Higher Ed Utah

(Sara Lenz, Deseret News) — Jeanette Liu just found out she won’t be going to her dream school — MIT.

She knew it would be hard to get in. That’s why she applied to 14 colleges, many of them Ivy League and nearly impossible to get into — especially this year.

“I applied to a lot because the admission rates are so low,” said the 17-year-old senior at Waterford, a Salt Lake City private school. “I am a pretty good student, but for a lot of schools it’s about chance or who you know. I applied to as many as necessary to get into one or two.”

Not only are admission rates going to be perhaps the lowest in history this year, but this comes at a time when a degree is more essential than ever. Due to the recession, students who would normally enter the workforce right out of high school are going to college instead. And with this heightened amount of competition, many students are no longer applying to three or five schools, but instead are applying to seven or more.

MIT only accepted 9.6 percent of students this year — down 5 percent from 2005. Last year, Harvard had a 6.9 percent acceptance rate, which is expected to drop even further with its 35,000 applications this year, making it perhaps the college with the lowest admission rate in the country. Many other Ivy League schools and even state colleges are seeing record-level applications as well as record-low admission rates.

Places like the University of Chicago used to accept about 70 percent of students. Last year it accepted just 18 percent. Even schools in Utah have seen acceptance rates drop in recent years. Brigham Young University had a 64 percent admission rate last year, down from 69 percent the year before and 78 percent in 2005. Westminster College expects its acceptance rate to drop by 11 percent this year to 67 percent, as the number of applicants jumped from 1,900 last year to 3,200 already — Westminster is still accepting applicants this spring.

Utah public colleges are fairly unique in that most are open enrollment, like Utah Valley University and Salt Lake Community College, or have no cap on enrollment, like the University of Utah and Southern State University, which means if a student gets a certain ACT or SAT score and GPA, they are automatically enrolled in the university. These universities follow a state academic index, which weights GPA and the ACT or SAT equally in deciding whether a student gets in or not.

But with three years in a row of state funding cuts and surging enrollment numbers, some of these schools may toughen their standards.

To read the rest of this article in the Deseret News, click here.