We have been mining the Common Data Sets of publicly available information from the most popular 40 or so universities in America. The trend pre-Covid was towards a concentration of applications towards perceived quality with a direct result in lower admissions rates as the size of entering classes has remained largely static.
Covid led to nearly all schools adopting a “Test Optional” policy that had the unintended side effect of greatly accelerating this trend.
This is best seen when we aggregate all the categories of universities.
The large private schools haver enjoyed a particularly large jump in applications with Northeastern and NYU more than doubling in just 10 years.
And of course the number of applications to schools in a specific regional athletic conference also has continued to grow.
With admit rates trending towards historical lows.
The University of California system is one of the few to reveal what the admit rate is overall and also for international students and the differences for Berkeley and UCLA are stark. A good number of the international kids are athletic recruits…
This has been the case across the board with more applications submitted across all the most popular schools. As a result of the test optional policies, many students who might not really have much of a chance of gaining admissions are having a punt and just submitting their applications with no test scores.
Students withholding scores also has accelerated the increase in average SAT scores among admitted students.
While all the while, the overwhelming majority of successful applicants are indeed submitting test scores:
By admit % Submit Rate Admit rate
Top 20 69.6% 6.5%
Top 40 62.7% 9.3%
Top 60 61.3% 12.8%
Top 100 57.8% 23.4%
Top 150 55.4% 35.7%
Top 200 54.3% 47.5%
We group the schools as follows:
Small-mid Privates
Caltech
CMU
Duke
Emory
Georgetown
MIT
Northwestern
Stanford
Tufts
Vanderbuilt
Wash U - St.L
Publics
UC Boulder
Georgia Tech
UIUC
Purdue
UC Berk
UC Davis
UC Irvine
UCLA
UCSB
UCSC
UCSD
Michigan
UTA
UVA
Large Privates
BC
BU
GWU
Notre Dame
Northeastern
NYU
Tulane
USC
