Stanford's 2017 acceptance rate hits record low: 5.7% | Hacker News Reader

Stanford's 2017 acceptance rate hits record low: 5.7%

stanforddaily.com

42 pointsaroman51 comments

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.

> 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.

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.

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!

100% agreed. As a matter of fact, just about all schools on the top USNWR rankings are a crap shoot (http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...)

You can get in one and not get in 20, get in 20 and not get in the one you really wanted to get into. I go to one of those schools and I personally know people that got into Berkeley and wanted to go to UCLA or got into Caltech when they wanted to go to Stanford, or didn't get into the state schools and got into Stanford. A friend of mine wanted to go to MIT for undergrad, but instead got into Cornell (and later went to MIT for grad school.) The undergraduate admission process at elite schools really makes zero sense.

All (most?) elite schools use a "holistic" method of evaluating applications. Which is basically a magical black box that spits out yes's and no's.

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.

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.

The six year completion rate of the 2006 cohort was 95% (http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2012). This rate has been consistent, both over time and at other top schools. Of the 5% that don't complete, it's rare that the student is incapable of completing (aaron swartz, tiger woods, etc). The admissions department will be the first to tell you that they pass on _a lot_ of qualified people. Even though most people believe that they were an 'admissions mistake', I still don't think that 'error' is the right term.

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.

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

I went to Caltech for undergrad. I know people who got "burnt out" and switched to non-science majors, but the core curriculum would still require everyone (even an English major) to take quantum mechanics, differential equations, etc. They've made some changes to the core curriculum requirements in the last few years, but I think this is still the case.

Even if the admission process had no "error" as you call it, there would still be kids who fail. Future behavior and circumstances are not predictable or controllable to that extent, no matter how good the admissions process is.

Regardless, the goal of admissions is not to pick the exact top students, but to create a solid class. That may involve taking some chances on kids who provide diversity or experience in areas other than pure academics. If those kids fail, it is not error, but intentional risk. Even the "best" (whatever that means) kid carries some risk, and may fail due to personal or incidental circumstances that could not have been known during the admissions process.

Lets not conflate paper acceptance with college acceptance, the former is based on one piece of work that can be subjectively measured, at least, the latter is more of a crapshoot.

I'm a big fan of low acceptance rates in conferences. There are way too many mediocre papers that get into conferences I care about even when the acceptance rate is low. Also, the surge in papers submitted from China has pushed everyone's acceptance rates down, and quality isn't necessarily getting better. Disclaimer: I'm submitting from china these days.

In computer science, if you look at low accept conferences like OSDI/SOSP (systems), you'll see some safe (uncontroversial) papers getting accepted but most of them are just good and interesting. Now, compare that to CHI where the accept rate is still competitive but the quantity is huge. The quality there seems much less consistent.

When I review for conferences these days, I'll get a stack of papers where one or two are obvious good, one is controversial that we argue over, and 17 get binned after 5 minutes (the rest if the time you spend on the paper is just to give the authors useful feedback).

Yeah, I agree there's a big difference. What reminded me of it is that making finer distinctions get more error-prone as you try to take "the best of the best of the best" and add on more "of the bests". CHI is one of the conferences where I think the low acceptance rate tends towards: 1) a lot of randomness in the reviews; and 2) a tendency towards safe "I did a user study and here are p-values" type of work.

I agree there are some times when it's easy to accept only 10% or so: when there is a lot of obvious crap submitted. I'm currently organizing a conference with about a 30% acceptance rate, and it's somewhat painful, though. It's not one of the main catch-all conferences like OSDI, CHI, AAAI, SIGGRAPH, etc. which everyone submits to. Instead mostly people in the area submit to it, and a large proportion of the submissions are legitimately good. I would say 50% solid submissions from regular members of the community, 25% not-great submissions from people legitimately in the area, and 25% either crap or clearly off-topic.

So it'd be easy to choose which 50% to accept, but when you're accepting 30%, now some good work is being rejected, just because you have to hit the arbitrary acceptance-rate target to count as "selective" in certain U.S. universities' bibliometric systems. If we went down to a 20% acceptance rate (as some people are pushing, not b/c of quality but solely b/c it makes the conference look better bibliometrically), we'd have to fairly arbitrarily reject some more good papers.

