Rethinking The Meaning Of Colleges' Low Acceptance Rates
Willard Dix
Contributor
I cover the college admission process and how it affects families.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
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In my last entry I called students who apply to high status, low
admission rate colleges and universities “cannon fodder.” Charging
ahead to breach the walls of these institutions has increasingly become
an exercise in futility even for the best, most accomplished students.
Admission officers at these schools routinely tell audiences they could
“fill the class two or three times over” from the reject pile. They
supposedly mean this comment to be comforting, but it provides little
solace to the rejected students lying desolate on the field of battle.
I return to this metaphor because of the damage done to students entering the college admission process. Those inculcated with the idea that only a high status college will do for their post-secondary lives must endure a four-year slog through high school to position themselves for a virtually impossible result. When they’re rejected, all that work seems to have been for naught. They have lost their four years of high school pursuing a fruitless goal, with the end results being cynicism about the system, regret over lost time, mental and physical exhaustion and a feeling that studying and being active don’t really matter.
To put it bluntly: They become collateral damage. Let’s look at a few numbers from the current admission season (College class of 2020) to see how many students fell during ”The Charge of the Bright Brigade”:
I didn’t even bother to include Dartmouth or Cornell with their
comparatively generous double-digit acceptance rates (10.5% and 14%,
respectively). It’s clear that applying to these institutions is a
losing proposition.
Although colleges love to crow about these numbers, they conceal a fact that few outsiders realize: A low acceptance rate, along with high scores, grades and other characteristics, indicates inputs, not outputs. It says nothing about what, how or whether students learn once they’re there. (More than one Harvard student has told me that the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in.)
In his new book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession With Smartness Shortchanges Students, UCLA professor emeritus Alexander Astin refutes the idea that high selectivity automatically equals excellent education. [Aside from his many years of researching higher education, he also founded UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), so he is uniquely qualified to discuss this phenomenon.] Astin writes,
Despite the almost inevitable prospect of rejection, more and more students seem willing to charge into the volley that will cut them down. Simultaneously they (or their parents) refuse to consider institutions that would love to have them, often because their acceptance rates seem to indicate a lack of quality. It’s an issue of status, not education, in that case. (I once had a very well-educated mother in tears on my office sofa because her son would have to attend Tufts instead of Brown. That was before Tufts’ admit rate plummeted to its current 14%. I imagine she’d be happier now.)
It pays to know that while the Ivies’ admit rates have shrunk, the average university acceptance rate is still above 50%, which means plenty of schools welcome good students eager to learn and contribute to their campuses. It also makes sense to ask, if you care, where all those rejects from the Ivies go–surely they don’t simply crawl off to live in the basement. They very likely attend other schools just as good but without the advantage of name recognition. As Astin puts it, to a large extent “the entire process is being driven by the folklore about institutional quality or excellence, our shared cultural beliefs about which are the best colleges and universities.” (p. 30)
Instead of hurling themselves futilely into the low admit rate battle, students should look for schools that would appreciate their talents and enjoy having them on campus. I’m not arguing that the Ivies and their kin aren’t good schools for some students; I’m saying they don’t need you, and they’re proud of the fact. That’s something to be concerned about.
One final story: I used to show the low percentages to students fixated on Ivies hoping at least getting them to be realistic. That almost never worked. I then happened to read a medical study about how patients determined whether or not to have a particular procedure done. If the doctor said there was a 10% chance of success, the patient usually said “OK, let’s do it.” But if the doctor led with “There’s a 90% chance of failure,” the patient usually declined to have the procedure.
As the college search process starts to heat up, I urge families to reject high rejection institutions in favor of those with more favorable statistics. The values represented by that minuscule number are not about education but about how well the institution can collect smart kids. Understand, too: colleges that respect students’ histories as they are rather than having compelled them to sacrifice themselves for that scarce admit may be much better choices in the long run, not just academically but personally. Students can enjoy their high school and extracurricular lives without worrying about how every move will look to an institution that ultimately doesn’t care. They can arrive at college feeling as though they are at the beginning of an exciting adventure, not at the end of a marathon.
(Excessive anxiety and obsession over getting into college as early as freshman year of high school lead to something I’ve called Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. I’ll talk about that in another post.)
I return to this metaphor because of the damage done to students entering the college admission process. Those inculcated with the idea that only a high status college will do for their post-secondary lives must endure a four-year slog through high school to position themselves for a virtually impossible result. When they’re rejected, all that work seems to have been for naught. They have lost their four years of high school pursuing a fruitless goal, with the end results being cynicism about the system, regret over lost time, mental and physical exhaustion and a feeling that studying and being active don’t really matter.
