A metric that people recently have started to adopt to measure their chances of getting into schools is looking at their acceptance rates.
For people who might not know, an institution’s (school) acceptance rate basically gives you an idea of how many people they accept out of their total applicant pool.
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Because of how competitive most programs are, some people have sought to seeking out schools with very high acceptance rate in hopes that the acceptance rate means the bar to get into the program is on the floor. This is true in some instances, and false in others.
Sometimes schools with very high acceptance rates are still very selective in the sense that their GPA or test score requirements automatically prevents “less qualified” candidates from getting it. For instance, a school with 70% acceptance rate that only accepts grades not lower than a 3.7 (out of 4.0) is very selective despite the high acceptance rate. But that’s just one part of it.
Let’s say the program you’re applying to actually had a high acceptance rate with very minimal admission requirements. That’s not really the good news you think it is, because even if you were admitted, chances of getting a scholarship with your application will be very minimal. Remember that they’re accepting almost everyone, so surely they can’t give everyone a scholarship. This is one of the downsides of uncompetitive or easy-to-get-into programs.
On the other hand, the more competitive and selective schools admitting only the few qualified students will most likely have some sort of funding either in the form of graduate teaching assistantships, departmental scholarships, or research grant-supported funding.
Another thing you might also want to consider is Prestige.
Whiles a high acceptance rate doesn’t automatically infer a poor program, prestigious programs generally have lower acceptance rates. In my previous posts on graduate school talk, I already covered some reasons people normally want to go to prestigious schools. The respect, career prospects and rooms degrees from certain institutions can get you into is crazy!
I was telling a friend just a few days ago an observation I made recently about how bias the Tertiary Institutions in Ghana are: they hold foreign earned degrees in higher esteem than they do local ones. And whiles I understand that their justification could be that foreign earned degree holders have received a “better education”, it beckons the question why people should attend the said institution if the local university is clearly considered not at par with internationals.
