Stanford admissions - Printable Version
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Stanford admissions - BostonCard - 03-31-2017
Down to *gulp* 4.65%.
https://twitter.com/treesidjorge/status/847987389083525121
Congratulations to the very few who succeeded.
BC
Re: Stanford admissions - JJJ - 03-31-2017
Here's the Daily's piece:
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2017/03/31/stanford-admit-rate-falls-to-4-65-percent/
Re: Stanford admissions - paloalto - 04-01-2017
I thought the plan was to increase the student population each year for the next ten years.  The 2021 number of admitted students was slightly lower than last year. Unless they expect an increase in yield or plan to take a higher than normal number of transfers/waitlisters, the 2021 class will be smaller than 2020.
Re: Stanford admissions - winflop - 04-01-2017
Largest applicant pool in history was also a contributing factor in the lower rate. My big question is to what extent to students "at the top" is becoming a larger pool or whether it's just more kids applying who many not be qualified. probably some of both, but certainly the ease of applying online to colleges in general is contributing to the lower admission rates across the board. I haven't done the research (yeah, shame on me) but my guess is the average number of colleges each HS student applies to has gone up and continues to rise.
Re: Stanford admissions - 81alum - 04-01-2017
(04-01-2017, 08:59 AM)winflop link Wrote:Largest applicant pool in history was also a contributing factor in the lower rate. My big question is to what extent to students "at the top" is becoming a larger pool or whether it's just more kids applying who many not be qualified. probably some of both, but certainly the ease of applying online to colleges in general is contributing to the lower admission rates across the board. I haven't done the research (yeah, shame on me) but my guess is the average number of colleges each HS student applies to has gone up and continues to rise.Googling around, it does not seem like there is great data on this, but what there is indicates that application inflation (applying to large numbers of schools) is prevalent among the top 5% of applicants but not prevalent among the other 95%, who still average 2-3 applications.
But applying to 20 schools is not uncommon among elite students (the Common App limits you to 20), who seem to be more obsessed about where they get in than other students.
What this means, paradoxically, is that the feeding frenzy just gets worse and worse at the very top of the college foodchain, and the more selective the elite universities are perceived as being, the more fear among elite applicants is sowed and the more they increase the number of their applications. Which of course drives down the acceptance rate, which increased fear.....etc.
I've posted many times about this, so won't repeat myself. Suffice it to say that some sort of reform is needed or else this trend will eventually break the system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/nyregion/applications-by-the-dozen-as-anxious-students-hedge-college-bets.html?_r=0
https://edreformnow.org/the-college-application-inflation-only-exists-among-the-top-5/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-more-application-inflation/2015/04/17/9d0863ea-e202-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html
The possible downside...and this relates to US - Redrum - 04-01-2017
Does the growing competitiveness and real / perceived "eliteness" of the student body as a whole put more pressure on athletic recruit admissions? Right now admissions sets some current standards for grades, test scores and somewhat vaguer evidence of intellectual curiosity and mindset when assessing athletes. There is a detente of sorts between the elite intellectual identity group and those with a broader view used to justify some, maybe many, of the, ummm, stretches for athletes on the grounds that they have demonstrated character, drive, discipline even if not elite academics.Â
I write this as a non-elite, who still wonders to this day how I got into Stanford in the first place.
Re: Stanford admissions - jacketree - 04-01-2017
Athletic admission is separate from the general pool so there will be no effect. There are slots for athletes and there are slots for everybody else. Alternatively Stanford could disband its athletic program.
Stanford's absurdly low admit rate is a simple matter of the college-age denominator; which itself is a function of easier access to college applications with fees waived if need be or even to encourage more applications, and the volume of applications to all colleges and universities. I bet the typical number of college applications per kid these days is between 10 and 20. My own anomalous daughter was accepted so early she stopped at three. My son sent in 13 because it was a baker's dozen and didn't cost a dime. His inbox had hundreds of invitations from schools from the obscure to famous (including UC Hicago, where he had no business going) offering "express" applications for free. Twelve of those applications were painfully easy. Control C, Control V and Control F. The application to his ultimate destination was literally painful, involving MRI scans, rehabilitation and a lot of antacid. And that was after he had been given his Letter of Assurance. We did pay on the back end to secure slots at an alternate ROTC unit in Boston and a "best civilian scholarship offer" university in Washington D.C. in case something happened. For about a minute in a hotel room the night before Induction Day, we thought it might.
Anyway, back to the subject, this is a great little circle of increased prestige without any real change in educational quality. There are more kids. You don't see a thousand new universities established each year. More kids apply everywhere, admit rates decline everywhere, so more kids apply everywhere, so admit rates decline....
Is Stanford twice as good than it was when the admit rate was 9 percent? No.
