March 18, 2007
SELECTIVE SERVICE JOURNALISM
(Table from USA Today article linked to below)
Publications love to do features on rankings, especially when it comes to academic institutions. Periodicals like US News & World Report make serious bank from their annual college-ranking issues. These efforts to settle the unquantifiable are like beauty pagents, designating one entrant better or worse than another, when in fact schools and beauty are both best determined through the eye of the beholder, i.e. they are highly subjective things to judge.
A reader recently sent me a link to a USA Today article from November of last year, reporting on a study of collegiate selectivity. It quoted an expert who correctly pointed out that it's not hard to get into college, it's just very hard to get into a very small number of colleges.
"When we read stories about how hard a time people are having getting into those very selective institutions, it's not the tip of the iceberg — it's the fly on the tip of the iceberg." says David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Using data that colleges reported to the U.S. Department of Education, Hawkins crunched application and acceptance numbers for 857 four-year, not-for-profit colleges in the country that accepted more than 1,000 students in 2004. In this chart, only 2.6% of the schools accepted fewer than 25% of their applicants, while 82.5% accepted more than half.
The table above shows the top 10 most selective schools in the U.S. as determined by the study. Most of the schools should be readily familiar, but the person who sent it to me was curious about the inclusion of the two schools I've since highlighted: Cal Poly and the University of Puerto Rico–Bayamon. I doubt either of these names would jump to most people's minds when asked to think of the hardest schools to get into in the U.S. and its territories.
Cal Poly should actually not be such a surprise. California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo is a member of the esteemed California public university system. With a focus primarily on undergraduate education slanted towards degrees in engineering, architecture, and business, and located midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles (as well as ten miles from the Pacific Ocean), it's no wonder the school gets a large number of applicants. Not hurting is that annual tuition for California residents barely tops four thousand bucks. According to the school, the total cost of attending Cal Poly for a year, including tuition, room and board, fees, books, transportation, and living expenses (beer money) is only $17,000. That is only about 50% of what the other schools on the list charge for tuition and room and board.
The University of Puerto Rico–Bayamon is more of a mystery. I did some searching online and could find very little information on the school. The university's own site is in Spanish, which didn't help me much. On a purely speculative note, one can imagine how the territory of Puerto Rico might only have a small number of institutions of higher education and in some sense a captive applicant pool. This could naturally lead to a high number of applicants for a limited number of spots in each incoming class. On the other hand, one would have to imagine that such a scandalous situation––four out of five aspiring higher-ed students being shut out of furthering their education in PR––would raise some type of a ruckus among residents. There certainly seems to be something happening at UPR–Bayamon, though. According to the table above, the school's 2004 acceptance rate was 18.1%. One of the few things I managed to dig up when trying to learn about the school was this report from EdRef.com, an online college directory. EdRef's report says that in 2002, UPR–Bayamon admitted 62.8% of its applicants. What happened between 2002 and 2004 that made the Puerto Rican school three times more selective than it was before? I'll let you know when and if I find out.
Tagged: Cal poly, bayamon, college, rankings, selectivePosted by Lexiphane at March 18, 2007 9:46 PM
| JournalismTrackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lexiphane.com/mt/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1145