The Allegedly Ever-Crazier College Admissions Rat Race, Continued Ad Infinitum

The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post ran near-identical articles last week focusing on the declining percentage of applicants being accepted by elite colleges and universities. Both focused on single-digit acceptance rates at Ivy League institutions, along with various quotes from admissions officers and anxious parents emphasizing that getting into the Ivies these days is tougher than getting a straight answer from the Bush White House about the war in Iraq. The Post summarized the phenomenon as follows:

About 3 million students are expected to graduate from high school this year, and about two-thirds of them are looking for college spaces. The number of rejections is further inflated by the increased number of applications sent out by each student, reacting to the uncertainty of admission and the ease of online and common applications. This produces a self-perpetuating cycle: It is harder to get in, so seniors apply to more schools, which makes it even harder to get in, at least for the most sought-after schools."

This quote--and the article generally--seems to miss the distinction between perception and reality. The declining admit rate at elite schools is, as the article notes, being driven entirely by the denominator in the equation. It's not that the elite schools are admitting fewer students--in fact, they're admitting more. It's that the number of applications is rising even faster, driving the percentage down.

If the increasing number of applications reflected a corresponding increase in the number of qualified applicants, then it would be fair to say that it's harder to get into an elite college. But this article, and others like it, says that a big factor here is the same pool of applicants simply submitting more applications.

That would make it seem harder to get in, because students would be rejected more often. But the net result, in terms of the total number of qualified students getting spots, wouldn't change. From 2004 to 2005, the Top 50 four-year institutions in terms of SAT scores saw a 6.5% incease in applications, and accepted 2.2% more students, driving their aggregate admit rate down by one percentage point. So unless the number of qualified applicants increased by more than 2.2%, this whole "it's harder to get into college" phenomenon is mostly a mirage.