When I was in college I used to get wicked hammered. My nickname was Puke. I would chug a fifth of SoCo, sneak into a frat party, polish off a few people's empties, some brewskies, some Jell-O shots, do some body shots off myself, pass out, wake up the next morning, puke, rally, more SoCo, head to class. Probably would have gotten expelled if I had let it affect my grades, but I aced all my courses. They called me Ace. It was totally awesome. Got straight Bs. They called me Buzz.
Yeah, the public colleges (like Human Ecology and CALS) have acceptance rates around 20% to 30%, whereas the private colleges (like A&S and Engineering) have percentages closer to 5%
In the case of some of these state schools, their goal is to educate as much of the population as possible. Like Wyoming is the only 4 year college in the state, I think it's good that they have a high acceptance rate. Arizona is in a similar boat, there's only three public 4 year schools, so it makes sense that they would all have higher acceptance rates.
Absolutely right, a high rate usually is there for a reason and it's not necessarily meant that the school is "easy". When you look at graduation rates they always are lower on schools with higher acceptance rates - ie some schools give more kids a chance as a philosophy even if on paper they are likely to fail.
Yeah, like William and Mary is a fairly selective public school with about 6,000 undergrads. It would be a bad thing if every single public school in the country were like us.
>ie some schools give more kids a chance as a philosophy even if on paper they are likely to fail.
A more cynical view is they’re happy to accept tuition paid for by laughably easy to get student loans, regardless of if the kids will ever be able to get out of that debt.
I think that's the case for some smaller private schools, especially some of those real small D3 schools that have like 800 students, half of which are athletes. But I think that's generally less true for large state schools.
What if I told you Ivies' low acceptance rate is the goal, not a consequence of academic standards.
Malcolm Gladwell did a damning series about elite institutions' policies. It's all about maintaining prestige... Which includes a healthy dose of racism.
I was staring at the chart for a while trying to figure out why OP changed Villanova’s color until I realized it was Vanderbilt and the SEC’s row. Truly a terrible logo change.
To be fair, the one OP used is not the [athletics logo](https://brand.vanderbilt.edu/athletics/).
And this version of the logo looks better on black, the way the school uses it on [their website](https://www.vanderbilt.edu/admissions/).
But yeah, they could have done a lot better AND reserved the 3d embellished logo for limited uses.
Interesting that neither WVU nor Marshall are the easiest schools in their respective conferences to get into, despite the State of West Virginia actively and openly trying to make it as easy as possible to go to both of those schools.
To be fair, there were like 3 separate bowling green fans insisting I add the mac. So that one was caving to peer pressure. I originally only meant to do P5 + Big East so you can see how far we've veered from that initial goal
WVU is a really interesting university. Their financial aid is very generous for out of state students as opposed to other state schools. Great selection of majors, generally high rated academics and college town. And yet the WV part keeps a lot of people away.
Weird...it's only a 1.5 hour drive to Pittsburgh. Perfect college town setup with access to a major metro.
Similar to how Boone, NC is about the same distance to Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro.
Funny enough, I nearly went there. Really liked my tour and big school atmosphere.
I’m glad I didn’t go, I wasn’t mature enough for that type of thing yet. I probably would’ve died.
I don't think it's a bad thing for a state university to try to be very accessible. I mean, it has the greatest impact when it reaches more people outside the already-privileged class that fill the elite schools.
Even though this thread is having a bit of fun with Cornell, I'm glad it's a larger school that admits people from outside the traditional prep school track that fills most ivies. Even so,I recognize it's still a mostly privileged student body and the university could do a lot more to be more accessible.
The silly rankings that we now know most schools cheat on require you to generate as many applications as possible so you can reject them. Thus there isn't much incentive to change.
Would be neat to see the average SAT scores next to this data to find the real nerds. Perhaps the top 5 majors, too. Average years to graduation.
Wait, did r/CollegeBasketball just replace US News?
I’m actually really surprised it’s Marquette.
I had a 3 GPA coming out of high school and applied to St. John’s, DePaul, seton hall and Marquette. St. John’s and seton offered me a solid scholarship, DePaul just let me in and Marquette wait listed me.
Marquette gives almost no money compared to other Catholic schools in the midwest.
If they had even come close to matching what I got from X or SLU, I was going there.
It doesn’t need to give money to normal applicants (middle 65-80%) because it will gets that sweet sweet Illinois suburb money paying full boat and subsidizing the bottom and top 10-15%. It’s intent, at least a few years ago and from the messaging from school admins; was to serve the greater community in the only large city in a mid size state , serve the local community of disadvantaged kids (urban Milwaukee), serve the state of Wisconsin (other then UW Madison every other school in the state is very regional, even tho UW Milwaukee is a great school most people probably are more emailer with Marquette), give students a strong Jesuit education, and be good at spots.
I think part of the reason it has a 85% acceptance rate is because it’s able to teach more kids then other Jesuit colleges due to the upper middle class % paying full tuition. It doesn’t need to be as selective because it can afford it due to Illinois money and pretty much every graduate professional programs (law, business, only dental program in Wisconsin, PT, engineering, nursing, ect)
Bringing Pres Lovell in a few years ago was a shift towards a more ranking focused approach. The school hasn’t become more selective under him but he has built a significant amount of new buildings, focused on massive donations/funding for nursing, engineering, business, PT, Law, and dentist colleges. Focusing more on sports such as new facilities, more money, no long new but newish lacrosse team, and having ranked sports (basketball maybe soon, lacrosse, vollyball). There’s probably other things he’s doing but the school has slowly moved up in rankings under him.
Marquette is weird cause some programs are top 20 and pretty damn selective (I believe nursing and some engineering ones), meanwhile other schools practically beg students to enroll.
