American College Admissions Doesn't Need to Be So Competitive
post by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-07T17:35:26.791Z · LW · GW · 18 commentsThis is a link post for https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/college-admissions-doesnt-need-to
Contents
18 comments
Spoiler: “So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.”
It’s well known that
- Admission to top universities is very competitive in America and even top SAT scores (1550+ out of 1600) paired with a 4.0 GPA doesn’t guarantee admission to a top school.
- Even top universities take into account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni.
But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.
But in reality, the top 20 schools together enroll about 49,000 students. That’s about 1.3% of the 3.8 million students who graduate high school each year in the United States. If you restrict it to the eight Ivy League schools + Stanford + MIT, those ten schools together enroll 17,500 students per year. Below I’ll argue that there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots, even with the limitations of current metrics, and certainly not with metrics that would be available if the SAT was made more difficult in line with historical standards.
Rank | School | Freshman Class Size | SAT 25th Percentile | SAT 50th Percentile | SAT 75th Percentile | % Foreign |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Princeton | 1,400 | 1,450 | 1,528 | 1,570 | 10 |
2 | MIT | 1,100 | 1,510 | 1,535 | 1,580 | 10 |
3 | Harvard | 1,700 | 1,460 | 1,528 | 1,580 | 10 |
4 | Stanford | 1,700 | 1,420 | 1,535 | 1,570 | 15 |
5 | Yale | 1,600 | 1,460 | 1,521 | 1,580 | 10 |
6 | Caltech | 250 | 1,530 | 1,545 | 1,580 | 15 |
7 | Duke | 1,700 | 1,510 | 1,533 | 1,560 | 15 |
8 | Johns Hopkins | 1,300 | 1,480 | 1,548 | 1,570 | 15 |
9 | Northwestern | 2,100 | 1,430 | 1,513 | 1,550 | 15 |
10 | UPenn | 2,400 | 1,450 | 1,528 | 1,570 | 15 |
11 | Cornell | 3,100 | 1,450 | 1,513 | 1,540 | 10 |
12 | UChicago | 1,700 | 1,500 | 1,533 | 1,570 | 15 |
13 | Brown | 1,700 | 1,440 | 1,528 | 1,570 | 15 |
14 | Columbia | 1,500 | 1,470 | 1,527 | 1,570 | 15 |
15 | Dartmouth | 1,200 | 1,440 | 1,520 | 1,560 | 15 |
16 | UCLA | 6,600 | 1,290 | 1,405 | 1,520 | 10 |
17 | UC Berkeley | 13,700 | 1,290 | 1,415 | 1,530 | 10 |
18 | Rice | 1,100 | 1,460 | 1,528 | 1,570 | 10 |
19 | Notre Dame | 2,100 | 1,420 | 1,490 | 1,560 | 10 |
20 | Vanderbilt | 1,400 | 1,460 | 1,530 | 1,560 | 10 |
About the data:
- The 25th- and 75th-percentile ranges are from US News & World Report 2022.
- Medians are estimated according to this random site called CollegeRaptor and they seem to be 2025 estimates.
- The percentage of international (i.e. foreign) students is higher for grad schools than for undergraduate programs, so a university might have an overall international-student percentage of 25% or more, but their percentage among the undergraduate class is almost never above 15%. I rounded to the nearest 5 percentage points and usually used the most recent or second-most-recent freshman classes.
- Note: The number of enrolled students for a given school is smaller than the number of admitted students, because some admitted students will choose to attend other colleges that also accepted them. Indeed, many top students are accepted to multiple top-20 schools, and a college’s “yield”—i.e. the percent of admitted students who choose to enroll—is an important measure for college rankings and is often around 60% even for Ivy League schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia.)
For reference, the SAT is scored from 400 to 1600 with a mean of about 1000 and a standard deviation of about 200, though it varies from year to year and the College Board—the non-profit that produces the exams—is a bit opaque about how they norm the tests. The newer ACT (founded in 1959) has a slightly different format and gives scores from 1 to 36, with a mean of about 21 and a standard deviation of about 5. About 2 million students took the SAT in 2024 and about 1.4 million took the ACT. The variation is mostly regional: some states require one or the other (or a choice of either) to graduate high school.
With regard to how many students achieve high scores:
- The College Board hasn’t published details statistics about SAT scores since 2008 as far as I can tell, but online I see repeated the claim that in 2021, there were 8,323 (0.4%) students who scored above a 1550. I’m not sure if that claim is accurate. Meanwhile, a 1500 is slightly above the boundary for the 99th percentile.
