Acceptance Rates - Next Level Concepts

Level 5 - Ivy League

Welcome! In a previous post, we discussed why acceptance rates do not matter. If you missed that post, you can find it here:

Why Acceptance Rates Don't Matter

In that post, we discussed why acceptance rates are overblown in their importance for evaluating the selectivity of a college. Namely, they do not tell the whole story.

Now we’re going to discuss what acceptance rates actually can tell you and more importantly, how to truly understand selectivity.

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How to evaluate college selectivity

One of the basics of applying to college is understanding the concept of tiered applications:

• Safety schools

• Target schools

• Reach schools

The way that you determine what colleges fit into those buckets is based on how your academic profile measures up to the historical data of accepted students. In other words, how do your SAT scores stack up against SAT scores of other students who have been accepted?

The better your scores are against the accepted students of the pass, the stronger a candidate you will likely be.

The academic profile associated with the school is the first level of evaluating college. You want two numbers:

• Average GPA

• Average Standardized Test Scores

Once you have those ranges for accepted students, you can now compare your profile against those to determine where you fall. There is some art to this, but for a hard rule, take your scores and see how they fit into a given college’s accepted student’s range.

For example, say College A has the following stats:

• 3.5-3.7 GPA is the 25%-75% range for accepted students

• 1200-1300 SAT is the 25%-75% range for accepted students

If a student has a 3.6 and 1300 SAT, that would put them at the 50% for GPA and 75% for SAT. That puts this slightly at a Target, potentially a Safety School. These data points create the basis of something called the Academic Index (AI), a tool that is used to very quickly determine whether a student is competitive enough for admissions consideration.

Got it? Now let’s dive deeper.