Re: Stanford admissions - Hank 91 - 04-01-2017
This article is a year old, so I'm sure it's been posted here somewhere, but it's a fun read and it fits this thread.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/opinion/college-admissions-shocker.html?_r=0
Here's the lede:
Quote:PALO ALTO, California Cementing its standing as the most selective institution of higher education in the country, Stanford University announced this week that it had once again received a record-setting number of applications and that its acceptance rate which had dropped to a previously uncharted low of 5 percent last year plummeted all the way to its inevitable conclusion of 0 percent.
Re: Stanford admissions - threepointer - 04-02-2017
Feel my pain.....
My daughter was accepted to USC, Cal, Pomona, and a bunch of others. She applied to 11 which was about the norm at her high school. Prior to Friday, the only school to reject her was UCLA. Great grades, test scores, blah, blah, blah...
She has been to the Women's Final 4. The Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and just about every other significant Stanford sports event and banquet. Her blood was RGB 140, 21, 21.
She was rejected by Stanford on Friday.
I love Stanford and the world it opened up for me. But today, I love Stanford a little less.
And for the next few years I have to listen to that idiotic "This is the only song we know" ring tone that my daughter installed on my smartphone.
Re: Stanford admissions - TrumpCard - 04-02-2017
When you consider the relatively high admissions rate of athletes (because the coaches generally have a good idea of who will gain admissions before they submit), the rate for the general population is even lower than 4.65%.
Re: Stanford admissions - oldalum - 04-02-2017
yes, it is almost impossible to get in, no matter how good your qualifications. Not just the 4.65%, not just the athletes, but also the children of professors, the children of major donors, the children of double and up legacees, the superstar applicants in various fields. Fortunately my children didn't even apply.
Re: Stanford admissions - UltimateCard - 04-02-2017
(04-02-2017, 12:47 PM)threepointer link Wrote:Feel my pain.....
My daughter was accepted to Under Stanford Control (again), ×ÉÉ, Pomona, and a bunch of others. She applied to 11 which was about the norm at her high school. Prior to Friday, the only school to reject her was UCLA. Great grades, test scores, blah, blah, blah...
She has been to the Women's Final 4. The Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and just about every other significant Stanford sports event and banquet. Her blood was RGB 140, 21, 21.
She was rejected by Stanford on Friday.
I love Stanford and the world it opened up for me. But today, I love Stanford a little less.
And for the next few years I have to listen to that idiotic "This is the only song we know" ring tone that my daughter installed on my smartphone.
Was just on campus yesterday for an alum event and several of us lamented the near impossibility of having our children follow our footsteps. My son, who is now a freshman at Northwestern, didn't even apply, mostly because he wanted to go away for college (which is what I did, coming from NYC to the Farm, so who am I to object?!) but also because his high school has a lousy track record of getting kids into Stanford (despite being the top public high school in San Francisco) and the amount of time it would take to write the four supplemental essays. He's happy (so far) in Evanston, and I have to admit that I started following their MBB this season. No torn allegiances on 8/31/2019, however!
Re: Stanford admissions - JJJ - 04-02-2017
(04-01-2017, 08:54 AM)paloalto link Wrote:I thought the plan was to increase the student population each year for the next ten years.  The 2021 number of admitted students was slightly lower than last year. Unless they expect an increase in yield or plan to take a higher than normal number of transfers/waitlisters, the 2021 class will be smaller than 2020.
I believe the plan was always to have a "manageable" yield with an eye to accepting some off the waitlist. It was just that yields kept rising faster than they anticipated, leading to lack of waitlist admits for a few years. I wouldn't be surprised if the total student population keeps growing each year, with some happy kids being taken off the waitlist in the process.
Re: Stanford admissions - 82lsju - 04-02-2017
one thing that had definitely changed since my time on the Farm (1979-82) is transfer admissions (I'm one). In my class ('82) there are over 150 transfers, some as sophomores, some as juniors, some from community colleges, some from four year universities and probably some other unusual combos I didn't even know about then. Back then the transfer admit rate was a little lower then the freshman admit rate. My understanding is that currently there are almost no transfers.
Re: Stanford admissions - 81alum - 04-03-2017
A few reactions:
1) My children did not apply to Stanford, even with a double-legacy working on their behalf. Partly a desire to go further away, but mainly they felt excluded and began to resent the place long before applications were due. One year recently, Gunn (one of the two main high schools in Palo Alto--where my children attended) sent 19 kids to Stanford, 18 of whom were the children of faculty. Counselors there advised that non faculty kids had a much better chance applying to Ivies and other elites since Stanford generally fills its Gunn "quota" with children of faculty. So it was a unique kind of discrimination since we happened to live in the same part of town as Stanford's faculty enclave.Â
2) If you read through the links I provided, you will see that the average number of applications overall is about the same as it always has been--between 2 and 3. But the average number of applications among elite students has skyrocketed. This feeds a culture at certain college-prep oriented high schools where 10-20 apps is "normal." This puts enormous stress on the already stressed out super-students.