- The ACT publishes some exact numbers showing that in 2023 and 2024, roughly
- 3,000 (0.22%) of test-takers achieved the maximum score of 36
- 9,300 (0.67%) achieved a score of 35
- 11,800 students (0.86%) achieved a 34
- The ACT is widely perceived as being easier than the SAT, and its total score is the rounded average of four sections that are each graded in whole numbers out of 36, so a 35.5 resulting from a mistake on two sections would round up to 36. For the SAT, you could score a 1550 by making one mistake on each of the three sections, but to score as low as a 1500 you would need to make about ten mistakes on a 100-question test. The ACT provides a concordance scale in which a perfect 36 is only a 1570 on the SAT. A 35 is roughly equivalent to a 1540.
So if you suppose that the same proportion of ACT takers who score a 35 or 36 (together 0.895%) would achieve a 1540 on the SAT, then that’s roughly 34,000 students. If there’s an intermediate score threshold of 1550 or 1560 that represents the top 0.5% of students, then about 19,000 students who graduate each year meet that bar.
Both of these numbers are well below the 49,000-strong intake at top-20 schools. The idea that top students are a dime a dozen isn’t correct; the reality is that top schools admit very many students who have relatively low SAT scores. Under the percentile assumptions in the table above, we can calculate upper and lower bounds showing that top-20 schools are enrolling 16,000–28,000 students who score below 1500 and 30,000–42,000 students who score below 1560. If you restrict it to the Ivy League + Stanford + MIT, then using the data above, out of the combined 17,500 students those ten schools enroll, at least half score under a 1540, and probably closer to 60%.
So after removing the international students from the calculations, and using the middle-of-the-range estimates, the conclusion: The top-scoring 19,000 American students each year are competing in top-20 admissions for about 12,000 spots out of 44,000 total. Among the Ivy League + MIT + Stanford, they’re competing for about 6,500 out of 15,800 total spots.
So for whatever combination of reasons—affirmative action, athletic recruitment, legacy/donor preference, personal essays about running over a feral cat—top schools are accepting a lot of relatively unqualified applicants. Top students are left competing for an artificially small number of slots. The qualitative system (which has merits as well as drawbacks) makes outcomes more uncertain and “yield” considerations sometimes cause schools to reject “overqualified” applicants who are unlikely to enroll; together this leads top students to shotgun applications to many colleges without clarity about the process or outcomes.
As an example of a more functional system, Oxford and Cambridge are the top universities in the UK. Each year they together enroll about 7,000 students out of 700,000 students who finish secondary education, so also about 1% (though about 20% of Oxford undergraduates and 25% of Cambridge undergraduates are from outside the UK). Their system has a bunch of features that make it more predictable and less strenuous:
- Students can only apply to either Oxford or Cambridge but not both. As a result, the “yield rate” is 80% for Cambridge and 90% for Oxford. And UK students can only apply to five undergraduate institutions in total, so weaker applicants won’t apply, especially if they recognize that they won’t reach published minimum score requirements for A-Level exams, standardized content exams similar to AP exams in America.
- Many subjects use entrance exams. For example, if you want to study math at Oxford, you can review every past entrance exam for free online and if you score in the 80s or 90s you’ll probably be admitted (based on publicly available statistics).
Further, the SAT used to be much harder. In 1991, only nine students scored a 1600, whereas people estimate that over 500 students achieve a perfect score today. The SAT scaled scores upward in 1995 and removed the highly g-loaded analogies section in 2005. Senator Chuck Schumer’s 1600 score from 1967 is off the charts today. But there are no signs of the College Board making the test harder, and meanwhile Princeton, UPenn, and Columbia remain test-optional even now, while UC Berkeley and UCLA don’t consider SAT/ACT scores at all.
If we removed the mechanisms and practices in place that lead top schools to admit many low-scoring students, and if applicants were matched to universities using a stable-marriage system similar to the medical-residency matching system, then the chaos and confusion of the admissions process would basically go away without any more complicated intervention required.
18 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by Mis-Understandings (robert-k) · 2025-04-07T19:09:08.781Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think you might fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of admission systems. To be frank, admissions is set up to benefit the university and the university alone. If getting good test scores was the bottleneck, you would see shifts in strategic behaviour until the test became mostly meaningless. For instance, you can freely retake the SAT, so if you just selected based on that people would just retake till they got a good result.
The university has strong preferences about the distribution of students in classes. They have decided that they want different things from their applicants than "just" being good at tests.
They get this exactly through account race-based affirmative action, athletic recruitment, “Dean’s Interest List”-type tracking systems for children of donors or notable persons, and legacy preference for children of alumni, and a bunch of ill articulated selection actions in admissions offices and in other various places.
stable-marriage system would require a national system, which would require universities as distinct and competing organizations (mostly for prestige) to coordinate for the benefit of students. They obviously should do things wiht that general description, but they tend not to.
