Manhattan Review Blog - Test Prep, Admissions Consulting and Career Training

The acceptance rate of the super-selective Ivy League is extremely low. There is a record number of high school students who are applying for college straight out of high school – more than 60 percent, according to David Hawkins, director at the National Association of College Admission Counseling. Meantime, the number of students applying for college is increasing each year. According to the federal Department of Education, this year will feature the highest number of high school graduates, 3.2, almost a million up from five years ago.

Recent admission trends indicate that even though you have a high GPA and good or perfect SAT scores, it’s not a given that you’ll get admission to your first choice school, so it’s wise to have as many back-ups as you can to optimize the final result of your college application process without waiting for another entire year. As a matter of fact, many students are applying to as many as 10 or 15 universities. This is primarily attributed to the Common Application form, which can be downloaded from the Internet and sent online to as many as 300 schools nationwide.

However, the results of this survey of first-year college students is relieving: 70% of these students say that they ended up at their first choice school, and most students are ultimately happy with their choice of college.  At first this may seem surprising, especially since schools like Yale accepted fewer than ten percent of the 20,000 students who applied last year, and both Harvard and Columbia accepted just more than 10 percent, but there are many reasons why students end up at specific schools, as both the students and the college make great endeavors to find a right fit.

Tags: admission trends, College, College Admissions, Columbia, common application, GPA, Harvard, ivy league, National Association of College Admission Counseling, SAT, Yale

Related posts:

• Beyond the Scores – What do Colleges Want?
• Full-Tuition Fellowships – B-Schools’ Best-Kept Secrets
• Scholarships 101: Making College an Affordable Choice
• New Trends, New Courses
• MBA Students Pledge to be Ethical