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<p>I don’t think you can let the privates off the hook that easily, hawkette. Set aside Penn as an outlier, but it still makes no sense that Harvard can get this data for 84% of its freshmen, Columbia can get it for 80%, the University of Chicago can get it for 62%–and yet Princeton can only get it for 30% and Boston College can do no better than 29%? That’s a huge variance, even from the Chicago level to the Princeton/BC level. Similarly among LACs: Harvey Mudd 78%, Vassar 66%, Pomona 60%—yet Williams, Colgate, and Kenyon only 30%, Bucknell only 28%, and Trinity a mere 20%? Again, a huge variance. </p>
<p>And it can’t be explained away by saying that “private colleges attract a larger (and sometimes much larger) percentage of their matriculates from private high schools.” No doubt this is true, but that doesn’t explain why Princeton’s reporting rate on class rank is so much lower than Harvard’s, Penn’s, and Columbia’s. Indeed, as PtonGrad2000 points out (post #10), a strong majority of Princeton’s entering freshmen come from public high schools, and the percentage of its entering class coming from private high schools doesn’t differ significantly from schools like Harvard, Columbia, and Penn. If only 30% of Princeton freshmen are reporting class rank and 60% to 70% of the freshmen are coming from public high schools, that means more than half the public high school matriculants aren’t reporting class rank at Princeton—while their counterparts at Penn, Harvard, and Columbia clearly are.</p>
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<p>Could be. But that’s pretty much the quintessential case of garbage data, isn’t it? How can you “objectively” compare the data of two schools if one is reporting apples where the other is reporting oranges? As I said, garbage in, garbage out.</p>
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<p>The variance among publics appears on the whole somewhat smaller than among private universities and LACs. And variance among the publics is, if anything, more understandable. It could be state mandates as you suggest. Or it could be as simple as the dominant public university in a state demanding class rank information and thereby making it the de facto norm for virtually all high schools in the state, and therefore for the largest number of the university’s applicants. Other states and other universities may not care, consequently in-state schools won’t care and won’t produce class ranks, and in-state applicants won’t care and won’t submit or won’t even have the data. That would explain most of the state-to-state variance. </p>
<p>Very few of the privates draw their student body so heavily from a single state, however, so there’s got to be some other explanation for the variance between Penn-Harvard-Columbia at one extreme and Princeton at the other.</p>