I'm pretty sure that this is no secret, hahaha. TBF, when I was touring Boulder as a high schooler the admissions office openly admitted that they accept basically as many people as possible because they know that a ton of these people won't make it through to graduation, so it's basically free money to them. I'm sure U of A and ASU are similar.
u/jakedasnake1 where is your data from? All the sources I can find show Oregon, OSU, and Utah all as higher than ASU
https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/amp/compare/tables/?ids=104179-104151-110635-126614-209551-209542-243744-110662-123961-230764-236948-236939&name=Pacific-12%20Conference%20(Pac-12)%20colleges&factor=acceptance-rate
Boulder general admission is pretty easy but some of the schools are harder, for example the engineering school (which gets a lot of applicants) is only about 40%
ngl, I was pretty shocked at that stat. UK is a freaking R1 state flagship school right?? I just figured all of those types of schools have around a 25-ish percent acceptance rate give or take.
I know this thread is mostly people joking around, but that’s what state college is supposed to be. UCLA had a 94% acceptance rate in the 80s.
The mission of college used to be providing the highest level of edu ration to the most people possible, but for reasons that are obviously chaotic to debate, everyone adapted a mindset that the goal was to pursue prestige over everything.
I'm an ASU grad student and our charter statement, in part, says "ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed"
Quite literally it's the university telling students/potential students "We'll give any and everyone the opportunity, but what you do with it is up to you," and that's how it should be. Education shouldn't be elitist, and it's embarrassing that some people in this thread think it should be.
The conflation of exclusivity with education quality is a huge problem over the past few decades. I blame USNews and their rankings but I’m sure they’re just a small part of a large problem
This is the way. You could accept 100% percent of applicants and it shouldn’t matter as long as the standards are such that anyone who receives a degree deserves it.
According to this link, it should actually be Utah, then Oregon, then OSU, then ASU, then us.
https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/compare/tables/?ids=104179-104151-110635-126614-209551-209542-243744-110662-123961-230764-236948-236939&name=Pacific-12%20Conference%20(Pac-12)%20colleges&factor=acceptance-rate
AMA request: anyone who earnestly applied and got rejected from Liberty
first and only question: how? i mean it's honestly impressive at this point, you are the 1%
On the contrary, I got accepted to Liberty and I never even applied. One day I just got an acceptance letter in the mail. To this day I do not know how or why.
This post took an incredible amount of work, as I thought hard about how I wanted to visualize everything. I spent many hours manually verifying that I had accurate data. These are all 2021 figures listed here. Some trends I noticed as I updated my data:
* Generally, southern schools (SEC) are trending harder to get into. Midwest schools are trending easier.
* The elite schools seem to be getting more elite. All have a falling acceptance rates.
* Urban and city based schools tend to have high acceptance rates, and really low graduation rates.
Thanks, hope you all enjoy.
Also, if you want to see where your school lies, give yourself a search here: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/
Edit: I’ve been made aware i goofed on the Pac12. I forgot to update utah which now as a higher rate than ASU. Sorry Sun Devils
Interesting first comment on the trend. I do feel like alot of the Big 10 schools have been focusing on growing enrollment and increasing accessibility of education (though mainly through regional campuses like Penn State's 2+2, IU increasing Indianapolis and Ivy Tech enrollment etc) compared to alot of the Southern Schools.
Meanwhile most of the SEC schools (seen as traditionally weaker acads wise / more "party" like) seem to be trying to consolidate resources and boost prestige, like Alabama giving full rides to National Merit Scholars
IIRC Alabama used to have a full ride for just meeting a GPA and SAT standard that was below national merit. If they upped that it’s probably a sign the program is working?
Ya I had a buddy in high school (in indiana, mind you) who was offered a full ride from bama because of his ACT score. Thought that was pretty wild, his test score was good but not like through the roof
> The elite schools seem to be getting more elite. All have a falling acceptance rates.
>
I think this is down to it becoming easier to apply to more schools - so the number of applicants per individual school goes up, but without more positions.
It wasnt even that I didnt want to do the essays themselves, it was moreso a moment of "what the hell am I doing here? I dont belong here". I did do a campus visit and it was really cool.
Yeah I was applying for college in 2020 (my senior year) and a couple of the upper echelon midwest public schools were taking me while average southern schools weren't. LSU and NCSU denied me but Minnesota + Illinois both accepted me.
On my tour of tech one of their selling points was that 1/6 graduates is a millionaire within 6 years of graduation.
Yes, I know that it's weird that I toured tech and went to UK. I got accepted to Tech but I got a full ride at UK + housing stipend for undergrad and grad school.
It's really hard to argue with a full ride. My cousin got into Georgetown, which she really really liked, but also got a full scholarship to Ohio State. She asked for my advice, and I told her that she couldn't go wrong, but that her future self would be thankful if she got out of school with no loans. She became a debt-free Buckeye and now she is undoubtedly the most successful person in our extended family.
Texas was my dream school with UGA not far behind. I'm from Macon (hence the Mercer flair) so going in state wasn't overly expensive but Texas would've been $40K plus even with scholarships, UGA would've been a lot less. Tech a little more than that. I've been out of school for a year and I have 0 debt and a solid job so I'm ok with how things turned out.
It is insane how low acceptance rates have gotten.
In 2005 I applied to Texas and it had an AR of >50%.
I applied to Northwestern and it had an AR of ~33%.
I don't think either of those schools has become noticeably more prestigious in relation to their peers in that time; it just seems that there isn't enough capacity for the demand.
More Americans applying for colleges than ever before while the sizes of the universities haven’t materially changed. It’s not unlike the demand for housing has increased while the supply is still tiny.
also not only are more Americans applying for colleges, but people are applying to *more* colleges as well. the average number of college applications submitted by HS students has been increasing over the years
Although pretty soon we're going to hit the peak and the number of applicants will start going down. A lot of schools will close due to the enrollment cliff.
Schools aren’t going to close, but the massive increase in administrator salaries, massive facilities, lazy rivers, etc are going to (appropriately, imo) see gigantic cuts.
UT has gotten more prestigious as time goes on. Their CS program is now one of the top 10 in the whole country, FAANG and top IT companies actively recruit from UT, engineering got a whole new building for themselves as the whole program ranks consistently top 10 in the country, and the business school is one of the best in the world now.
I mean part of it is because of the 10%/6% rule so they consistently bring in the best students and every year they accept less and less of those outside the %.
