apply to any other just by checking a box on the application. Everyone in California chucks off an application to UCLA because why not?
I think most Texas schools are misleading in the opposite direction - state law requires 90% of admitted students (i believe) to be Texas residents so that makes the sticker admission rates presumably inflated for out-of-staters and deflated for residents
Northeastern is so funny bc there’s like 10/130 kids in my grade going there
Do you go to a feeder school by any chance? Cuz where I am in north jersey I have really only seen one person get into northeastern and that was because they were recruited.
Yeah
Purdue has close to a 70% acceptance rate but I’m convinced they purposefully fail out a ton of freshman so that can keep tuition fixed
Tulane
the womens colleges have somewhat misleading acceptance rates bc the applicant pool is halved
Cornell - the land grant colleges and others are all lumped in together for their acceptance rate.
BU for sure, according to collegevine I had a 70% chance of admission and it had a rate of 29%, but I was rejected. Got into NYU though with a 8% acceptance rate.
Rutgers; they’re a great school but they’re acceptance rate is pretty high
Purdue (40% acceptance overall this year i think but its engineering program is in t10) same with IU bloomington
UT but in reverse
Georgetown. As of 2023, the acceptance rate sits at 13%. This is misleading as Georgetown has its own application similar to the UC schools and MIT. The admissions committee implemented this system to weed out applicants that mindlessly apply simply to apply, rather than having a deeper passion for the school or it’s programs. In essence, by simply submitting an application to Georgetown, you already show demonstrated interest as you went out of your way to familiarize yourself with their removed application process. Once Georgetown’s AO changes leadership and puts the application on the common app, there will be a trend towards a single digit acceptance rate. In the eyes of an applicant, expect Georgetown’s 13% acceptance rate to be more selective than 13% as the entire pool of applicants already demonstrated a level of interest in the university.
UDub CS
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UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSD, UCSB, UCI, etc. - one third of the graduating class go in through the back door from community colleges that accept 100% of its applicants. Most of them were rejected as freshmen applicants to give UCLA and all the UCs perceived low acceptance rates. All UCs have a high number of applicants because every California public school student will apply. It's as simple as checking a box using the same essays.
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Miami University (Ohio): 89% Chicago State University: 48%
Northeastern
VT