To put it bluntly: They become collateral damage. Let’s look at a few numbers from the current admission season (College class of 2020) to see how many students fell during ”The Charge of the Bright Brigade”:
| Institution | % Accepted | Brigade Numbers | Left on the Battlefield |
| Stanford | 4.69 | 43,997 | 41,934 |
| Harvard | 5.2 | 39,044 | 37,014 |
| Princeton | 6.46 | 29,313 | 27,429 |
| Brown | 9 | 32,390 | 29,475 |
| Columbia | 6.04 | 36,292 | 33,970 |
| Yale | 6.27 | 31,455 | 29,483 |
| MIT | 7.81 | 19,020 | 17,535 |
| Penn | 9.4 | 38,918 | 35,260 |
Although colleges love to crow about these numbers, they conceal a fact that few outsiders realize: A low acceptance rate, along with high scores, grades and other characteristics, indicates inputs, not outputs. It says nothing about what, how or whether students learn once they’re there. (More than one Harvard student has told me that the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in.)
In his new book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession With Smartness Shortchanges Students, UCLA professor emeritus Alexander Astin refutes the idea that high selectivity automatically equals excellent education. [Aside from his many years of researching higher education, he also founded UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), so he is uniquely qualified to discuss this phenomenon.] Astin writes,
If you look at our higher education system from an educational perspective, this preoccupation with enrolling smart students makes little sense because the emphasis seems to be more on acquiring smart students than on educating them well. As a consequence, institutions and the public define the excellence of a college or university in terms of who enrolls rather than how well they are educated after they enroll. In the health care field, this would be the equivalent of judging a clinic or hospital on the basis of the condition of the patients it admits rather than the effectiveness of the care and treatment patients receive once they are admitted. (p. 25)A low admit rate doesn’t really tell you anything about the institution’s effect on its students; it tells you about the students it accepts. One can say, “Well, it’s Yale, after all,” and that’s fine, but is that worth making the years of high school a boot camp to prepare for the losing battle to get into Yale? Increasingly, students report they arrive at college burned out, with no sense of why they’re there. In high schools, rates of depression and anxiety have risen for any number of reasons, but college admission is one. Knowing that highly competitive colleges look for “passion” in their applicants, students obsess over ways to find it or, worse, create it when it really isn’t isn’t there yet.
Despite the almost inevitable prospect of rejection, more and more students seem willing to charge into the volley that will cut them down. Simultaneously they (or their parents) refuse to consider institutions that would love to have them, often because their acceptance rates seem to indicate a lack of quality. It’s an issue of status, not education, in that case. (I once had a very well-educated mother in tears on my office sofa because her son would have to attend Tufts instead of Brown. That was before Tufts’ admit rate plummeted to its current 14%. I imagine she’d be happier now.)
It pays to know that while the Ivies’ admit rates have shrunk, the average university acceptance rate is still above 50%, which means plenty of schools welcome good students eager to learn and contribute to their campuses. It also makes sense to ask, if you care, where all those rejects from the Ivies go–surely they don’t simply crawl off to live in the basement. They very likely attend other schools just as good but without the advantage of name recognition. As Astin puts it, to a large extent “the entire process is being driven by the folklore about institutional quality or excellence, our shared cultural beliefs about which are the best colleges and universities.” (p. 30)
Instead of hurling themselves futilely into the low admit rate battle, students should look for schools that would appreciate their talents and enjoy having them on campus. I’m not arguing that the Ivies and their kin aren’t good schools for some students; I’m saying they don’t need you, and they’re proud of the fact. That’s something to be concerned about.
One final story: I used to show the low percentages to students fixated on Ivies hoping at least getting them to be realistic. That almost never worked. I then happened to read a medical study about how patients determined whether or not to have a particular procedure done. If the doctor said there was a 10% chance of success, the patient usually said “OK, let’s do it.” But if the doctor led with “There’s a 90% chance of failure,” the patient usually declined to have the procedure.
As the college search process starts to heat up, I urge families to reject high rejection institutions in favor of those with more favorable statistics. The values represented by that minuscule number are not about education but about how well the institution can collect smart kids. Understand, too: colleges that respect students’ histories as they are rather than having compelled them to sacrifice themselves for that scarce admit may be much better choices in the long run, not just academically but personally. Students can enjoy their high school and extracurricular lives without worrying about how every move will look to an institution that ultimately doesn’t care. They can arrive at college feeling as though they are at the beginning of an exciting adventure, not at the end of a marathon.
(Excessive anxiety and obsession over getting into college as early as freshman year of high school lead to something I’ve called Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. I’ll talk about that in another post.)
See my blog at collegeculture.net for essays about the college admission process itself.
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