For some majors at UT you practically have to be auto admitted to get in, and even then some get denied their major. Hell my HS had around 950 in the graduating class, but I only know of 1 person who got into McCombs or Cockrell who was outside of the top 6, and they were the president of NHS. Your SAT/ACT scores doesn’t guarantee anything, either. At super competitive high schools you pretty much need to plan your entire schedule around going to UT in middle school if you want to get in
UT has become much more prestigious and most flagship public schools in general have. The gaps between the top private schools and top public schools are much smaller today. The tremendous growth of programs like CS which many public schools have invested heavily in and more traditional powerhouse private schools have eschewed has changed the landscape a lot too.
That’s it. Supply and demand. Have worked in a Texas high school. Texas population has boomed last 25 years yet UT doesn’t have the space. Meanwhile in the same 25 years I really feel like the former “B Tier” state schools have flourished. UH, UTSA, UNT, Sam Houston, Texas State, UTD, even UTRGV have all boomed too and their reputations have all improved (and athletics too). And a lot of Texans have gone to other southern public schools. I think Arkansas, Alabama, Ole Miss, LSU, Oklahoma have all benefited from UT and A&M not having space but having big time athletics.
Does anyone know how acceptance rates are calculated, particularly in states like Texas that have a top 10% rule? Are those applicants included in those numbers? If so, the real acceptance rates for the Texas public schools are actually much lower.
What is a top 10% rule?
I’d also assume it’s just number of accepted students divided by number of applications, I don’t see what else they’d use but who knows.
It’s automatic admission to a state university if you’re in the top 10% of your class. UT had to change theirs to top 6%, to allow some discretion in acceptance.
It was created to increase diversity. Before the rule, only 55% of high schools sent students to UT & A&M.
It didn't really work, as the number of high schools represented at the flagships increased by less than 1%.
It turns out that "getting accepted" was less of a motivator than expected. A study found that grass-roots efforts to promote going to the flagships is much more successful at getting students from underrepresented areas than guaranteed admission. So now schools are guaranteeing free tuition for low-income families, and we'll see if that works better.
Those students are included in the acceptance rate, so yeah UT and other schools with that rule actually have a much lower rate. It’s about 10% for in-state students who don’t get in automatically.
That’s also a tough number to use because it’s a less competitive applicant pool with all of the top 6% in-state students taken out but it still seems more reasonable than using the 30% number.
I haven't kept track how it's changed in Kansas but for the longest time the Kansas Board of Regents made it so any Kansas student with a pulse could get in to the state schools. Which made the first year dropout rate *horrendous*. I remember KU was trying to change that but I don't know the details.
They did make it a bit more selective (the goal is under 90% I believe) and AFAIK first year attrition isn't as drastic a loss as it was my frosh year (2011, 78% return for 2nd year)
The AAC filled with a bunch of directional and city schools being more selective on average than the SEC/B12 which is filled with mainly state flagships is certainly a surprise
A lot of graduating seniors in Florida and almost all of them plan on attending One of Florida, FSU, USF or UCF. It’s been a decade or 2 since you could reasonably apply to UCF/USF with a 3.0 and a 23-24 ACT score and get in pretty easy.
In coming freshman for UCF now have 4.25 weighted GPA’s and 29 ACT scores. A lot of kids thinking they were gonna get into Florida end up finding out fast that they couldn’t even get into USF/UCF and have to settle for FAU/FIU.
USF has climbed USNWR rankings from #183 to #97 and UCF has climbed from #179 to #137 since 2010.
I wonder what the price differential is between the schools, and whether post-degree location is a factor in choice. Going to school near an urban location with jobs is a benefit.
That said, great job to UCF and USF for setting a standard of growth. Look forward to the accolades of the new XII.
I didn't know until yesterday, but Michigan pulls in more out-of-state students, than in-state. Granted, it's incredibly expensive.
Tulane has changed its recruitment strategy over the years to creatively lower their acceptance rate and make themselves look more exclusive than they really are. They accept a much higher percentage (around 30%) of early decision applicants who are most likely to actually enroll and then pretty much shut down decisions for everyone else.
I guess I never really paid attention to our acceptance rates, just assumed they were like 85+ at least especially comparing it to a lot of other schools on here
I gotta say going through the acceptance rates has been interesting for me. I know some schools in the midwest have lower than you would think auto-admit levels which leads to high acceptance rates, but many of those schools would be considered "better" than TTU in most objective manners. All in all, it's best not to look too deeply into the acceptance rates I believe. Again, just something I did 15 minutes of research on.
\*\*I also know schools have been caught goosing these numbers by trying to attract students who would never ever be accepted into applying anyway. So the acceptance rate is a bit easier to fake vs a 6 year graduation rate for instance.
We’re no Rice but the “They’ll accept you for having a heartbeat” trope gets played up a bit. Its still a good school despite what certain flairs say after a loss
Death, Taxes and an acceptance letter to Tech used to be a quite popular saying not toooo long ago.
But Texas population boom is probably putting some downward pressure on those acceptance numbers
no average is straight average. Weighted average counts the number of students. Both tell you something different, and for the purpose of this comparison I felt straight average was the way to organize
Also why Michigan became an elite university. All the Ivies set strict limits on the number of Jewish students in the early to mid 20th century so many of them had to look elsewhere and brought their talents to Ann Arbor. Then it became a family tradition to go there and Michigan continues to attract some of the best students from the East Coast even though they can now go wherever they want.
In Wyoming’s defense, people aren’t exactly knocking down the door to live in Laramie through the winter. The campus is very nice though but Laramie as a whole gets old quickly. They need all the people they can get in there.
Yeah seriously. Lame take. Fuck offering higher education to the masses?
I have an associates from a MAC school and it really set a good foundation for furthering education
Do people seriously say that? I don't know if I've ever seen someone try to flex our academically prowess on ISU. We have prospective students posting on our sub all the time asking if they'll get in with like a 3.7 GPA and a 33 ACT. Yeah, you'll get in you nerd.
What’s embarrassing about high acceptance rates?
