Cornell vs. Duke - which is more selective?

cleareyedguy
Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:14:27 +0000

Another way to look at admissions is through the subgroups that the colleges are trying to attract. Typical subgroups include athletes, alum kids, math majors, all-arounds, journalists, etc. From within those groups, the Cornell math majors, for example, are very similar to those at Duke (and Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Northwestern, and a variety of excellent private and public schools). Similarly, the people who run the school newspaper at Cornell, Duke, etc are very similar. And the math majors and the journalists within the schools don’t look much like each other (though of course sometimes they’re the same person).

Parsing out selectivity via SAT scores and acceptance rates is easy but uninformative. Yep, it’s generally harder to get into Harvard than Duke or Cornell, and more people accept H’s acceptance, but within subgroups, there is very little difference among top 20 schools. HYP may recruit student athletes who wouldn’t be looked at twice by a school like Duke, Northwestern or Stanford (where the athletics are generally at a different level), while Duke may recruit (and get) some of the students who are being heavily recruited by HYP, often through its full-ride academic packages that are hard for any school to match. And that doesn’t even bring up the issues of geography (Cornell and Duke may be looking for kids from Hawaii and North Dakota to round out the class, but they are also looking hard at their own backyards to get local kids for a variety of political and school spirit reasons. Finally, MANY MANY kids look about the same on paper, and admissions is inevitably something of a crap shoot.

Looked at a different way, graduate and professional schools essentially lump these mid-size elite schools into one category when looking at admissions, and what they look for (and find) is differences between the top students from within this broader category and the students who didn’t fare as well at these schools (ie, for medical school purposes, a 3.8 from Cornell or Duke is likely to be good enough for an interview almost anywhere (though the interview and acceptance will hinge on other stuff), but a 3.5 from HYP is likely to not get an interview from a top 10 med school unless the applicant has some sort of extraordinary EC’s or MCAT’s. Further, these med schools (who are under the same gun with US News as the undergrad colleges to demonstrate high average numbers) find plenty of top-notch students who went to the big, famous public universities as well as the less famous schools that are considered “back ups” by many people at CC.

In other words, find a place you like, enjoy yourself, and excel. The place matters MUCH MUCH less than you do.