Comment by pyuser583
1 day ago
Vanderbilt has an acceptance rate of 3-4%, which makes it almost as exclusive as Stanford.
They aren’t having trouble getting applicants.
1 day ago
Vanderbilt has an acceptance rate of 3-4%, which makes it almost as exclusive as Stanford.
They aren’t having trouble getting applicants.
I graduated the year before they stopped allowing graduates to walk away without student loans. What a journey that's been (as a blue collar electrician) — still not finished repayment!
Yield Rate (percentage of admitted students who accept) is what matters, not acceptance rate.
Most people who get into Vandy (such as me and my peers years ago) also got into Columbia [1], UChicago [2], Northwestern [3], and other similar programs.
Yet Vanderbilt's yield rate of 45% [0] compared to 53-63% of its peers highlights this rising discrepancy, with students choosing to attend alternative peer programs.
The only thing that differentiates Vanderbilt from (eg.) Rice was prestige as a supposed T15, yet Vanderbilt's ranking and prestige has been dropping significantly over the past decade [4], and this leaves a university like Vandy in a tough position.
The overwhelming majority of students who get into a Vanderbilt tier university lean liberal to progressive and/or are a racial minority, and for these candidates Vandy is not as attractive as it's peers (the likelihood of being "hate crimed" as an Asian American is much higher in Nashville compared to New Haven). Conversely, Vandy and Nashville is viewed as too "woke" by conservative students so they are less interested in matriculating (and anyhow, the overwhelming majority of bachelor degree holders end up leaning liberal).
As such, if Vanderbilt wishes to retain it's value proposition, it has no choice but to branch out from it's historical geography becuase it otherwise faces the prospect of being relegated into the same bin as Wake Forest or Tulane - a somewhat prestigious but geographically limited university.
For high achieving students (and their parents) and academic faculty, such a prospect is not very attractive.
[0] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1624-Vanderbilt-...
[1] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-319-Columbia-Uni...
[2] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-1416-University-...
[3] - https://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-945-Northwestern...
[4] - https://vanderbilthustler.com/2023/09/19/vanderbilt-drops-to...