
Stanford's 2017 acceptance rate hits record low: 5.7% - aroman
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/03/29/class-of-2017-admit-rate-marks-record-low/
======
rkaplan
I'm fortunate enough to have been included in that 5.7% today. Nonetheless,
the statistic is highly misleading and the entire college process is becoming
increasingly arbitrary. With so many talented candidates, it is often simply a
crapshoot for all but the very best applicants.

Admission to an individual school in particular is extremely difficult to
predict. I have friends who were just accepted to Harvard and rejected from
Stanford, vice versa, accepted to Yale and neither Harvard nor Stanford, etc.
It's similar to an earlier discussion today here on HN about the applicability
of group statistics to an individual situation: even if you're an exceedingly
qualified applicant, your essays just might not click with a particular
school's screener. Or perhaps you're not fully qualified, but someone in the
admissions committee really connects with your personal story. These kinds of
things happen all of the time in college admissions; with such a competitive
pool, getting into any particular school often comes down to chance.

As for the acceptance rate itself, it's as much a measure of how good a school
is at marketing as it is of its competitiveness. Harvard (and many others)
sends pamphlets by the thousands trying to bait almost-certainly-hopeless
students into sending an application, just to drive down their acceptance
percentage. Many schools also reject candidates that are "too good," ("Tufts
syndrome") because an admissions office will gamble that such candidates will
matriculate at a better school. They would prefer to get their acceptance
percentage lower than accept a student who probably wouldn't matriculate.

~~~
nnexx
> I have friends who were just accepted to Harvard and rejected from Stanford,
> vice versa, accepted to Yale and neither Harvard nor Stanford, etc.

There has always been speculation that the elite schools get together and do a
little horse trading in regards to whom they will accept. Other than those
truly exceptional students that they all want, they'll pretty much make sure
people get into one or two but not all of the top universities. This is to
keep them from wasting too many slots on the same people. They'll deny it of
course, but it seems a little too coincidental given how often it happens.

~~~
tanzam75
Unlikely, given the volumes of applications that they're now dealing with.

It's simply much harder to get into two elite universities these days. At
single-digit admit rates, we're well past the point of selecting for qualified
students. Which means that a lot of students are selected based on essentially
random factors. And when something is random, humans like to see patterns
where none exist.

You may be thinking of the fact that the elite colleges coordinate financial
aid decisions for students who have already been admitted to multiple schools.
Suppose Stanford costs $60k and offers a $40k aid package, while MIT costs
$58k and offers a $45k aid package. In that case, both schools might agree to
offer a $42k package, so that the $7k difference in out-of-pocket costs gets
narrowed to $2k.

Coordination of financial aid makes coordination of admissions unnecessary, as
it prevents schools from "stealing" students from each other by offering
higher aid packages.

------
mjn
I'd be interested in reading something about what they're doing to keep the
process working in that case.

I'm involved in various academic conferences, and acceptance rate is a big
sticking point, which gets more problematic as the number gets lower. It's
very easy to put on a symposium with a 60-70% acceptance rate: you just filter
out the stuff that is clearly not good, and is not going to contribute. It's
not _much_ harder to go to 40-50%: you raise your bar for how well thought out
something needs to be, how well it needs to ground itself in the existing
research, and how good the prose itself needs to be.

But once you start going south of that, things quickly get problematic. Now
you start rejecting decent stuff, for reasons that depend on random assignment
of reviewers: some reviewers are harsher than others, and if you don't correct
for it, that impacts things. You have not easily comparable factors: is
borderline contribution in area A better or worse than borderline contribution
in area B? How precisely do you weight every possible factor? Is
interestingness, rigor, or clearness of communication more important? You
also, as you get towards 10-20% acceptance rates, easily end up slipping into
a mode where papers get accepted more because of "can't find a reason to
reject it" rather than "would actually want to accept it". Reviewers become
very critical (since most papers need to be rejected), and look for any reason
they can find to reject a paper. So what survives is not the _best_ papers,
but the papers nobody could find a good enough reason to reject. What that
usually means is either 1) airtight incremental work; or 2) blockbuster media-
friendly work.

More generally, I think it gets exponentially harder to make any kind of
review process meaningful as you accept a smaller and smaller percentage of
applications. I believe I can honestly set up a screening system for accepting
the top 30% of an applicant pool with at least _acceptable_ error. But the top
5%? It starts looking like rolling dice. If Stanford does it better, I'd love
to know how!

~~~
aneth4
Two things:

\- They are just as happy with a random selection of 7% from the top 15-20% of
applications

\- There is zero "error". They select who they select, and are not just
looking for exactly the top applicants - in fact that has little meaning. What
does top mean? Is someone with incredible musical talent but slightly weaker
than another applicant in math better or worse? They want a solid diverse
group of amazing students. This is not angel investing, where they are afraid
of missing out on the one big hit.

