The average acceptance rate for top 50 US school is now under 15%, this is crazy. What do you think it's going to look like 30 years from now ? Do you think the acceptance rate at Stanford is going to be under 1% ?
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Most likely, America's population is only increasing which is leading to more kids applying. Also, top colleges aren't expanding at all and the number of students at said universities has remained steady.
As tuition rates continue to rise and start reaching untenable levels, and as the student loan bubble continues to pop, I think the U.S. will reach an equilibrium where fewer students will be applying to college. With the boomers retiring en-masse and projected labor shortages, forgoing college will be easily justified by the demand for trade jobs and non-skilled labor in various industries. Of course there will still be high demand and low acceptance rates for world class universities, but they will start to offer more tuition incentives and "perks" as part of enrollment. In my view the real losers in this shift will be mid-tier or lower-tier schools who will no longer be able to justify a private education price tag.
My undergrad's acceptance rate is currently ~60%. Killin' it!
83% here
~49% gotta stay under that 50% mark i guess.
How did you break into ER from a non-ivy/top private?
1.) Understand that life meanders and not everyone follows the same path. 2.) Have an overall goal as well as incremental goals, make sure you meet your incremental goals. 3.) Wallstreetoasis.com, if you know you know and this site puts you in the know.
I also got an MSF but that's because I fucked off undergrad. Know a guy from my undergrad graduating class that's currently in IB at a top BB (GS/MS/JPM) in a top group (HC/ TMT/ FIG). He was always putting in work and had to start in commercial banking but the cream rises so he lateraled after a year.
I would like to point something out about US university acceptance rates, just to clear the air. When schools like Harvard and Stanford boast acceptance rates around 5% and Oxford and Cambridge have acceptance rates closer to 20%, it doesn't mean that the former are more exclusive or harder to get in. In the UK people apply to university via a system called UCAS which allows only 5 spots which could be the same course at 5 unis or 5 courses at the same uni and anything in between. This means that the people who apply to Oxford and Cambridge are only going to be the top students and out of those 20% get in. In the US anyone can apply anywhere because there isn't a place quota so even the guy with a 3.2GPA can hope for a lucky shot to Harvard. That being said, even if acceptance rates decrease in the US that won't be an indication of improving university quality, it may just be that more people apply.
While you're right, it doesn't change the fact that more people = more competition.
Lets say one year there's 20000 people applying to Harvard and maybe 10% of them of competitive - that's 2000 people and Harvard doesn't even accept that many people.
Now lets say because there is a lower acceptance rate at other schools, people want to apply to more to be safe and now 40,000 people are applying for Harvard, there are now more than 2000 people that are qualified for Harvard and your chances just got cut in half.
True, but the flip side is that there are many people out there that THINK they are qualified but fail to perform an accurate assessment of themselves and apply anyways. Then they either get in as a long shot or are disappointed when they get a rejection. I don't know about Harvard but my guess would be that out of those 20,000 potential applicants, maybe 700-800 are serious contenders.
You can only have Oxford or Cambridge as 1 choice in your UCAS and cannot apply to both. Hence we should automatically divide the acceptance rate by half for both.
International applicants will play a big role in the future of acceptance rates. Right now many schools weigh international applicants separately from American ones (giving native applicants an advantage) but if this ever changes in an increasingly globalized world, especially as more countries develop and start applying to American universities, acceptance rates could plummet.
Honestly unless you want to be an investment banker/doctor/lawyer/scientist, your school doesn't really matter
Nah only in finance/ the arts and shit like that does school matter. Anyone with great grades from any reasonable University can get into a great law/ medical/ PhD program. You can go to University of South Dakota undergrad and get into a top 10 law school, for example.
Easily. What are your thoughts on the outlook of jobs/school acceptance in 50 years?
Imagine paying a quarter million USD to join a social club where they hire people to dictate stuff they found through a Google search. Oh, and they make you memorize and "apply" them through "exams" and rank the club members accordingly. Aforementioned clubs are happy to raise dues annually, since they know (desperate) wage slaves need a paper with the club's inscription to attain a job.
In all seriousness (or not), college admission rates in 2050 will be 0%.
Because people will have figured out it's a) the situation above or b) unregulated, untaxed hedge funds masquerading as "education.
As a footnote, I attended one ivy league university, and one top 20 rated university. So my thoughts should hold (some) water.
I think the network people gain while attending an elite school seems to be worth it based off the people I've hired or worked with that attended one. I didn't so you'd know better than me but yeah...other than that it doesn't really make much sense to me unless you're in STEM and want to do specific research that is easier to carry out at that school. IE uPitt was testing some fairly interesting biotech for treating burns, etc...
Generally speaking, the people attending elite schools seem to be a little smarter than when I hire out of gen pop too but it doesn't seem to help much with macro/strategic thinking interestingly enough.
Food for thought, definitely agree with you for the most part.
nice Oz reference
Read "The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan - think you'd enjoy it. I largely agree with your analysis (and I attended 2 Ivy League universities), but I'm skeptical that a "deescalation" of the arms race will occur. A few thoughts as to why: 1. it would require a widespread decision from employers to stop valuing educational credentials (and why would they when they can outsource intelligence/conscientiousness/conformity screening to schools at 0 cost); 2. education is in some ways a luxury good/positional good, and there's not a lot of evidence for people losing interest in status goods (are there fewer or more mega yachts today?); 3. a corollary of (1) - there are still many, many high-status jobs for which it's difficult to observe a candidate's fitness prior to employment. Even the best work on this (which I would argue comes from Google) shows that the a combination of IQ test/structured interview can explain only ~30-35% of subsequent performance. So hiring from a high-status school will continue to be a way to CYA for managers - "It can't be my fault he's bad, he went to Stanford!". It's the hiring equivalent of "McKinsey said it was ok".
Most US colleges now are worse in terms of indoctrination than Chinese ones and they are already living on the reputation of their glorious past, while offering a shitty present.
The US higher education system is due for a deep crisis and devaluation. I wouldn't be surprised to see the internet taking over in terms of providing education in the next 20 years, ravaging the monopoly of universities.
Top universities have more than enough funds to expand, but they don't. That way they can appear more elitist than they should be and they can raise their tuition exponentially - especially with an insane amount of international competition - without having to improve their academic quality.
I think American students should really stand up for themselves, more so in terms of study debt than acceptance rates, but the top university students from Berkeley and Stanford who should take the front row, are too busy defending their 49 pronouns.
EDIT: I did some quick searches and it appears that some top universities have finally decided to expand, but only these last couple of years: 2017-2020
They will continue to creep lower at the elite universities, likely to single digits. More people than ever are trying their hardest to get into ivy league schools. Parents pay insane sums of money for private school education, SAT prep, extracurriculars, abroad volunteer experience for resumes, etc. the “pipeline” to an ivy league school starts earlier and earlier. Also the perpetual quest for “diversity” will continue to make it more competitive.
I think rates will level out. Firstly I think the percent of college students applying to college has reached the highest it will (for a while at least) and I think top 50 will become more prestigious, so non top 50 Universities will become better and applications will increase in those institutions. Also, a lot of colleges like to inflate their application numbers through free apps and whatnot, so I think that is important to look at (5% acceptance rate doesn't mean a qualified candidate will have a 1/20 chance of getting in)
The Common App is also driving this. There’s no additional effort required to apply to additional schools so people do en masse. Also, the comment around applicants being deluded is true. A friend who was involved in admissions said that it essentially boiled down to the applicant’s odds not being 7% or whatever the overall admissions rate was but rather 0.01% and 50%. You had folks who had a coin flip chance and others with a snowball’s chance in hell.
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