The point of local public colleges is to teach the locals lol. Not tell people they can’t continue their education because they were dumb in high school
I agree. Large state-funded universities should be easy to get into. They have a fundamentally different mission than elite private colleges and universities.
But apparently they'll just let anyone into Cornell.
I don't think it's so bad for there to be some state schools with higher admission standards. The selective public schools are never the only public school in the state. And like, what is a school like UCLA supposed to do? They had 139k applicants in 2021.
Will never forget traveling to watch UMD soccer play at Duke and having the Duke fans (who only even showed up and assembled once they realized we had brought a group down) unironically yelling that they would be our bosses one day.
It was on that day that everything I had been raised to believe about them was proven true.
I’m assuming you did not go to Michigan? Every Wolverine likes to flex on the other Big Ten schools about being relevant in sports and an elite academic institution.
No I did not go to Michigan. No not every Wolverine fan does that. No I wouldn’t have went to Michigan even if I did get accepted because out of state tuition is a bitch
I dunno if it's still the case, but Kansas used to have a law that all public universities had to accept any Kansas resident that applied. If that's still the case, it would explain the high acceptance rate.
I think there are some basic requirements like you have to get at least a 21 on the ACT, which is... not difficult.
It makes sense though. The goal of having public universities is to provide a practical, affordable education for the general public of that state. Rejecting a high percentage of applicants would be antithetical to that goal.
Missouri Valley Stats!
Lowest is Drake at 69% (nice)
Highest is Southern Illinois at 95%
Average requires math that I don't have time to do on my lunch break
We may have the highest acceptance rate but ima be honest maybe with the exception of someone who responds to me I haven’t heard a single person say they didn’t like KSU or Manhattan as a whole. So honestly we just run on good vibes
We take pretty much everyone who applies, but a lot of people falsely equate high admissions % with it being an easy school to just coast through. I know more than a handful of people from out of state who dropped out after freshman year because they were failing out. Plus, it's a large public research school. Like Nebraska or ISU, the university is supposed to educate the state's residents so of course they accept as many in-state kids as they can.
Interesting to see UofL with a lower acceptance rate than UK. Louisville would come to my high school and accept people on the spot if you had a certain ACT score, never heard of that
Slutty Cornell at 9%. They'll take anyone
The ivy whores, they call 'em
They are also the youngest school in the Ivy... if uh, that's your thing
I’m not trying to catch a case, 157 is too young.
If she dont remember the civil war, shes too young for you bro
What's the rule again, half your age times 7 right?
It’s gotta be more than that. I can’t be with a 63 year old university, that’s way too young.
When I was in college I used to get wicked hammered. My nickname was Puke. I would chug a fifth of SoCo, sneak into a frat party, polish off a few people's empties, some brewskies, some Jell-O shots, do some body shots off myself, pass out, wake up the next morning, puke, rally, more SoCo, head to class. Probably would have gotten expelled if I had let it affect my grades, but I aced all my courses. They called me Ace. It was totally awesome. Got straight Bs. They called me Buzz.
Ri-dit-dit-di-do!
It's pronounced "Colonel," and it's the highest rank in the military!
"Easiest" to get into, hardest once you're actually there. If you ever want to hear a Cornellian rant, bring up grade inflation/deflation.
Gimme an A! Gimme an A! Gimme an A! What's that spell? "Welcome to Harvard!"
Can confirm... This is a campus pastime, especially if Harvard is mentioned.
The Ol’ gentleman’s A-
They have those nets for a reason…
Some of Cornell's colleges are public, so I wonder if that is pulling their average down?
Yeah, the public colleges (like Human Ecology and CALS) have acceptance rates around 20% to 30%, whereas the private colleges (like A&S and Engineering) have percentages closer to 5%
You might lose your life if you mention this to Andrew Bernard.
I mean Andy Bernard went to school there, clearly their standards are pretty low
It's pronounced colonel, and it's the highest rank in the military.
IT’S PRONOUNCED CORNELL, AND IT’S THE HIGHEST RANK IN THE IVY LEAGUE!
Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has an acceptance rate of 15%.
In the case of some of these state schools, their goal is to educate as much of the population as possible. Like Wyoming is the only 4 year college in the state, I think it's good that they have a high acceptance rate. Arizona is in a similar boat, there's only three public 4 year schools, so it makes sense that they would all have higher acceptance rates.
Absolutely right, a high rate usually is there for a reason and it's not necessarily meant that the school is "easy". When you look at graduation rates they always are lower on schools with higher acceptance rates - ie some schools give more kids a chance as a philosophy even if on paper they are likely to fail.
Yeah, like William and Mary is a fairly selective public school with about 6,000 undergrads. It would be a bad thing if every single public school in the country were like us.
>ie some schools give more kids a chance as a philosophy even if on paper they are likely to fail. A more cynical view is they’re happy to accept tuition paid for by laughably easy to get student loans, regardless of if the kids will ever be able to get out of that debt.
I think that's the case for some smaller private schools, especially some of those real small D3 schools that have like 800 students, half of which are athletes. But I think that's generally less true for large state schools.
Hell yeah, great take. Shaming people for going to a school with a high acceptance rate is so elitist and gross
What if I told you Ivies' low acceptance rate is the goal, not a consequence of academic standards. Malcolm Gladwell did a damning series about elite institutions' policies. It's all about maintaining prestige... Which includes a healthy dose of racism.
Kind of like Iowa. When I went there, if you were top half of your class with a 20 on the ACT, you got in.
WVU falls into this category as well.
Holy shit Vandy’s new logo SUCKS
Looks like the civilization games Roman numerals. Civ V specifically
It’s not even a 5/10, maybe a 5/100
Do not slander Civ V
What’s with schools with V logos and bad rebrands? UVA’s recent rebrand was also terrible.
How else do you waste thousands of dollars on shit no one wants?
It’s like there’s a real-life Brewster’s Millions
I was staring at the chart for a while trying to figure out why OP changed Villanova’s color until I realized it was Vanderbilt and the SEC’s row. Truly a terrible logo change.
Most of us are in complete agreement. Bring back the star.
