Counselling resource: The scary maths of university admissions

All school counsellors know one thing: realistic expectations are hard to set when creating a college list. Families, students and even administrators all want “the best”, but struggle to fully understand what that means – or even what “best” they are aiming for.

As counsellors, we are often stuck between many different “bests”: best ranked, best return on investment, best known, best location, best fit…The list goes on and on, and very rarely do we all agree.

We try to teach, convince and sometimes cajole our families into putting together a holistic list – one that captures not just who the student is, but what they have excelled in so far. Nonetheless, many lists end up being much more reach-heavy than we would like.

University admissions: doing the scary maths

After many conversations with students and parents about the importance of a balanced list and what elements to consider when putting such a list together, I created the concept of Scary Maths.

My students often look at overall admission rates and think that those numbers are accurate reflections of a university’s process. As an international counsellor, I know that is not the case. Most of my students are applying to colleges and universities in countries where they are not citizens, and as such are vying for fewer spots.

Over years of having very difficult conversations about why I listed a school as a “reach” and not a “target”, I decided to run the numbers. I pulled data from the common data sets, school profiles and admitted student numbers to create a more accurate picture of what admissions looks like for international students.

The goal of the maths was not really to scare students (although they all refer to it as Scary Maths) but to give them a better understanding of what I was talking about.

The reality of international student numbers

Scary Maths works as follows: in the 2022 admissions cycle, the University of Pennsylvania received 56,332 applications from around the world. It admitted 3,304 (an admission rate of about 5.8 per cent) and enrolled 2,418 students. Sixteen per cent of its incoming class (about 528 students in total) came from 84 different countries, not counting the US.

If we were to assume that all these countries sent the same number of students each, each country would have sent 4.5 students. If we were to assume that all 50 states also sent the same number of students each, each state would have about 40 students represented in the incoming class.

We know the numbers are never quite equal by state or by country, but the comparisons are stark. International students are admitted at much lower rates than their domestic counterparts. For example, the city of Philadelphia alone had 149 students in the incoming class at Penn – equivalent to a third of all international students starting that year.

The numbers don’t lie

To make things a little more simple, I created a spreadsheet (see attached) where we can input and update the data every year. The numbers don’t lie, and by sharing this information with our community we can have more meaningful conversations about why fit matters.

If a student is trying to become one of three or four students in an entire country to be admitted to a particular university, we need to make sure everything about them and their application is a good fit. By helping students and families understand how stark the numbers can be, we can hopefully also help them see the value in writing that really compelling essay, in doing meaningful and in-depth research, in attending college visits and in working hard in class to earn good grades.

We know it all matters, and the Scary Maths helps make it a little more visible.