bclintonk

I quite agree with you csdad. The big exception here appears to be California, which sends students across the entire country to the Ivies in numbers roughly proportional to its weight in the nation's population.

You can break these figures down even further and show that the market skews even more local. Within the Northeast, Maine and New Hampshire send far more students to Dartmouth than to any other Ivy; Vermonters seem to prefer Cornell, or at least more end up there. Massachusetts sends three times as many students to Harvard as it does to Yale, while Connecticut sends twice as many to Yale as to Harvard. There are more Rhode Island residents at Brown than at all the other Ivies combined. New York sends 3 times as many students to Cornell--over a thousand--as to its nearest competitor among the Ivies, Penn, which is roughly an hour train ride away from New York City. Columbia, naturally, is a close third for New Yorkers. Pennsylvanians overwhelmingly prefer Penn. And so on.

Which just proves my point. Even at this level, the market is far more local and regional than many people on CC suppose.

sally305

^^Without any supporting evidence (nice work, BTW, bclintonk), I'd speculate that the California kids on average are wealthier than those from the Northeast. The travel costs alone would be several thousand dollars a year for most students and their families. I'd be curious to see whether the students of CA origin are also more likely to attend Ivies with the intention of pursuing high-paying careers like finance.

Also, I agree with Canuckguy: "I don’t see why it is so bad to admit that prestige is your thing. We tell ourselves we [choose Ivies] for the education while there is no good empirical evidence to support such a claim; we tell ourselves we love diversity but have no intention of living in diversity; we tell ourselves we want to be surrounded by the brightest yet I do not see math and physics departments bursting at the seam."

goldenboy8784

There's a simple explanation for this: the most academically qualified students in the country are located in the Northeast corridor, the DC metro area, and in California. If Harvard were to admit like 40 students from Utah and 30 from Arkansas, it would have to severely lower its academic standards and punish the high-achieving kids in NYC/CA.

You're making the faulty assumption that all states have an equal proportion of qualified candidates for the elite schools.

jym626

bclintonk-

Would you have time to possibly run a geographical distribution list on some of the private Universities outside the NE (Duke, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, Wash U, Northwestern, Chicago, Tulane, Hopkins, USC, Case, Carnegie Mellon, etc) to see what the geographic distributions look like? There are some that will be skewed a bit by regional issues (eg IIRC Rice had reasons to remain a largely Texan population) but the demographics would be interesting to see.

Pizzagirl

D has been amused that apparently some of the girls at her Boston-area LAC think that she must live amongst the cornfields because she's from suburban Chicago. No, you provincial little things, really, suburban Chicago looks pretty much like suburban Boston; blink your eyes and you really wouldn't know the difference between Wellesley, MA and Winnetka, IL.

Pizzagirl

No. You don't get it. The most academically qualified students in the middle of the country are often happy with / perfectly fine with their flagship state u. Plenty of Illinois valedictorians head off to U of I and don't think twice. Why should they? Unless they want to go into investment banking, U of I will take them pretty much anyplace they want to go - and for a lower price tag than most elite private schools. That doesn't happen in the northeast to the same extent. I know you drool over private elite schools - and personally I do too - but it is not a sentiment shared everywhere in the country.

ECAdmStudent

@Pizzagirl I'd also suspect that midwestern high schools produce more engineers, but I'd want the data to back it up. Most of the valedictorians in my class went to Ohio State or other strong engineering schools - We only produced one Ivy student (she wasn't even valedictorian) out of our class of 650, and our HS is supposed to be pretty good. There were a couple Northwestern and Vanderbilt kids as well.

Bill73

"Unless they want to go into investment banking, U of I will take them pretty much anyplace they want to go "

Actually, I know a few people that graduated from U of I that have worked as investment banking analysts at Goldman. In fact, one guy is now a managing director of their NYC office.

sally305

From goldenboy: "There's a simple explanation for this: the most academically qualified students in the country are located in the Northeast corridor, the DC metro area, and in California. If Harvard were to admit like 40 students from Utah and 30 from Arkansas, it would have to severely lower its academic standards and punish the high-achieving kids in NYC/CA.

You're making the faulty assumption that all states have an equal proportion of qualified candidates for the elite schools."

Wow. And you're making the assumption that they don't.

Education Week: Quality Counts 2012 - State Report Cards

Arkansas is in the top five states for overall educational quality, only two spots behind NY and significantly above CT, PA, RI, ME, DE....AND CA). It's also #1 (tied with MD and seven spots above NY, 12 above CA) for college readiness (see "Transitions & Alignment").

As I said in an earlier post, it really gets me when people make specious generalizations...

xiggi

Is it possible that you and Goldenboy are talking about entirely different subjects? For instance, I fail to see the relevance of the Education Week Scores to a discussion about admissions at highly selective or elite schools.

On the other hand, and perhaps through a naive and non-expert eye, I would speculate that the number of students who put together a competitive application for Harvard and its handful of peers does not follow an equal distribution among all states.

But again, someone adept at playing with statistics could come up with some proportional representation by controlling all criteria until the desired outcome is achieved.

In the meantime, if someone wants to convince me that Arkansas is among the best ten percent of education in the United States, I am all hears. Actually I happen to think that, when it comes to the analysis the real data of our education system, some of the very best scholars have moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Might be lifting everyone's academic lifeboat.

As far as specious generalizations ... that line is getting as old as the attempt to find something worth attacking through that old Mr. Straw Man.

jym626

Many of them seem to go to Rose Hulman.

ECAdmStudent

Yep. Rose Hulman, Purdue, Case Western, University of Illinois, and OSU seem to be the main culprits.

sally305

xiggi, goldenboy is using geography as the basis of his distinctions, and his claims are the very definition of "specious." I don't care if you like the word or not. He is asserting that kids from Arkansas (never mind Utah for now) are not academically qualified to attend Harvard. I am simply refuting his claim with data that demonstrates otherwise. Feel free to find your own sources to counter what I have presented. What makes you so prejudiced against Arkansas' education system? Do you have anything other than stereotypes to inform your point of view? And why would a national survey that ranks states' K-12 schools on the basis of "college readiness" not be relevant to this discussion?

To me this is at the heart of the debate about the Ivies...there is a large group of people who are from the "right" places and have done the "right" things and feel entitled to go there as a result. As some of the comments here demonstrate, they are also not very open-minded or accepting of those who are not like them--nor do they trade in facts.

Pizzagirl

Arkansas' public schools may be inferior to that of some other state, but in terms of raw distribution of smarts, why wouldn't the distribution of smarts be the same everywhere? YK, I bet there are quite a few Walmart-executive kids who are legacies at top schools, live lifestyles pretty darn indistinguishable from upper middle class kids elsewhere, and look pretty darn competitive to top schools.

Pizzagirl

The issue isn't whether all states have an equal proportion of qualified candidates. There is no a priori reason to think that people in state A are "smarter" than people in state B. The issue is whether all states are represented in proportion to their population in the APPLICANT pool.

Numbers made up for hypothetical purposes:
If Massachusetts represents 4% of the pop of the US, but Mass applicants represent 12% of the pool of Harvard applicants, and 8% of the pool of Harvard acceptees - did Harvard overrepresent or underrepresent Mass?