Shut observers of upper schooling is likely to be experiencing some cognitive dissonance of late. Latest years have introduced infinite media tales about declining faculty enrollments nationwide and the suggestion that this eases faculty admissions. A brand new evaluation by the American Enterprise Institute’s Preston Cooper, for instance, finds that, with fewer youngsters preventing for scarce spots, acceptance charges are beginning to rise.
And but any dad or mum of academically-striving youngsters can provide you examples of how arduous it’s develop into to get into top-tier universities—and the way it’s getting more durable. Even schools that have been thought of security colleges for sure youngsters have issued shocking rejections lately. That shift tracks with bigger demographic traits: America skilled one thing of a child increase within the 2000s that didn’t go bust until 2008. Meaning the previous few years have introduced a big wave of highschool graduates that hasn’t fairly crested but, elevating the variety of potential candidates for a restricted variety of seats and making it more durable, not simpler, to get into high colleges. (The scenario may reverse itself as soon as the baby-bust youngsters begin getting into faculty just a few years from now.)
All of this made us interested by updating an evaluation from 2020 by Mike and his Fordham colleague Pedro Enamorado. Again then, Mike and Pedro discovered that it had in reality develop into a lot more durable to realize admission to America’s high colleges in comparison with the earlier era, at the very least as measured by median SAT scores (adjusted for rating re-norming by the School Board), for the highschool graduating courses of 1985 and 2016. Right here, we replace these traits by means of the category of 2023, utilizing median SAT scores drawn from every faculty’s Widespread Knowledge Set submission. (The supply used for the 2020 evaluation, Barron’s, didn’t have an replace containing post-Covid scores.) Resulting from additional re-norming that befell after the discharge of the 2016 scores used within the unique evaluation, the 1985 and 2016 scores for every faculty have been adjusted to the present scale utilizing the School Board’s concordance desk.
We began with the highest 100 nationwide universities and high 50 liberal arts schools based on the 2020 US Information and World Report faculty rankings. Fifty-five colleges have been dropped from the 2020 evaluation as a result of they didn’t report median SAT scores for each 1985 and 2016, and a further 17 have been dropped from the present evaluation as a result of they not reported median SAT scores, or for different anomalies. What we discover is that median SAT scores have continued to rise at nearly all of America’s high schools, normally by fairly a bit.
That discovering comes with an enormous fats asterisk, nonetheless, as nearly each a type of establishments had test-optional insurance policies in place in 2023, which in all probability inflated their median SAT scores. Readers ought to needless to say college students with sky-high scores have been likelier to submit them to admissions officers than these with decrease scores.