~~~
just2n
Unless there is a 100% pass rate, there is definitely "error." Picking someone
who you couldn't find a problem with but who is incapable of passing your
courses counts as picking the wrong person.

~~~
barry-cotter
The only elite college in the US with a failure rate higher than 2% is Cal
Tech. Everyone else provides ample opportunities to switch to less rigorous
majors with lower standards. Given that they're admitting 18 year olds with no
previous experience of living away from home they're not realisitically going
to approach elite professional school levels of graduation unless they make it
really easy to pass.

~~~
duaneb
Lower standards or a better fit? I would find some subjects, like studio art,
prohibitively difficult.

------
rkuykendall-com
I received my letter on Wednesday, so I felt this one personally.

I applied for the masters program, but I'm sure the trend is the same. It's
been 3 days since I heard back, and I still think I'm feeling a little down.
Interestingly, none of my other declines bothered me much at all, even from
amazing schools with programs I may have picked over Stanford. I think it is
because Stanford was the first graduate program that I got excited about.

When you start a project, you never know where you will end up, but I think
it's important to pick a star to follow, a goal to motivate yourself. After
reading about the mobile and internet computing specialization at Stanford, I
finally felt like graduate school was a place I could fit in, and I set
Stanford at my star. When I was being lazy and not focusing enough, I set the
Stanford logo as my desktop. Since then I have found a number of places which
would be just fantastic places for me. Picking a star motivated me, and got me
where I needed to go, but it's hard not to be sad when it doesn't work out.

~~~
jcheng
Stanford et al are a huge leg up when getting your first job out of school.
But do they really matter once you have a few years of job experience? When
I'm hiring I care _vastly_ more about a candidate's last two jobs than where
he or she went to school.

~~~
robryan
Depends on the area of study. For Computer Science and related I think most
smart students that aren't in an academic bubble know this. Often it is more
intellectual curiosity than any eventual financial payoff that is the major
motivating factor.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
I have been told by many professors that I would earn more by directly
entering the workforce. It takes a massive salary increase to catch up to 2-3
years of pay. Intellectual curiosity is really the only reason you can choose
graduate school, or you will hate it.

I found my undergraduate advanced electives and research with professors
exciting and interesting, so I decided I would rather spend 2-3 years learning
more and researching, than spending 2-3 working my way up in my first few
jobs.

I will probably end up someplace similar, but I will enjoy it much more, and I
believe be a better person because of it.

------
maximz
This isn't surprising. Let's look at how many people applied and how many
acceptances were issued over the last few years:

* 2012-2013: 38,828 applied, 2210 accepted

* 2011-2012: 36,631 applied, 2427 accepted

* 2010-2011: 34,348 applied, 2427 accepted

* 2009-2010: 32,000 applied, 2300 accepted

There's a constant amount of spots and they take the same amount of people.

The reason they are now more selective (percentage-wise) is simply that more
people applied.

~~~
hkmurakami
_The reason they are now more selective (percentage-wise) is simply that more
people applied._

A more accurate description would be "Stanford's increased marketing efforts
got more people to apply". It's a trend nationwide, a race to the bottom to
game the school rankings system.

Edit: It's not limited to undergrad programs either. Business schools are at
it as well.

Edit2: It helps their top line too. Application fees are something like $100,
marketing costs are definitely an order of magnitude smaller, and the cost of
processing one application (especially if they just get rejected right away)
is quite minimal.

~~~
aneth4
> Application fees are something like $100, marketing costs are definitely an
> order of magnitude smaller

32,000 applicants * $100 = $3.2M

That's chump change for Stanford. They have an $18B endowment and massive
tuition revenue.

The idea that they run their application program as a profit center is
ridiculous.

And while some schools may "game the school rankings system," Stanford hardly
needs to.

~~~
hkmurakami
Agreed about the profits.

But I think you underestimate the need for Stanford to do everything it takes
to get maximize their rankings. Most college applicants base their college
choice largely on rankings, and the best students are going to be the most
likely to give $$$ "back to the school" (whatever that means). If every other
top college (I guess the "Ivy+" schools) is trying their darnedest to inflate
their ranking metrics, then Stanford is eventually going to find itself
towards the bottom half of the top 10 schools with respect to rankings. That
will actually affect its long term student body quality in ways that it
doesn't want.

Now I personally don't think rankings mean anything, but this is me, 10+ years
after my own college applications. From the school's perspective, they _have_
to protect their ranking.

~~~
duaneb
I found the rankings immensely helpful in selecting a college. Since then I've
realized how little the rankings mean for much of the top 50, 100 colleges. A
startup that allowed the user to define their own rankings could make bank.