We half-joke that the way to fix it next year is to spam the CfP to clearly unsuitable places, in order to elicit a flood of crap submissions that we can then easily reject, allowing us to hit a 30% (or 20%, or lower) acceptance rate without having to reject any good papers.

My point with CHI is that they probably admit too many papers, or at least are very unfocused. OSDI and SIGGRAPH have high bars (not sure about AAAI), they don't so much as have a paper limit but just very high standards.

> Instead mostly people in the area submit to it, and a large proportion of the submissions are legitimately good.

Working groups or invite only workshops might work better in this regard. It depends on your area though.

> So it'd be easy to choose which 50% to accept, but when you're accepting 30%, now some good work is being rejected, just because you have to hit the arbitrary acceptance-rate target to count as "selective" in certain U.S. universities' bibliometric systems.

Its more about how tenure cases work in universities. Your judges don't read your papers, they just look at your bib.

> If we went down to a 20% acceptance rate, we'd have to fairly arbitrarily reject some more good papers.

In my reviewing experience, the PC never had to reject papers based on too many good papers; if anything we had to accept papers of questionable quality to fill the conference up. The rejection notices that PC chairs send out about there being too many good papers are often lies. But maybe our fields have different problems :) I'm a firm believer in accepting all the good papers and rejecting all the bad ones.

> We half-joke that the way to fix it next year is to spam the CfP to clearly unsuitable places, in order to elicit a flood of crap submissions that we can then easily reject, allowing us to hit a 30% (or 20%, or lower) acceptance rate without having to reject any good papers.

Just use Weibo to advertise your conference. There is a lot of talent in China and India who want to make it big, not all of it is great yet, but it will definitely push down your accept rates.

I remember noticing this in high school as I prepared for Stanford's review process. It's not so much the pursuit of greatness as the pursuit of non-failure.

I've talked with professors that do physics graduate school admissions decisions. All in all, they told me that it is not too difficult to get 700-800 applications down to 100-150. Unfortunately, they need to get it down to more like 60-70, and they all agree it's probably not very much better than random from there =/.

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.

That's a healthy attitude. It's one that Stanford won't be getting. Their loss.

Best of luck to your other endeavors!

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.

Interestingly, I think it becomes even less important in graduate school, since only about half of your education comes from the classes you take, and even less for a PHD. After I get my masters, I expect I will be in a very similar position to a student who worked for those 2-3 years. He will be saying to employers, "This is what I worked on, and this is what I created, during my last 2-3 years," and I will be saying the same. The only difference is, I will have classes on top of that, and my work will be guided by an advisor, not a boss.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Application fees basically pay for the costs of running the Admissions Office.

There are very few economies of a scale in an admissions office. Each additional application takes an extra half hours to read. Thus, a certain number of additional applications will require an additional Admissions Officer to be hired.

(No, they're not that well-paid. Remember that applications are typically read by two admissions officers, that they have to meet to discuss candidates, and that the reading season only lasts from December to March. The other 2/3 of their time is thus spent on "marketing" activities, like going to college fairs. But it's not like you can eliminate this expense to cut the application fees -- the admissions staff has to have something to do during the rest of the year.)

Because costs scale in direct proportion to the number of applications received, application fees are a natural way to pay for it.

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.

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.

a constant amount of spots

a 10% variation isn't what I'd call 'constant' exactly.

Yeah but you have to consider the yield too, they have to "guess" the number of applicants who will choose to go to Stanford if they are admitted.

Similar news just came out here at Cornell: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March13/Admissions2013.h...

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...). 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.

Students also now apply to many more schools than they did in the past, especially when you add in the Common App, which Stanford and Cornell both participate in.

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).

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.

You're assuming all of the applicants are American. That's a very incorrect assumption. I would guess nearly all of the increase is international with China accounting for > 50% by itself.

Yes. Even Xi Jingping's daughter attends Harvard. The poor farmer kids who test well can go to Qinghua or PKU, all the kids whose parents have any money are going abroad. A bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

I knew that it was hard, but still really suck when you are rejected no one but three times.

Thanks anyway...

"Good luck, Bad luck, who knows ?" XP

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Think of an application as an expensive lottery ticket.

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