What the…?
Last weekend, Georgia Tech’s Early Action admission decisions were released. Like most schools, we provide a profile of our admitted group to give applicants, as well as campus and external constituents a sense of the class. This year, 30 percent of applicants were admitted in the early round. On average they had 11 AP/IB/college courses prior to graduating from high school and a 33 ACT/1453 SAT (CR+M). (Note: We no longer publish a GPA because schools have such varying ranges. Some schools are on a 4.0 non-weighted scale, some are on a 5.0 or 12.0 weighted scale, some have numerical only ranges to 100 or 80 or 120. The landscape is vast and non-standardized, so giving numbers has become pointless. For example, if you are a student on a 5.0 scale and a published GPA is 3.8, you’re thinking, “Sweet. My Bs and Cs are really paying off!”).
My wife’s comment upon seeing the numbers was “I didn’t know they even offered 11 AP classes.” And this is a woman who has two master’s degrees and smoked me on both her testing and academic performance, so granted, the word “average” and those stats should not even be in the same sentence.
Formulaic Process
This year we received nearly 15,000 applications for early action. Last year that number was 3,000 less, and in 2012 we did not have that many during the entire application cycle. See a trend line here. When I came to Tech in 2003 (ahem, at age 15…) we were receiving under 10,000 applications and admitting 65 percent of applicants. Life was easy. We calculated a GPA, downloaded test scores, ran the excel tables, plugged some codes into the system, and BAM! Change the toner a few times, grab a coffee, lick some stamps, and call it a year. Effectively, that formulaic process worked for us based on the admit rate, quality and size of applicant pool, and overall goals of the Institute.
But because our undergraduate population is not growing, our admit rate has plummeted based on supply and demand alone. The exciting part of this is that we are ultimately enrolling an incredibly talented and diverse class but it also means a lot of essays to read, copious amounts of caffeine, long days away from family during file review season, and the fact that we are not able to offer admission to many phenomenal students who will go on to literally change the world. And let me be clear—it was a lot more fun admitting two out of every three students than denying two out of every three.
Click here to read part 2 of 3, where I explain the “holistic admission” process, and what that really means when we sit down to review applications.