There are many different, important components of your academic profile. Grades, GPA, class selection, and of course class rank. How does the latter compare to the other components? We’ll investigate that below.
Harvard's Acceptance Rate is Inflated
Frank Bruni recently wrote a satirical piece about Stanford having a 0% acceptance rate. Although Stanford received many qualified applications, Bruni wrote that none of them fully impressed the admission staff. With no “Olympic gold medalists” in the applicant pool, Bruni sarcastically comments that they’re hoping for better applicants next year. Although this article acts as a commentary on how outrageous the college process has become, we received many emails from concerned parents asking how this was possible. Since the college process has grown so competitive, people actually thought it was possible for Stanford to accept zero people. To make matters worse, the most recent acceptance rates have hit historical lows across the board. These decreasing acceptance rates have become exponential in the past years. With this insight, it makes us wonder how these statistics are formed. The reality of college acceptance rates is that they are incredibly inflated.
Why you Shouldn’t Care About US News Rankings
In 1995, Reed College, one of the best liberal arts schools in the country, announced it would no longer submit data for consideration in the US News College Rankings. They made this decision based on the arguments that the ratings were deeply flawed and not representative of a school’s best qualities. In researching the system they found that just 2% of college counselors believed that US News’ methods were effective, and that 91% of colleges were manipulating their submissions to artificially raise their ranking.