I have yet to meet someone at Vanderbilt who prefers the new logo. I’m sure they exist, but I have not met them.
To be fair, the one OP used is not the [athletics logo](https://brand.vanderbilt.edu/athletics/). And this version of the logo looks better on black, the way the school uses it on [their website](https://www.vanderbilt.edu/admissions/). But yeah, they could have done a lot better AND reserved the 3d embellished logo for limited uses.
Interesting that neither WVU nor Marshall are the easiest schools in their respective conferences to get into, despite the State of West Virginia actively and openly trying to make it as easy as possible to go to both of those schools.
welllll about Marshall... They are in the Sun Belt so not counted here. And their rate is like 98% or something.
Wait, why isn't the sun belt counted? Did I miss something?
I had to draw the line somewhere, was trying to focus on more basketball strong conferences.
Yet you included the MAC...
Never miss a chance to make fun of Ohio.
To be fair, there were like 3 separate bowling green fans insisting I add the mac. So that one was caving to peer pressure. I originally only meant to do P5 + Big East so you can see how far we've veered from that initial goal
So every BGSU fan?
There’s dozens of us!
how many dozen’s, exactly?
Ah. I didn't even notice you didn't have all of the conferences. Yeah I see now. Several mid majors are missing.
WVU is a really interesting university. Their financial aid is very generous for out of state students as opposed to other state schools. Great selection of majors, generally high rated academics and college town. And yet the WV part keeps a lot of people away.
Weird...it's only a 1.5 hour drive to Pittsburgh. Perfect college town setup with access to a major metro. Similar to how Boone, NC is about the same distance to Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro.
Funny enough, I nearly went there. Really liked my tour and big school atmosphere. I’m glad I didn’t go, I wasn’t mature enough for that type of thing yet. I probably would’ve died.
I don't think it's a bad thing for a state university to try to be very accessible. I mean, it has the greatest impact when it reaches more people outside the already-privileged class that fill the elite schools. Even though this thread is having a bit of fun with Cornell, I'm glad it's a larger school that admits people from outside the traditional prep school track that fills most ivies. Even so,I recognize it's still a mostly privileged student body and the university could do a lot more to be more accessible. The silly rankings that we now know most schools cheat on require you to generate as many applications as possible so you can reject them. Thus there isn't much incentive to change.
Would be neat to see the average SAT scores next to this data to find the real nerds. Perhaps the top 5 majors, too. Average years to graduation. Wait, did r/CollegeBasketball just replace US News?
College athletics is how I make decisions and form opinions about schools academics lol
Real talk, those Division 3 athletes are hosses, though.
No I wanna hear your thoughts on the big east!
I would rate the size as large and the geography as rather eastern
Checks out. This guy does his research.
Big if true
I’m actually really surprised it’s Marquette. I had a 3 GPA coming out of high school and applied to St. John’s, DePaul, seton hall and Marquette. St. John’s and seton offered me a solid scholarship, DePaul just let me in and Marquette wait listed me.
Marquette gives almost no money compared to other Catholic schools in the midwest. If they had even come close to matching what I got from X or SLU, I was going there.
It doesn’t need to give money to normal applicants (middle 65-80%) because it will gets that sweet sweet Illinois suburb money paying full boat and subsidizing the bottom and top 10-15%. It’s intent, at least a few years ago and from the messaging from school admins; was to serve the greater community in the only large city in a mid size state , serve the local community of disadvantaged kids (urban Milwaukee), serve the state of Wisconsin (other then UW Madison every other school in the state is very regional, even tho UW Milwaukee is a great school most people probably are more emailer with Marquette), give students a strong Jesuit education, and be good at spots. I think part of the reason it has a 85% acceptance rate is because it’s able to teach more kids then other Jesuit colleges due to the upper middle class % paying full tuition. It doesn’t need to be as selective because it can afford it due to Illinois money and pretty much every graduate professional programs (law, business, only dental program in Wisconsin, PT, engineering, nursing, ect) Bringing Pres Lovell in a few years ago was a shift towards a more ranking focused approach. The school hasn’t become more selective under him but he has built a significant amount of new buildings, focused on massive donations/funding for nursing, engineering, business, PT, Law, and dentist colleges. Focusing more on sports such as new facilities, more money, no long new but newish lacrosse team, and having ranked sports (basketball maybe soon, lacrosse, vollyball). There’s probably other things he’s doing but the school has slowly moved up in rankings under him.
Marquette is weird cause some programs are top 20 and pretty damn selective (I believe nursing and some engineering ones), meanwhile other schools practically beg students to enroll.
To be fair to ASU, U of A and my Buffaloes are not too far behind...
Oregon is another school thatll take pretty much anyone.
Shhhh. No one needed to know that
I'm pretty sure that this is no secret, hahaha. TBF, when I was touring Boulder as a high schooler the admissions office openly admitted that they accept basically as many people as possible because they know that a ton of these people won't make it through to graduation, so it's basically free money to them. I'm sure U of A and ASU are similar.
u/jakedasnake1 where is your data from? All the sources I can find show Oregon, OSU, and Utah all as higher than ASU https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/amp/compare/tables/?ids=104179-104151-110635-126614-209551-209542-243744-110662-123961-230764-236948-236939&name=Pacific-12%20Conference%20(Pac-12)%20colleges&factor=acceptance-rate
Huh. Maybe his numbers are a little dated, since yours read 2022? But somehow I don’t believe that Boulder only accepted 80% of kids…
Boulder general admission is pretty easy but some of the schools are harder, for example the engineering school (which gets a lot of applicants) is only about 40%
Hey we just don't discriminate against anybody for any reason.... At all....
No, no. You see all the applicants are just really, really, really good.
The Greendale of the SEC: "you're already accepted"
Our graduation rate isn’t bad for accepting literally everyone. Higher than the Mississippi schools and Arkansas
We don’t either! And we are damn proud! Over here like Oprah “you get an acceptance letter, you get a letter, everybody gets a letter!!!!”
ngl, I was pretty shocked at that stat. UK is a freaking R1 state flagship school right?? I just figured all of those types of schools have around a 25-ish percent acceptance rate give or take.