Replies from: arjun-panickssery, robert-k↑ comment by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-07T19:25:00.498Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You're phrasing this as though it's rebutting some remark I made; if so, I'm not sure what remark that is. I know that admissions offices are admitting students according to an intentional system.
Replies from: aphyer, robert-k↑ comment by aphyer · 2025-04-08T00:20:28.233Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The phrase "Robbers don't need to rob people" is generally accurate.
But saying "Robbers don't need to rob people," and writing a long argument in support of that, makes it seem like you might be confused about the thought processes of robbers.
Replies from: liam-donovan-1↑ comment by Liam Donovan (liam-donovan-1) · 2025-04-08T02:52:44.758Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If robbers had a lot of cultural cachet and there were widely-disseminated arguments implying that robbers need to rob people, I think there would be a lot of value in a piece narrowly arguing that robbers don't need to rob people, regardless of your views on their thought processes.
↑ comment by Mis-Understandings (robert-k) · 2025-04-07T19:59:06.454Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is about your top line claim, and your framing.
If you try to say that if you exclude the reason a system is competitive, it does not need to be competitive, this is obvious.
The system you propose does not fufill the top line purposes of the admissions system.
there isn’t a huge oversupply of talent at all for these spots,
Misses the fact that the complexity of the admissions process does not come from competition over talent (universities would be willing to accept most people on their waitlist if they had more slots, and slots are limited by other factors), but from highly multidimensional preference frontiers which require complicated information about applicants to get good distributions of students.
Basically, the argument about talent is wrong directioned for talking about admission systems.
Replies from: arjun-panickssery↑ comment by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-08T07:10:53.417Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
At the start of the post I describe an argument I often hear:
But many people are under the misconception that the resulting “rat race”—the highly competitive and strenuous admissions ordeal—is the inevitable result of the limited class sizes among top schools and the strong talent in the applicant pools, and that it isn’t merely because of the reasons listed in (2). Some even go so far as to suggest that a better system would be to run a lottery for any applicant who meets a minimum “qualification” standard—under the assumption that there would be many such qualified students.
This is the argument that I'm responding to and refuting.
Replies from: robert-k↑ comment by Mis-Understandings (robert-k) · 2025-04-08T13:22:41.144Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You are wrong. The article does not refute that argument because (2) is about exactly the large dimensions of types of talent demanded. (Since universities want a variety of things)
You are assuming the consequent that there is not a large variety of things a university wants.
Saying if you relax a problem, it is easier, is not an argument that it can be relaxed. That is your fundamental misunderstanding. For the university, they do really find value in the things they select for with 2, so they have a lot of valuable candidates, and so picking a mixture of valuable candidates with a large supply of hard to compare offerings is in fact difficult, and will leave any one metric too weak for their preferences.
↑ comment by Mis-Understandings (robert-k) · 2025-04-07T19:12:18.057Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
University cohorts are basically setup to maximally benefit the people who do get admitted, not to admit the most qualified. For this purpose universities would rather have students that make the school more rewarding for other students, and not the smartest possible students. This is combined with a general tendency to do prestigous/donor wanted things. And donors want to have gone to a college that is hard to get into (even though they did not like applying). The challenge of application (and with that admit rates over yield rates) is a signal.
comment by Purplehermann · 2025-04-08T19:17:12.866Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Just make online courses for all major studies, with pdf textbooks, video lectures and homework exercises with solutions. Then set up a testing facility and give people degrees based on passed tests.
Pay the best professors you can for this, make tests with very high upper ceilings, it could become the standardized system for schooling like China's old civil bureaucracy tests.
(For tests you could have full day tests, and you answer as many questions as you can - with the later ones more difficult)
Leave the "top schools" to their status games, provide better education and fairly standardized testing, plus certification - for much lower prices
comment by Pat Myron (pat-myron) · 2025-04-08T22:53:01.641Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Further, the SAT used to be much harder. In 1991, only nine students scored a 1600, whereas people estimate that over 500 students achieve a perfect score today.
Those numbers don't support that claim because of:
- More intelligent students (Flynn effect)
- >50% more HS students
- Higher standardized test participation among HS students (test takers ~doubled with only >50% more students)
comment by Hruss (henry-russell) · 2025-04-08T10:35:18.347Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
>Further, the SAT used to be much harder. In 1991, only nine students scored a 1600, whereas people estimate that over 500 students achieve a perfect score today.
What do these numbers mean? Surely more than 500 students have achieved a 1600 last year
↑ comment by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-08T17:23:03.427Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why is it obvious
Replies from: henry-russell↑ comment by Hruss (henry-russell) · 2025-04-08T18:29:54.499Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
No, it is not obvious. That is what my comment meant, that the statistic is unclear
comment by Sam B (sam-b) · 2025-04-08T17:39:36.404Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree with your title, but cannot agree with your solution. Some of the issues you pointed out are not intentional decisions universities could remove without major restructuring:
So after removing the international students from the calculations...
Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students. Studies found that at public research universities, a fall in state funding led to an increase in foreign student enrollment, and I think similar trends affect most private LACs and even the top elite schools, although the latter to a much smaller degree. I believe universities also likely need a portion of international students to maintain their global reputation and ranking. Simply removing international students would require a huge funding and incentive shift from the status quo.
Additionally, college standardized test scores are biased towards the highest income earners. If we only admitted students with 99th percentile (1500-1600 SAT) scores, it would produce freshmen classes full with almost only children from the richest families, arguably less meritocratic than the system we currently have. This distribution might be less skewed if we purely used test scores, but that trend is likely to remain.
I agree with some points very strongly:
Top students are left competing for an artificially small number of slots.
This is true. The supply of spots at America's top institutions is artificially constrained. Here, I'm focusing my criticism on just T15/T10 schools. Given their large endowments and access to top instructors, I strongly believe that these universities should all expand their freshmen class sizes by 10-20%. Despite the US and the world population increasing over the past 50 years, their class sizes have not kept pace. This helps increase the "prestige" of these universities in the rat race towards a lower admissions rate while increasing their rankings, but it has the socially irresponsible effect of making a social good, elite education, increasingly scarce. It also has the ripple effect of overwhelming the next best options for students, flagship state schools, which unduly burdens the public university system to maintain private schools' elite status.
If we built the infrastructure (mainly to make space) and mandated a reasonable increase in freshmen class size over time, we could make elite admissions less competitive, reduce the feeling of "randomness," and allow universities to continue some of their selective practices.
Replies from: arjun-panickssery↑ comment by Arjun Panickssery (arjun-panickssery) · 2025-04-08T20:55:43.511Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
> So after removing the international students from the calculations...
Having a sizable portion of International students necessarily subsidizes the cost of higher education for domestic students
Maybe I should rephrase the sentence in OP. What I mean is that "After assuming that half of international students scored at or above 1550 and half scored below, the remaining spots are divided among domestic students in such-and-such way."
comment by jamjam · 2025-04-08T02:59:08.227Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why are we equating high test scores with "high achieving students" 1-1? While the correlation is undeniable, it feels overly simplistic to say "there are 19,000 top scoring students on the SAT/ACT, these are the students who 'deserve' the available 12,000 seats" and make your claim from there. The strongest refutation of this is the simple fact that the difference between two scores can be pure chance, which matters more the closer you are to a perfect score.
So if you suppose that the same proportion of ACT takers who score a 35 or 36 (together 0.895%) would achieve a 1540 on the SAT, then that’s roughly 34,000 students. If there’s an intermediate score threshold of 1550 or 1560 that represents the top 0.5% of students, then about 19,000 students who graduate each year meet that bar.
If the difference between students receiving a 1540 and a 1560 can be that student A guessed between two remaining choices correctly, and student B guessed incorrectly, [1] then is it fair to drop the pool of those "qualified" from 34,000 to 19,000 based on this 20 point gap? You also have to consider indirect luck, where student A encounters an obscure question type that they happened to have encountered previously and can therefore solve trivially, while student B had not. There are also obvious socioeconomic factors, such as studying with incredibly expensive private tutors consistently increasing score, time investment to make up the gap between a 1400 and a 1600 being high (children from economically struggling families often have to work, take care of family, or have other required responsibilities that reduce available time), and even availability of direct resources (I used a 300 dollar calculator on the SAT that could solve algebra natively, it literally handed out the answers to multiple questions and helped greatly on others. This was explicitly permitted). I strongly agree that the admissions system is greatly flawed, but in my view this post failed to tackle the problems with the nuance they need. The goal of admissions is (ideally) to give the limited space to the people who deserve it, but its incredibly difficult to agree what parameters define a deserving student, much less a fair and realistically implementable method to measure those parameters. Despite how much I hate the current admissions system, I believe basing admission decisions solely on exam scores and grades would be a step away from the goal of fairness.
- ^
Which it can, due to the way the SAT sections are weighted a single mistake on certain questions can dock 20 full points, and conversely you can get a 1600 with 1 or sometimes 2 incorrect answers
comment by Joseph Van Name (joseph-van-name) · 2025-04-09T03:26:33.531Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Universities are altogether unprofessional, so it is probably best for everyone to shame them and regard the degrees from these universities are completely worthless. Universities promote violence and they refuse to apologize or acknowledge that there is any problem whatsoever.
comment by dirk (abandon) · 2025-04-08T18:18:15.439Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There's an easy way to avoid competition for a restricted pool of elite slots: some students could go to less competitive schools.