What does admission rate mean? Admission rate is simply the percentage of the applicants who have received an offer of admission from a college. In isolation, the admission rate gives limited information about the college. The admission rate is an important metric, BUT it has to be viewed with a few other metrics for it to make sense for students and parents looking at colleges for application.
While, in general, the admission rate gives a reasonable idea of the “selectivity” of the college and how hard it can be to get that offer of admission, it should always be correlated to the number of applicants for a better understanding. For example, let's look at these four colleges with a 17% admission rate for 2014-15:
| Applicants | Admissions | Admission Rate | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swarthmore College | 5,540 | 943 | 17% |
| Middlebury College | 8,195 | 1,407 | 17% |
| Tufts University | 19,074 | 3,288 | 17% |
| Washington University in St. Louis | 29,211 | 5,004 | 17% |
What a big difference in the number of applicants and the number of students receiving offers of admission! A quick check of the test score profile does not show a significant difference between Swarthmore and Wash U. In fact Wash U had a slightly higher test score profile as compared to the others! So the admission rate does not always correlate one to one with test scores unless there is a significant difference in the test score profile.
Let’s look at a different case. Let’s compare San Diego State University (SDSU) with a 2014-15 admission rate of 34% with over 59,000 applicants and UC Riverside with a 2014-15 admission rate of 56% with over 38,000 applicants. Where would you prefer to apply if you just compared 34% vs 56%?
Now consider this: Both SDSU and UCR have similar test score profiles for their admitted students. SDSU admitted nearly 20,000 students and UCR admitted nearly 21,500 students. So similar aren’t they, and yet so different! One belongs to the UC system and the other to the Cal State system. The biggest difference in our opinion between the two is their enrollment rate. SDSU has an enrollment rate of 26% whereas UCR has an enrollment rate of 19%!
Unfortunately, admission rates can be skewed by the number of students applying to a particular college. With the rise of Common App and application forms that allow students to apply to different campuses for a distributed university system, students are applying to many more colleges, which has resulted in a lowered admission rate for most of the colleges. It is so easy to apply to all the University of California (UC) campuses with the same application. All that is needed from an applicant is the $70/campus application fee and select all the campuses on the UC form. This decision by an applicant is being reflected in the enrollment rate which will the topic of our next post.
Generally public universities will have a much a higher admission rate as compared to many of the selective private universities. But that does not imply that the education at a public university would be of lesser quality than that at a private college or that getting into one of the top public universities is easy. After all, UC Berkeley does have a sub 20% admission rate! Or University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with an admission rate of 26%! All it means is that you need to measure the admission rates for public and private universities a little differently.
Final words: So how should you use the admission rate while building your college list for application? A good college list will have a wide range of admission rates to accommodate the range of selectivity, number of applicants, the number of students accepted, and include both public and private colleges. Or you can simply use O’s List!