Why is the acceptance rate for SLP grad school so low?

If you're wondering...

1. How many applications do students submit?

2. Is it normal to receive a few rejections?

3. What the acceptance rate for SLP grad school is?

Scroll right on down for the good stuff!

Spoiler: The acceptance rate for SLP grad school may actually be as high as 92% !!!!

Why?

The acceptance rates that ASHA publishes refer to the number of applications that graduate programs reviewed and recommended for acceptance, not the number of students that were accepted.

More on that in a bit...

You already know that applying to SLP grad school is competitive. You'll even hear students talk about how some of your top programs receive 200+ applications and admit 20 people (looking at you, CUNYs).

But that can't be the case for all programs, right? Right?

I set out to learn more about SLP grad school acceptance rates by conducting an informal, completely anonymous poll in places that SLP grad students congregate online - slpgradschool on Reddit & the Speech Pathology Forum on GradCafe.

I won't keep you waiting!

Here are the results:

​Number of students who responded to the poll	​109
Number of students responding to the poll who received at least one acceptance	​104
Number of students responding to the poll who were not accepted to any programs	5
​Percent of students who responded to the poll that received at least one acceptance	​95.41%

So about 95% of students were accepted!?

That seems high, because we know that ASHA reported that the acceptance rate for the 2018/2019 application season was 34.6%, and their reported acceptance rate for the 2019/2020 application season was 39%.

However, the acceptance rates that ASHA publishes refer to the number of applications that graduate programs reviewed and recommended for acceptance, not the number of students that were accepted.

What does that mean?

We all know that some students apply to more than one school. If a student applied to 5 schools, and received one acceptance, that student's applications only had a 20% chance of acceptance. But, our hypothetical student still made it into grad school!

Don't believe me? Let's check ASHA's math.

ASHA looks the total number of applications submitted to all programs that are CAA accredited. Well, they try to. Approximately 91% of institutions participated in ASHA's survey for the 19/20 season.

For the 2019-2020 application season, ASHA reported that 56,148 applications were submitted to Master's programs in Speech Language Pathology.

9,826 students matriculated (enrolled in their master's programs).

Of the 56,148 applications, ASHA reports that 21,877 applications were recommended for acceptance.

21,877 / 56,148 = 0.3896

That's the 39% figure that they reported for their acceptance rate in the 19/20 season.

So, if you were a student applying in the 2019/2020 application season, and you submitted a single application, that application would have, on average, a 39% chance of acceptance. If you submitted two applications, each of those applications would have a 39% chance of being accepted.

However, we know that those 56,148 applications do not represent 56,148 students, because students typically submit more than one application!

The reality is that we don't know how many students applied to SLP graduate school, so we can only make educated guesses as to the actual acceptance rate.

Does your chance of acceptance increase when you submit more than one application? These data suggest that it does.

Let's get back to our poll results:

​Average number of applications that students responding to this poll submitted (total applications/total students)

​5.278

Let's think about how this would play out if we were to use ASHA's data from the 2019/2020 application season.

If we take the 56,148 applications that we know were submitted, and divide it by the average number of applications per student that we came up with (5.278), we can estimate that 10,638 students applied during the 19/20 season.

56,148 total applications / 5.278 applications per student = 10,638 students who applied.

We also know that 9,826 students matriculated, and we can estimate that most of the students who received an acceptance enrolled.

If 9,826 students were admitted and enrolled,

9826 admitted students /10,638 total applicants = 0.924, or 92.4%

This would suggest that if students in the 2019/2020 application season submitted 5.278 applications, and if all of the admitted students enrolled, our estimated acceptance rate is close to 92%.

Is there anything else the data is telling us?

Number of students receiving at least one acceptance	104
Number of students who received only acceptances	22
​Average number of applications submitted by students that were admitted to at least one program	5.301
​Average number of acceptances received by students that were admitted to at least one program	3.535
Average number of rejections received by students who were admitted to at least one program	1.766

Our takeaway from this information is that 78.8% of students who received acceptances also received a few rejections.

If you are accepted to at least one program, the total number of acceptances that you could expect to receive is relative to the number of applications you submit:

Last but not least... how accurate is this data?

• Data was collected anonymously from GradCafe and Reddit, so I could not verify that the reported results were accurate.

• This sample was not taken from students admitted in a single application season - and we know that acceptance rates fluctuate slightly each season.

• The average number of applications submitted by students could fluctuate from year to year.

• The sample size is very small.

To see whether or not this data could be representative of the population, I compared average acceptance rates for all applications in this data set to ASHA's published acceptance rate: 33.33% to 39%. This overall application acceptance rate is lower for the students included in this sample,