------
jonemo
Similar news just came out here at Cornell:
[http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March13/Admissions2013.h...](http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March13/Admissions2013.html)

The real news both in Cornell and Stanford is that more people applied but
more or less the same number of places as always is available. My first guess
was that this might be simply because there were more births in the years that
have now reached college age, but that seems to not be true
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics)).
Or it could be an economic effect, namely that people who couldn't afford
sending their kids to college during the crisis years now can. Or maybe
universities really just did better PR and therefore get more applications.
Would be nice to have this data for every university to see if the same effect
applies everywhere.

~~~
superprime
It's not about the cost of college, at least here. Places like Stanford and
Princeton have generous enough financial aid programs that if you can't pay
for it, they will (presuming you're accepted).

~~~
jonemo
True. Having applied to one of the two I'd like to point out that this is
(with very few exceptions) only true for domestic students.

------
barry-cotter
Look at how we respond to the US N&WR like all the other universities, by
increasing our advertising spend and getting people who aren't even marginal
admits to apply.

------
nextstep
This is just like any highly-selective admissions process. They (Stanford, but
it could be any Ivy, or a company like Google) has accepted the fact that they
will turn down many good candidates. It doesn't really matter as they can't
accept more than a certain number anyway. Hiring/acceptance policies are more
about guaranteeing low false positives, not preventing false negatives.

However, with college admissions, the schools have a lot to gain by increasing
the number of applicants. Colleges charge $50-$100 per application, so some
revenue is generated to cover the application process's costs. Schools like
Stanford can brag about how low their acceptance rates are, just by increasing
the number of applicants.

~~~
duaneb
Funny- I heard quite a few complaints about the quality of new hires dropping
at google ever since they expanded rapidly five(?) years ago. I don't think
you can always hire people better than you are, because unlike a college it
was in google's best interest to multiply their work force. Stanford operates
on exclusivity whereas workers are more of a resource to google.

------
siscia
I felt it personaly.

The idea that university in the US take the "best" students really bother me.

I got reject from both, CalTech, MIT and Stanford.

My curricul very shortly is: Italian student, best of his class. (italian
school is a "little" harder tha American) AFS/Exchange student in America for
the school year 2011/12 (GPA 4.0 that year) Some project on github (does it
count ?) Very good letters from my teacher. Interest in about every single
field (scientific or not) ACT -> 29 SAT Math2 -> 770 SAT Chem -> 720 Toefl ->
102

Now, I am sure that there are plenty of students better than me, but I feel
really bad about that.

On the other side POLIMI, best tech university in Italy, took me in very
quickly, but I really wanted to come back in the US.

Sorry about that, but I needed...

~~~
hga
MIT caps the foreign students in a class at about 15%, so you were competing
for one out of a bit over 150 slots. You very possibly made the "Can you do
the work?" cut; overall, before applications shot up from 13,000 to 18,000,
about 1/3 made that cut, but MIT has room for only a bit over 1,000.

It's nothing personal, and the people involved in admissions do _not_ like
turning down qualified applicants, but they don't have any choice.

~~~
tanzam75
Actually, it's even harder than you state. MIT's quota for international
applicants is not 15%, but 8%.

Sources:

(1)
[http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/international_men_women...](http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/international_men_women_of_mys)

(2) <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/admissions-2011-0404.html>

------
latj
Is anyone with a small child currently planning on how to get their kid into
Stanford? My intuition is that Stanford (and the other elite schools of today)
will not be so important in 20 years.

~~~
wilfra
haha that's taking things a bit far. Yes, 99% of parents would love for their
children to go to Stanford. I haven't even had kids yet and I would very much
like for mine to go there.

The Cal State Fullerton's of the World may well be obsolete within a
generation, but Harvard/Stanford/MIT etc are here to stay as powerful
institutions, wealth creators and status symbols.

------
theprodigy
I would be curious to read the applications of the people who got in.

------
spullara
The <http://www.minervaproject.com> is creating a university just for this
reason. Plenty of qualified people get rejected from the prestigious
universities just due to the numbers of positions / applicants.

------
reader5000
Do these ridiculous accept rates hurt society? That is, is there any
measurable difference in human capital between the top 5.7% that got in and
say the next 5.7%, or even the next 20%? But only the particular 5.7% that got
in will be able to use Stanford branding to get to the top of the interview
heap for the rest of their lives. For everybody else, employers will have to
either invest more resources to discern their quality or will forgo the added
expense and also miss the opportunity of a Stanford-quality employee that just
happened to not get access to Stanford branding due to the increasingly
fantastical notion that what Stanford offers is "education" which can only be
supplied to a limited number of seats per year.

------
brianbreslin
Stanford's MBA program accepts less than 5.7% if I recall correctly. Closer to
4.5%

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Think of an application as an expensive lottery ticket.

