Close observers of higher education might be experiencing some cognitive dissonance of late. Recent years have brought endless media stories about declining college enrollments nationwide and the suggestion that this eases college admissions. A new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute’s Preston Cooper, for example, finds that, with fewer kids fighting for scarce spots, acceptance rates are starting to rise.
And yet any parent of academically-striving teenagers can give you examples of how hard it’s become to get into top-tier universities—and how it’s getting harder. Even colleges that were considered safety schools for certain kids have issued surprising rejections in recent years. That shift tracks with larger demographic trends: America experienced something of a baby boom in the 2000s that didn’t go bust till 2008. That means the last few years have brought a large wave of high school graduates that hasn’t quite crested yet, raising the number of potential applicants for a limited number of seats and making it harder, not easier, to get into top schools. (The situation might reverse itself once the baby-bust kids start entering college a few years from now.)
All of this made us interested in updating an analysis from 2020 by Mike and his Fordham colleague Pedro Enamorado. Back then, Mike and Pedro found that it had in fact become much harder to gain admission to America’s top schools when compared with the previous generation, at least as measured by median SAT scores (adjusted for score re-norming by the College Board), for the high school graduating classes of 1985 and 2016. Here, we update those trends through the class of 2023, using median SAT scores drawn from each school’s Common Data Set submission. (The source used for the 2020 analysis, Barron’s, did not have an update containing post-Covid scores.) Due to further re-norming that took place after the release of the 2016 scores used in the original analysis, the 1985 and 2016 scores for each school have been adjusted to the current scale using the College Board’s concordance table.
We started with the top 100 national universities and top 50 liberal arts colleges according to the 2020 US News and World Report college rankings. Fifty-five schools were dropped from the 2020 analysis because they did not report median SAT scores for both 1985 and 2016, and an additional 17 were dropped from the current analysis because they no longer reported median SAT scores, or for other anomalies. What we find is that median SAT scores have continued to rise at almost all of America’s top colleges, usually by quite a bit.
That finding comes with a big fat asterisk, however, as almost every one of those institutions had test-optional policies in place in 2023, which probably inflated their median SAT scores. Readers should keep in mind that students with sky-high scores were likelier to submit them to admissions officers than those with lower scores.
