Best Tech Colleges Are Harder Than Ever To Get In

alphadogg writes "Results from the early application rounds at the nation's best technical colleges indicate that it will be another excruciatingly difficult year for high school seniors to get accepted into top-notch undergraduate computer science and engineering programs. Leading tech colleges reported a sharp rise in early applications, prompting them to be more selective in choosing prospective freshmen for the Class of 2017. Many colleges are reporting lower acceptance rates for their binding early decision and non-binding early action admissions programs than in previous years. Here's a roundup of stats from MIT, Stanford and others."

Comments

What are you talking about?

[Lucas123]

ITT Tech accepted me no questions asked.

"Reach" schools

[Missing.Matter]

Part of the perception of low acceptance for these schools is the concept of a "reach" school that counselors push on students. The idea is you apply to schools from different strata: safety, match, and reach. Your safety school are your fallbacks that you'll likely get into with no problem. The match school are those which you exceed or meet the qualifications. And the reach schools you can guess are the dream schools you apply to. You don't meet the acceptance criteria (grades, SAT, extracurriculars too low) but you apply anyway on the off chance you make it in somehow. The thing is, this batch of reach schools is the same for everyone: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, etc. This is why you see 6000+ applications for MIT, Stanfard, etc.

Take a look at lesser known CMU (and I should know, I went there. When friends and relatives ask me where I attended, it's always followed by "Oh... and where is that?"). They admitted LESS students than MIT, but ended up with double the acceptance rate because 6x as many students applied to MIT, most of them probably completely unqualified because they chose MIT as a "reach" school.

Re:"Reach" schools

[Missing.Matter]

Actually looking more closely at TFA, much of the low acceptance rate for Stanford and MIT can also be attributed to the fact their early admissions are not binding. When I played the application game in highschool, I applied to a single dream school early admission and saved the rest of my apps for when that decision came in. In this case, you can apply to MIT *and* Stanford early admission, and maybe any other schools that do this, effectively giving you two rounds of decisions.

Either way, the "reach" school concept applies, because you always want to apply to your reach school as early decision. That way you know early if you don't get in and can apply to some other reach schools for regular admissions.

Re:"Reach" schools

[elashish14]

Which is why it is shameful for anyone to measure the strength of a school based on the percentage of students admitted. I would think this is obvious. You want to judge an undergraduate institution? See what students are doing when they graduate, not when they're accepted. Or whether they make it graduation for that matter.

Ummm...

[hondo77]

...it will be another excruciatingly difficult year for high school seniors to get accepted into top-notch undergraduate computer science and engineering programs.

Isn't it supposed to be excruciatingly difficult to get accepted into top-notch programs?

These are tech schools??

[elashish14]

How do Harvard and Columbia make the list when UIUC, Berkeley, Michigan, Cornell don't?