3) The idea that Stanford has different admission standards for athletes than for non athletes is complicated. Since Stanford admissions has always placed a lot more weight on "extracurriculars" than other elite schools, the question is how athletic achievement gets factored as an extracurricular. Stanford admissions says it is looking for students who have shown they have perfected at least one skill to a high level of excellence, and I imagine any scholarship athlete has done that. It would be interesting to compare with all the other extracurriculars for non athletes to see if there really is a double standard, or whether non athletes are compensating for weaker extracurriculars with higher academics. Leaving aside that two-part weighting scheme, it is nonetheless true that some athletes--especially football players--seem to be admitted with lower academic standards than nearly anyone else on campus. But this does not seem to apply to other athletes. You never find WBB players who had B+ averages in high school the way Christian McCaffrey did, for example. If B+ were good enough for WBB players the way it seems to be good enough for football players, we might well have had Kelsey Plum on the roster, among many others.
And, with respect... - Redrum - 04-03-2017
"Athletic admission is separate from the general pool so there will be no effect. There are slots for athletes and there are slots for everybody else. Alternatively Stanford could disband its athletic program."
There is no guarantee that it will be ever thus. I have talked and read stuff by successful Stanford alumni whose focus seems to be elite-and-ever-more-elite...with barely a whisper about Stanford sports. When they did, it seemed like a rote, ceremonial nod to sports.Â
The next Gerhard Casper is out there somewhere.
And my point was that blind faith that it will ever be thus has real risks for those of us who got the Stanford boost going in and coming out of Stanford, but whose relationship to the school these days is mostly about Stanford sports...for me, mainly football. (And for that run-on sentence, a high school English teacher spinning in her grave). Of course, through a combination of good sense, serendipity and that Mr. A guy, Stanford managed to turn around a gut-wrenching drop in the quality of its most visible and $$ making sport. I have read enough comments by the academic elitists that the "Stanford experience" doesn't include that fluff on the playing fields. May they always be a crank minority of limited means.
Re: And, with respect... - CTcard - 04-03-2017
(04-03-2017, 09:05 AM)Redrum link Wrote:"Athletic admission is separate from the general pool so there will be no effect. There are slots for athletes and there are slots for everybody else. Alternatively Stanford could disband its athletic program."
There is no guarantee that it will be ever thus.
...
The next Gerhard Casper is out there somewhere.
I don't want to stop you from enjoying your anxieties, and indeed there are no guarantees of anything, but from what I can see the fundamental interest in competitive sports at Stanford and the essentially separate admissions track is on fairly substantial footing. In fact, the only main discussion I have heard in recent years about de-emphasizing big time sports at Stanford was from disgruntled football fans during the Buddy/Wlat years; which still seems to me more dramatic whining than any kind of serious proposal.
I know we all only hear voices from our own worlds, but since the arrival of Harbs and a happy football fan base I haven't heard any discussion yearning to de-emphasize sports at Stanford; and I know many of the usual suspects - like foreign born faculty members.
Casper himself, I think, is an example of the robustness of the role of big-time sports at Stanford. As far as I could tell, he did indeed seem somewhat bewildered by the whole American thing of high level sports in universities and was not pro-sports. However, during his time (1992-2000) we say a reasonably high level of football success under Willingham, the rise of the golden era of mens basketball, and a Sears Cup every year (well, every year starting in 1994-5, the second year of the cup).
If you want to look for a possible fly in the ointment of our athletic success it would be the next Robin Mamlet -Â though I would maintain that even she was a lesser issue to a series of inadequate coaches.
[ I am not quite sure how much your concern is about a separate admissions track for athletes and how much general issues of athletic success at Stanford. I was assuming the latter. Even in the Ivies, admissions for athletes is essentially a separate track.]
Re: Stanford admissions - M T - 04-03-2017
By definition, a separate admissions track is a perk that is not available to the normal student. Considering the difficulty of and competition for getting into Stanford, preferential treatment for athletes must have a significant value. Does the NCAA account for this in the calculation of compensation given to athletes. Surely this is worth more than the value of a loan to purchase a bicycle!
Re: Stanford admissions - CTcard - 04-03-2017
(04-03-2017, 10:55 AM)MT link Wrote:By definition, a separate admissions track is a perk that is not available to the normal student. Considering the difficulty of and competition for getting into Stanford, preferential treatment for athletes must have a significant value. Does the NCAA account for this in the calculation of compensation given to athletes.Â
Obviously they don't, or basically every university in the country would be in violation.
On the other hand, being admitted without advanced athletic skills is a perk for normal students not given to athletes.
Re: Stanford admissions - CornFed - 04-03-2017
"and a Sears Cup every year (well, every year starting in 1994-5, the second year of the cup). "
And hopefully it will be every year when that "other" winner in the first year has their Sears Cup win vacated. lol >:( ::)