It’s Not Hard Getting Into College

Running down some common misconceptions about American college students, Libby Nelson points out that most colleges don’t have highly competitive admissions:

The competitive college admission process can seem like life or death for students who are going through it. But those students are a tiny slice of the next year’s college freshmen. Their experience isn’t representative: 84 percent of public colleges admit at least half of all students who apply.

That’s just four-year colleges — community colleges take virtually all students as part of their mission. Outside the public sector, for-profit colleges rarely have admissions criteria either. (A third of college students attend for-profit or community colleges.) Even the vast majority of private nonprofit colleges aren’t especially selective: Just 20 percent accept less than half of their applicants. Colleges with acceptance rates in the teens or single digits are overrepresented in the media, but they’re outliers in American higher education.