Carleton Admissions Trends
Introduction & Motivation
Our team created this project for our final project for DGAH 110: Hacking the Humanities. We decided to investigate admissions trends including total number of applicants, total number of accepted students, and total number of enrolled students at Carleton College from 1999-2024. When applying for colleges, one of the things that many people look at is acceptance rate. We were no exception, which is why we were curious in seeing if there were any interesting trends in admissions data.
We worked with data from Carleton’s Common Data Set for our analysis. For the in-depth discussion on the data and our processes, head on over to our Processes page. We created various graphs including line charts, bar charts, and pie charts to visualize our data. Our complete set of visuals can be seen on our Visuals page.
Analysis
After creating the graphs, we selected trends we found interesting and wanted to further research. We discuss Carleton-specific trends, national trends, and trends shared by other selective liberal arts colleges like Carleton.
Click on any of the buttons below to view our trend analysis.
The Future of Carleton Admissions
- In 2024, the US News and World Report made changes to its ranking methodology. The categories of alumni giving, percent of faculty with terminal degree, class size and high school standing were all removed from the methodology. These categories were ones that Carleton excelled at and thus contributed to its high ranking. However, after this change, Carleton dropped to 9th from 6th.
- The Wall Street Journal also made some changes to their ranking methodology as well. “The WSJ shifted from more traditional ‘input’ measures like a college’s financial resources and student test scores to a greater focus on outcomes, specifically financial outcomes: initial post-graduation salaries and the WSJ’s own measure of value-added social mobility” (Byerly, Reflections on College Rankings – Office of the President – Carleton College). Consequently, Carleton plummeted to 218th from 35th because it sends alumni into grad school as well as fields like journalism, arts, and the public sector which generally aren’t the highest paying fields.
- Since many people pay attention to rankings when considering where to apply, this could potentially have an impact on student awareness of Carleton. “The new emphasis on earnings potential and “return on investment” runs counter to the message we try to convey about the inherent value of a liberal arts education” (Byerly, Reflections on College Rankings – Office of the President – Carleton College). Although we won’t know the effects of this until many years down the road, it’s still worth acknowledging that this could potentially have an impact on future admissions at Carleton.