Since a lot of people ineligible or marginally eligible for admission apply, the acceptance rate is low, meaning that the eligible students who didn’t apply also would have been rejected, since the acceptance rate is low.
We live in a state with two B1G schools, but DD has received several more pounds of brightly colored marketing snail mail from Ivies, and let’s not discuss the virtual mountain of email - all of basically saying “this could be you.” It’s brilliant, but a little shady. At $80 a pop applications about have to be a profit center - 28,000 * 80 (round Yale numbers) is pushing two and a half million dollars, most of it from deliberately targeted kids that were never going to be admitted in the first place. So these innocents, dreams in their eyes, spend a C note and get denied, and that part of the schools’ rating is safe for another year. It’s not a scam, but I wouldn’t like my kids to act that way.
But it’s brilliant because they’ve figured out a way to make money from gaming the ratings systems, and hats off to them for that.
There isn’t anything wrong with going to any one of them - but for the right reasons. B1G schools do some odd things too, just not this, at least to us.
Edit: the more I mull this over, the more I wonder if the question ought to be reversed. For 2 students of equal credentials, how do the Ivies fare? For engineering, that’s easy. For other majors, it isn’t as clear. Good thread. Needs popcorn.