How Do Colleges Make Their Decisions? :Building the Freshman Class

The Outcome Can Be Unpredictable

Parents and students need to realize how complex and fundamentally messy college admissions decisions at selective colleges can be. The purpose of sharing this information is not to discourage you but to help you approach college admissions with the right mind-set and to encourage you to develop a list of good-fit colleges that includes some where your admission is assured.

Almost no one has a record that will guarantee admission to the most selective colleges in the country—there are too many variables in the admissions equation, including institutional priorities that are not under your control, to predict the outcome with any certainty. Knowing this may initially be disillusioning, but it can also be liberating. It can help you understand, in both your head and heart, that the admit-or-deny decision made in the admissions office of a selective college is not an evaluation of your worth as a student and as a person. And equally true, the decision does not measure the success of a parent’s child-rearing efforts.

It looks to the family that this is a perfect student, but most of the students look like that. We’re making hairline decisions.  - Ann Wright, former vice president for enrollment, Rice University

 Appreciating what goes on behind the scenes in the college admissions process can help explain some of the puzzling situations. A student with a terrific record may receive serious consideration at several highly selective schools. But because of the judgments involved, the differing needs of each college, and the qualitative nature of the process of review, some of the schools may offer admission at once, while others may end up wait-listing or even denying admission instead. Same application and similar schools, but different readers, different applicant pools, different institutional priorities, thus different outcomes.

But It Is Not Random

Although the result of an admissions review may be unpredictable, it is not random. A super-selective college may have a 10 percent admission rate, but that does not mean that all applicants to that college have the same one in ten chance of admission. The overall admission rate for a college is just that—an overall rate that does not consider the factors that make an individual applicant more (or less) likely to be accepted.

If a college collected and shared more information about its admissions process, in principle you could know the probability of acceptance for a male legacy with a mid-range (for that school) SAT score and 3.9 unweighted GPA in a demanding curriculum. Maybe the chances of acceptance for a student with that profile are 80 percent, not the 10 percent figure for the overall applicant pool.

But even that would still leave a fair amount of uncertainty about the outcome. An 80 percent chance of admission means that on average, eight out of ten applicants with that profile will be admitted, but two will not. What may seem like a fair outcome to one of the chosen eight may seem capricious to the unlucky two. Although the same chance of admission applies to all ten, the outcome for a given individual can be very different.