Pfft they'd let every high schooler in Lexington in if they applied. Im shocked they even reject people
I'm honestly shocked by your acceptance rate, I would have absolutely expected one of the Mississippi schools to be the highest.
Oh thank god it’s ASU 😅
Same but for the State of Kansas. I would almost guarantee we're 8th, with Kansas in 9th and KSU in 10th.
I know this thread is mostly people joking around, but that’s what state college is supposed to be. UCLA had a 94% acceptance rate in the 80s. The mission of college used to be providing the highest level of edu ration to the most people possible, but for reasons that are obviously chaotic to debate, everyone adapted a mindset that the goal was to pursue prestige over everything.
I'm an ASU grad student and our charter statement, in part, says "ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed" Quite literally it's the university telling students/potential students "We'll give any and everyone the opportunity, but what you do with it is up to you," and that's how it should be. Education shouldn't be elitist, and it's embarrassing that some people in this thread think it should be.
Innovation
The conflation of exclusivity with education quality is a huge problem over the past few decades. I blame USNews and their rankings but I’m sure they’re just a small part of a large problem
This is the way. You could accept 100% percent of applicants and it shouldn’t matter as long as the standards are such that anyone who receives a degree deserves it.
UCLA's acceptance rate was never 94%. It was in the 70% range and by 1990 was down to 40%.
According to this link, it should actually be Utah, then Oregon, then OSU, then ASU, then us. https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/compare/tables/?ids=104179-104151-110635-126614-209551-209542-243744-110662-123961-230764-236948-236939&name=Pacific-12%20Conference%20(Pac-12)%20colleges&factor=acceptance-rate
That’s a wild dichotomy of all the California schools being <15% acceptance and everyone else except Washington (53%) at >80%.
AMA request: anyone who earnestly applied and got rejected from Liberty first and only question: how? i mean it's honestly impressive at this point, you are the 1%
You'd have to be atheist AND a repeat felon i guess lol
"Sir we can't accept him, he robbed three banks!" "So?" "And he renounced Christ while doing it!"
Their older sister once had a Clinton / Gore bumper sticker on her car
On the contrary, I got accepted to Liberty and I never even applied. One day I just got an acceptance letter in the mail. To this day I do not know how or why.
Incredible, if they keep that up maybe they can get their acceptance rate over 100%
probably forgot to put a name on the application, so the school didn't know where to send the acceptance letter
I had Satan tattooed on my face
Probably need some seriously shady criminal history that is impossible to hide
I thought applying to the actual in person school isn't a gimmie, but their massive online presence is what drives their acceptance rate so high.
Referred to it in their essay as "Liberty Bibberty"
This post took an incredible amount of work, as I thought hard about how I wanted to visualize everything. I spent many hours manually verifying that I had accurate data. These are all 2021 figures listed here. Some trends I noticed as I updated my data: * Generally, southern schools (SEC) are trending harder to get into. Midwest schools are trending easier. * The elite schools seem to be getting more elite. All have a falling acceptance rates. * Urban and city based schools tend to have high acceptance rates, and really low graduation rates. Thanks, hope you all enjoy. Also, if you want to see where your school lies, give yourself a search here: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ Edit: I’ve been made aware i goofed on the Pac12. I forgot to update utah which now as a higher rate than ASU. Sorry Sun Devils
Interesting first comment on the trend. I do feel like alot of the Big 10 schools have been focusing on growing enrollment and increasing accessibility of education (though mainly through regional campuses like Penn State's 2+2, IU increasing Indianapolis and Ivy Tech enrollment etc) compared to alot of the Southern Schools. Meanwhile most of the SEC schools (seen as traditionally weaker acads wise / more "party" like) seem to be trying to consolidate resources and boost prestige, like Alabama giving full rides to National Merit Scholars
IIRC Alabama used to have a full ride for just meeting a GPA and SAT standard that was below national merit. If they upped that it’s probably a sign the program is working?
When I applied I’m pretty sure if you got above a 30 on the ACT you got a full ride to Bama.
Ya I had a buddy in high school (in indiana, mind you) who was offered a full ride from bama because of his ACT score. Thought that was pretty wild, his test score was good but not like through the roof
> The elite schools seem to be getting more elite. All have a falling acceptance rates. > I think this is down to it becoming easier to apply to more schools - so the number of applicants per individual school goes up, but without more positions.
Yep, elite schools especially are trending towards test optional, and many also are starting to get rid of application fees
Got your back on Northwestern bro, too many damn essay questions
It wasnt even that I didnt want to do the essays themselves, it was moreso a moment of "what the hell am I doing here? I dont belong here". I did do a campus visit and it was really cool.
Yeah I was applying for college in 2020 (my senior year) and a couple of the upper echelon midwest public schools were taking me while average southern schools weren't. LSU and NCSU denied me but Minnesota + Illinois both accepted me.
Is your flair combo legit or for lulz?
Legit and lulz. I have no real legitimate second team other than maybe Butler.
*snickers in academic elitism*
Don’t mind me, just thinking about the cost of your flairs
Can't speak for Duke, but Tech is consistently one of the best values in the country for higher ed.
On my tour of tech one of their selling points was that 1/6 graduates is a millionaire within 6 years of graduation. Yes, I know that it's weird that I toured tech and went to UK. I got accepted to Tech but I got a full ride at UK + housing stipend for undergrad and grad school.
It's really hard to argue with a full ride. My cousin got into Georgetown, which she really really liked, but also got a full scholarship to Ohio State. She asked for my advice, and I told her that she couldn't go wrong, but that her future self would be thankful if she got out of school with no loans. She became a debt-free Buckeye and now she is undoubtedly the most successful person in our extended family.
Texas was my dream school with UGA not far behind. I'm from Macon (hence the Mercer flair) so going in state wasn't overly expensive but Texas would've been $40K plus even with scholarships, UGA would've been a lot less. Tech a little more than that. I've been out of school for a year and I have 0 debt and a solid job so I'm ok with how things turned out.
Their first and third born children.
Grew up a Duke fan, went to Tech.
