It's getting so hard to get in

Impossible admission odds at research universities are found mostly on private campuses.

According to conventional wisdom, getting into college has become super hard. But as close observers have noted, the single-digit admission rates are found only at a few hyper-selective institutions. Jeff Selingo, who wrote a book about getting into college, explained. “Much of the dysfunction stems from a misperception about how hard getting into college is.” I was exchanging text messages with my collaborator and friend Barrett Taylor about fine-grain differences between the organizational behavior of uber-selective and wealthy private research universities. He noted that one explanation might be that several have become nearly impossible to get into only recently. And he was right.

I started to think about the difference in undergraduate selectivity between the American Association of University (AAU) members public and that are private. And I am procrastinating and trying to avoid my email, so I went to IPEDS and got AAU to admit rates from 2006 to 2021. Nothing special about that time frame. It’s the years IPEDS had calculated admission rates for. And I wanted to do this quickly, without too many clicks or messing around with multiple CSV downloads. I used the current AAU list, which included a few campuses that were not members in 2006 and included former members. What I found didn’t surprise me much, but it is remarkable.

You can probably get into a major public (flagship, even!) university.

In 2006, the median public member of the AAU admitted 63% of undergraduate applicants, and in 2021 median admission rate for AAU publics was 59.5%. Very little movement. About half of the AAU public universities were more selective in 2021 compared with 2006, and about half were less selective. The figure below shows the highest, lowest, and median admission rate for AAU public universities over the period.

You can see that the most selective institution has become even more selective (California-Berkeley was the most rejective in 2006, and it was California-Los Angeles in 2021). The median university because less selective in 2016 and since was bouncing —generally upward. The least rejective (i.e., highest admit rate) has hovered just over 90%. In 2021, IPEDS reported the Universities of Utah, Oregon, and Kansas had accepted more than 90% of applicants.

Some public members of the AAU have gotten much more selective. For example, it is harder to get into a University of California campus than before. In 2006 UCLA admitted 27% of applicants but only 11% in 2021. Irvine went from accepting 60% to only 29% of applicants. But Georgia Tech is the AAU member that saw the largest change. In 2006, GA Tech took 67% of applicants but 16% in 2021. For those of you who are keeping score a home, that is a decrease of 51 percentage points.

Demand - and selectivity - among major public research universities varies tremendously. As Selingo puts it, some universities are buyers, and some are sellers when it comes to undergraduate admissions.

You can probably can’t get into a major public (flagship, even!) university.

Private university members of the AAU are what Akil Bello coined as highly rejective colleges.

Compared to their public counterparts, the gap in admission rates between the most and least selective AAU private universities has shrunk. And the median rejective AAU private and the most rejective AAU private are converging. In 2006, the median admission rate at this set of universities was 25%, but it fell to only 7% in 2021. Over the same period, the group's lowest acceptance rate (most rejective) went from 9% to 4% (Harvard, both times). The median and lowest admit rate gap shrunk from 16 to 3 percentage points. While the least selective AAU public universities admit around 9 out of 10 applicants, the least selective private (the University of Rochester) admits 4 out of 10 applicants.

Some AAU private universities went from merely selective to highly rejective. For example, in 2006, Johns Hopkins University accepted 28% of applicants but fell to single-digits (8%) in 2021. Even more dramatically, the University of Chicago admitted 40% of applicants at the start of our period and fell to 6% by the end. Only one of the AAU private university members was less selective in 2021 than in 2006 (Brandeis University) and then only by one percentage point.

It is becoming impossible to get into a private university member of the AAU.

Inequality and opportunity hoarding

The difference in how hard it is to get accepted to public versus private research universities tells a story about growing inequality. US higher education is becoming more unequal. Something I’ve written about before. The gap between the halves and the have-nots (or the buyers and sellers) is a proxy for institutional resources and social status. But it also suggests how hard affluent families compete to score a coveted positional good in the form of a set at a select campus. By concentrating demand on a handful of campuses, students and their families are giving those universities tremendous power to ration the collegiate opportunities that are at least perceived as the pathway to economic security and social status. One apparent division is the public/private divide. But there is also a geographical dimension. A location in a big city near the east and west coasts appears to contribute to high demand. There are also elements of the “quasi-market” — markets established by or shaped by policymakers and market conditions — at play. The Georgia Hope Scholarship, contextualized by economic growth in Atlanta and the high demand for tech and engineering workers, has waxed the attractiveness of Georgia Tech. California needs more universities. Chronic supply shortages by underfunding higher education in CA and the absolute need for more UC campuses ratchets up the competition for established campuses of the University of California. Where a 4% admission rate at Harvard is the product of an academic plutocracy, the 11% admission rate at UCLA is a crisis manufactured by the government of California.

Ok, enough.