Business Insider By Abby Jackson
College
admissions season is upon us, reinvigorating conversations
about what it takes to get accepted into top schools around the
nation. The impressive strength of the applicant pool has been
apparent over the past few years. Business Insider, for example,
profiled impressive students for the class of 2020, some of
whom gained acceptance to all eight Ivy League schools.
The New York Times, too, puts out an annual call for
college-admissions essays to the newest class of applicants,
and then prints the most poignant essays, displaying the wit
an eloquence of the teenage applicants. The strength of these credentials and impressive essays elicits
the question of whether it’s more difficult to get into elite
schools today than ever before. Former Ivy League admissions
directors have some potentially unsettling news for college
applicants: yes, it is.
“Admissions have gotten more and more competitive in the past
decade,” Angela Dunnham, a college admissions counselor at
InGenius Prep, told Business Insider via email. “In addition
to the sheer number of applicants applying, the expectations for
candidates have increased,” Dunnham, a former assistant director
of admissions at Dartmouth College, said.
The steady uptick of college applicants, especially at elite
schools, is stark, driven in part by the emergence of Common App,
which allows students to apply to many schools at once. Take, for example, an article in the Harvard Crimson about the
acceptance rate for the class of 2000. “The class was chosen
among a pool of 18,190 applicants, making Harvard’s admission
rate a paltry 10.9 percent — the lowest in College history,”
The Crimson wrote. Twenty years later, the authors of that story are likely to be
aghast that the acceptance rate has spiraled ever lower. With
more than double the applicants,
about 95% of students who applied to Harvard were rejected.
In addition to the sheer number of applicants which make the
field appear more competitive, the academic credentials of
students are also becoming more impressive, in part due to the
increase in international students who have begun to flood US
colleges and universities.
“I met a Korean freshman who scored a 2400/2400 on the SAT,
after taking in once,” Dunnham said. “She also was conducting
impressive research and loved debate.”
However, there may be reason to view this lowering acceptance
rate with some skepticism, Cat McManus, a counselor
InGenius Prep and a former assistant dean and regional
director at The University of Pennsylvania, told Business
Insider via email.
Selective colleges have caps on the amount of international
students they accept, and, therefore,the increase in
international applicants, while it driving down the acceptance
rate, has less impact on US applicants.
“The rise in the number of international applicants to the most
selective institutions in the US has inflated the number of
overall applicants, as well as, in some cases, the GPA and
testing profiles, which makes schools appear more selective
from a purely statistical standpoint,” McManus, who was also an
admissions officer at Princeton, said.
And while in many cases it looks like GPA and standardized test
score averages are increasing, some of this should be
attributed to the test prep era, which is ubiquitous in the
college admissions process.
“Whether applicants are actually ‘stronger’ is tough to say,”
McManus said. “There is also a lot of essay ‘help’ that goes
on, both domestically and internationally.”
Still, while the increase in students utilizing test prep to
boost scores doesn’t necessarily mean these applicants are
inherently stronger students than they were a decade ago, it
does mean that average test scores are inching up, potentially
harming students who don’t have the means to pay for extra
help.