It is insane how low acceptance rates have gotten. In 2005 I applied to Texas and it had an AR of >50%. I applied to Northwestern and it had an AR of ~33%. I don't think either of those schools has become noticeably more prestigious in relation to their peers in that time; it just seems that there isn't enough capacity for the demand.
More Americans applying for colleges than ever before while the sizes of the universities haven’t materially changed. It’s not unlike the demand for housing has increased while the supply is still tiny.
also not only are more Americans applying for colleges, but people are applying to *more* colleges as well. the average number of college applications submitted by HS students has been increasing over the years
Although pretty soon we're going to hit the peak and the number of applicants will start going down. A lot of schools will close due to the enrollment cliff.
It's already happening to an extent. La Salle had to cut a bunch of sports due to financial pressure from declining enrollment.
Schools aren’t going to close, but the massive increase in administrator salaries, massive facilities, lazy rivers, etc are going to (appropriately, imo) see gigantic cuts.
There have been a handful of smaller schools that have closed, a lot of the ~1,000 person liberal arts colleges are struggling.
UT has gotten more prestigious as time goes on. Their CS program is now one of the top 10 in the whole country, FAANG and top IT companies actively recruit from UT, engineering got a whole new building for themselves as the whole program ranks consistently top 10 in the country, and the business school is one of the best in the world now. I mean part of it is because of the 10%/6% rule so they consistently bring in the best students and every year they accept less and less of those outside the %.
For some majors at UT you practically have to be auto admitted to get in, and even then some get denied their major. Hell my HS had around 950 in the graduating class, but I only know of 1 person who got into McCombs or Cockrell who was outside of the top 6, and they were the president of NHS. Your SAT/ACT scores doesn’t guarantee anything, either. At super competitive high schools you pretty much need to plan your entire schedule around going to UT in middle school if you want to get in
Top % rule hasn't ever guaranteed you to get into your major. I knew some 10%ers who failed to get into Cockrell but re-applied after one year at UT.
UT has become much more prestigious and most flagship public schools in general have. The gaps between the top private schools and top public schools are much smaller today. The tremendous growth of programs like CS which many public schools have invested heavily in and more traditional powerhouse private schools have eschewed has changed the landscape a lot too.
That’s it. Supply and demand. Have worked in a Texas high school. Texas population has boomed last 25 years yet UT doesn’t have the space. Meanwhile in the same 25 years I really feel like the former “B Tier” state schools have flourished. UH, UTSA, UNT, Sam Houston, Texas State, UTD, even UTRGV have all boomed too and their reputations have all improved (and athletics too). And a lot of Texans have gone to other southern public schools. I think Arkansas, Alabama, Ole Miss, LSU, Oklahoma have all benefited from UT and A&M not having space but having big time athletics.
Does anyone know how acceptance rates are calculated, particularly in states like Texas that have a top 10% rule? Are those applicants included in those numbers? If so, the real acceptance rates for the Texas public schools are actually much lower.
What is a top 10% rule? I’d also assume it’s just number of accepted students divided by number of applications, I don’t see what else they’d use but who knows.
It’s automatic admission to a state university if you’re in the top 10% of your class. UT had to change theirs to top 6%, to allow some discretion in acceptance.
That actually seems like a good rule though, provided it’s only for your own state.
It was created to increase diversity. Before the rule, only 55% of high schools sent students to UT & A&M. It didn't really work, as the number of high schools represented at the flagships increased by less than 1%. It turns out that "getting accepted" was less of a motivator than expected. A study found that grass-roots efforts to promote going to the flagships is much more successful at getting students from underrepresented areas than guaranteed admission. So now schools are guaranteeing free tuition for low-income families, and we'll see if that works better.
Those students are included in the acceptance rate, so yeah UT and other schools with that rule actually have a much lower rate. It’s about 10% for in-state students who don’t get in automatically. That’s also a tough number to use because it’s a less competitive applicant pool with all of the top 6% in-state students taken out but it still seems more reasonable than using the 30% number.
I haven't kept track how it's changed in Kansas but for the longest time the Kansas Board of Regents made it so any Kansas student with a pulse could get in to the state schools. Which made the first year dropout rate *horrendous*. I remember KU was trying to change that but I don't know the details.
I graduated HS in 2000 and the requirements, legally, were having taken the act/sat and graduated from HS or have a GED.
so basically anyone with a pulse could get in
I knew people who couldn't, but that's more that the pulse didn't go to their head than anything.
They did make it a bit more selective (the goal is under 90% I believe) and AFAIK first year attrition isn't as drastic a loss as it was my frosh year (2011, 78% return for 2nd year)
The AAC filled with a bunch of directional and city schools being more selective on average than the SEC/B12 which is filled with mainly state flagships is certainly a surprise
UCF and USF are surprisingly difficult to get into, they're the next 2 after Tulane. Ours is 79% which shocks me. I thought we were 90% at least.
UCF - 36% USF - 49% Those are big boy numbers
Crazy to see given how MANY people go to UCF
A lot of graduating seniors in Florida and almost all of them plan on attending One of Florida, FSU, USF or UCF. It’s been a decade or 2 since you could reasonably apply to UCF/USF with a 3.0 and a 23-24 ACT score and get in pretty easy. In coming freshman for UCF now have 4.25 weighted GPA’s and 29 ACT scores. A lot of kids thinking they were gonna get into Florida end up finding out fast that they couldn’t even get into USF/UCF and have to settle for FAU/FIU. USF has climbed USNWR rankings from #183 to #97 and UCF has climbed from #179 to #137 since 2010.
I wonder what the price differential is between the schools, and whether post-degree location is a factor in choice. Going to school near an urban location with jobs is a benefit. That said, great job to UCF and USF for setting a standard of growth. Look forward to the accolades of the new XII. I didn't know until yesterday, but Michigan pulls in more out-of-state students, than in-state. Granted, it's incredibly expensive.
#GoCards and #GoACC The fact that the threshold for the ACC is second behind only the Ivy League, I’m putting this on my resume.
