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."

"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.

a lot easier when I got into one of those

[peter303]

About 25% acceptance rate when I got into MIT decades ago. But then applying to more than 3-4 colleges was unusual. Computers/Internet make it somewhat easier to churn applications now. So with twice as many people applying to college at three times more college since then increases applications around six-fold.

Important Question:

[CanHasDIY]

How many of the world's billionaires graduated from one of the aforementioned universities?