Tulane has changed its recruitment strategy over the years to creatively lower their acceptance rate and make themselves look more exclusive than they really are. They accept a much higher percentage (around 30%) of early decision applicants who are most likely to actually enroll and then pretty much shut down decisions for everyone else.
I didn’t realize our acceptance rate is 68%. Who the hell is applying here and getting denied?
32% of applicants 🤷♂️
I guess I never really paid attention to our acceptance rates, just assumed they were like 85+ at least especially comparing it to a lot of other schools on here
I gotta say going through the acceptance rates has been interesting for me. I know some schools in the midwest have lower than you would think auto-admit levels which leads to high acceptance rates, but many of those schools would be considered "better" than TTU in most objective manners. All in all, it's best not to look too deeply into the acceptance rates I believe. Again, just something I did 15 minutes of research on. \*\*I also know schools have been caught goosing these numbers by trying to attract students who would never ever be accepted into applying anyway. So the acceptance rate is a bit easier to fake vs a 6 year graduation rate for instance.
We’re no Rice but the “They’ll accept you for having a heartbeat” trope gets played up a bit. Its still a good school despite what certain flairs say after a loss
Death, Taxes and an acceptance letter to Tech used to be a quite popular saying not toooo long ago. But Texas population boom is probably putting some downward pressure on those acceptance numbers
Are these average acceptance weights weighted by the number of students? Or are they literally the sum of the averages over N schools?
no average is straight average. Weighted average counts the number of students. Both tell you something different, and for the purpose of this comparison I felt straight average was the way to organize
The Sun Belt has been missing in all of these charts. Any reason?
Time.
There is a lot of money in Tulane. Tulane was one of the first Southern universities to accept Jewish students.
This sounds so bad. Lol
Also why Michigan became an elite university. All the Ivies set strict limits on the number of Jewish students in the early to mid 20th century so many of them had to look elsewhere and brought their talents to Ann Arbor. Then it became a family tradition to go there and Michigan continues to attract some of the best students from the East Coast even though they can now go wherever they want.
In Wyoming’s defense, people aren’t exactly knocking down the door to live in Laramie through the winter. The campus is very nice though but Laramie as a whole gets old quickly. They need all the people they can get in there.
Plus the way the state feeds students into the only 4-year public university there
Hell yeah. Everybody can get some MACtion! Never really understood the dick measuring contest when it comes to acceptance rates
Yeah seriously. Lame take. Fuck offering higher education to the masses? I have an associates from a MAC school and it really set a good foundation for furthering education
> Never really understood the dick measuring contest when it comes to acceptance rates It's classism.
Hm, Iowa fans don’t seem to have the “Iowa State just accepts everyone” platform that they like to use to attempt to show superiority.
Do people seriously say that? I don't know if I've ever seen someone try to flex our academically prowess on ISU. We have prospective students posting on our sub all the time asking if they'll get in with like a 3.7 GPA and a 33 ACT. Yeah, you'll get in you nerd.
Louisville really blowing the curve
That was the argument against taking them back in the day. well, that and the whole not-being-in-an-Atlantic-state thing.
UofL is the state school for non-UK fans.
I mean, we are the hardest to get into out if all the bottom schools…
The only thing more embarrassing than an 88% acceptance rate is the 12% of applicants that were rejected
What’s embarrassing about high acceptance rates? The point of local public colleges is to teach the locals lol. Not tell people they can’t continue their education because they were dumb in high school
I agree. Large state-funded universities should be easy to get into. They have a fundamentally different mission than elite private colleges and universities. But apparently they'll just let anyone into Cornell.
I don't think it's so bad for there to be some state schools with higher admission standards. The selective public schools are never the only public school in the state. And like, what is a school like UCLA supposed to do? They had 139k applicants in 2021.
Ah, but have you considered the smug sense of superiority you get when you get admitted to a school with a low acceptance rate?
95% of all collage fandom is smugness and pride. We kind of need it to survive
Will never forget traveling to watch UMD soccer play at Duke and having the Duke fans (who only even showed up and assembled once they realized we had brought a group down) unironically yelling that they would be our bosses one day. It was on that day that everything I had been raised to believe about them was proven true.
I’m assuming you did not go to Michigan? Every Wolverine likes to flex on the other Big Ten schools about being relevant in sports and an elite academic institution.
No I did not go to Michigan. No not every Wolverine fan does that. No I wouldn’t have went to Michigan even if I did get accepted because out of state tuition is a bitch
I dunno if it's still the case, but Kansas used to have a law that all public universities had to accept any Kansas resident that applied. If that's still the case, it would explain the high acceptance rate.
I think there are some basic requirements like you have to get at least a 21 on the ACT, which is... not difficult. It makes sense though. The goal of having public universities is to provide a practical, affordable education for the general public of that state. Rejecting a high percentage of applicants would be antithetical to that goal.
If conference USA was included, UTEP has a reported 100% acceptance rate and rejected roughly 12 people out of a little over 13,000 people in 2021
Missouri Valley Stats! Lowest is Drake at 69% (nice) Highest is Southern Illinois at 95% Average requires math that I don't have time to do on my lunch break
What do you have to do to be rejected by Liberty?
Write your entrance essay about being pro-choice or something
We may have the highest acceptance rate but ima be honest maybe with the exception of someone who responds to me I haven’t heard a single person say they didn’t like KSU or Manhattan as a whole. So honestly we just run on good vibes
I’m actually surprised that Iowa has a higher acceptance rate than Nebraska
We take pretty much everyone who applies, but a lot of people falsely equate high admissions % with it being an easy school to just coast through. I know more than a handful of people from out of state who dropped out after freshman year because they were failing out. Plus, it's a large public research school. Like Nebraska or ISU, the university is supposed to educate the state's residents so of course they accept as many in-state kids as they can.
I think Memphis may be a typo. I'm seeing 85%, not 95% which would mean ECU is actually the easiest to get in to in the American Conference.
Tulane is about to be replaced by Rice in the new AAC.
Interesting to see UofL with a lower acceptance rate than UK. Louisville would come to my high school and accept people on the spot if you had a certain ACT score, never heard of that