<p>There are only 10 schools in the entire U.S. that admit less than 50% of their applicants and yield greater than 50% of those accepted. Notre Dame is one of them. Hardly an anomoly.</p>
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<p>Important point that nicely ties all this back together to the OP and previous posts, just as the tournament metaphor so aptly captures the underlying high stakes drama of the intense competition to attract competitive applicants. One more thought on this aspect of the OP topic -what threatens to kill the smaller LACs also threatens to stymie the boycott movement itself. The gist of the President’s letter is to take a serious stab at the validity and power that current ranking systems yield over the college admissions market place. While most attention is given to the refusal to participate in the PA survey, the second commitment is no less important especially for those smaller, lesser known brand name IHEs. Signatory colleges are asked to make reference to or use ranking information in a neutral, factual context and not in a way that suggests any intrinsic or extrinsic value “in the specific ranking or support the ranking project.” In this vein, Yale President Richard Levin has gone on record that although he disagrees with USNWR’s “misleading use of quantitative measures to evaluate schools” that he is opposed to any movement aimed to eliminate college rankings completely or that does not address factors designed to characterize strong versus weak colleges. The boycott movement’s success does hinge in great part in how many of these institutions that do offer quality education can tread the fine line between eschewing the rankings and acknowledging them. On this point, Kevin Carey of the Education Sector is just as outspoken:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/20381[/url]”>http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/20381</a></p>
<p>It will be interesting to see if more colleges will follow Moravian’s balancing act that clearly takes a more moderate position within the boycott movement - in their statement there is a clear reference to the value and appreciation that is accrued by a positive ranking just as there is a clear statement that more reliable and transparent parameters are needed- to create a broader coalition of IHEs willing to take a stand and take part in the boycott.</p>
<p>“There are only 10 schools in the entire U.S. that admit less than 50% of their applicants and yield greater than 50% of those accepted. Notre Dame is one of them. Hardly an anomoly”</p>
<p>I disagree. I think the preponderance of those applicants are catholic. Notre Dame DOES have this preference profile among THOSE applicants, and the results would be as indicated among that subset of the applicant population that would apply to Notre Dame in the first place.</p>
<p>The problem comes in trying to extrapolate this observed preference beyond those who actually applied. It is my opinion that Notre Dame would not have the same staure among non-applicants. And this was not revealed.</p>
<p>I believe the sample of applicants is biased when compared to the overall population being sampled, and this limits the applicability of the results to the particular sample and not the population.</p>
<p>Lets say they their data showed some Mormons admitted to BYU and Northwestern, and picking BYU.</p>
<p>And then maybe they observe a bunch of non-Mormons not applying to BYU at all, admitted to Northwestern and U Chicago, and maybe a couple more of them picked Northwestern.</p>
<p>So based on these results the study would (and in fact did) produce a "Revealed Preference ranking of:</p>
<p>21 BYU
23 Northwestern
28 U Chicago</p>
<p>But is this really the relative preference for these schools among the applicant pool as a whole? The people in that second bunch, which is a larger number of individuals, did not even think enough of BYU to even apply to it, and if they had been admitted to it they would preferred both Northwestern and U Chicago to BYU.</p>
<p>If the opinions of the whole applicant pool had been properly captured their real relative prefence for these schools overall might have shown BYU least preferred of these three. But this wasn’t “revealed” because the last pool didn’t apply to BYU, hence didn’t get to reject it. They rejected it at an earlier stage in the process.</p>
<p>The method would be extrapolable if each sample of applicants were unbiased when compared to the underlying population of all applicants; ie if it were a random sample. But in fact each sample of applicants is itself a biased sample, not necessarily representative of the underlying population, and that’s where this procedure fails.</p>
<p>I just picked BYU as, to me anyway, an obvious example. But each other case may also be biased in some other, less obvious way.</p>
<p>It’s not productive to argue over this issue. Notre Dame is not perceived as a first-tier school in my world. Hardly any kids I’ve known have gone there, because the kids who could get in don’t even thing about applying. No revealed-preference survey or other statistic is going to convince me that it is until I see a lot of cumulative evidence, including appeal to non-Catholics based on academics. That’s my prejudice. At the same time, I recognize that Notre Dame has a lot of prestige among American Catholics, many of whom DO regard it as the equivalent (or better) of Harvard, and I know perfectly well that it’s far from chopped liver academically, even on my standards. </p>
<p>So if I know someone went to Notre Dame, I have to assume that he or she was a strong student, academically ambitious, and cared about getting a great education (and also probably cared about prestige). Not so different from what I assume when I meet a Harvard alumnus, except in the latter case I also assume a greater degree of coherence between that person’s academic and social values and mine. And with the Notre Dame alumnus, I know almost to a certainty that he or she came out of a social context with a different academic prestige hierarchy than mine. But that doesn’t mean that mine is “right” and theirs “wrong” at all. (Of course, at some level I do believe that, but I take myself with a huge grain of salt on stuff like that.)</p>
<p>JHS,
I think you might be selling ND short because you aren’t that familiar with it, but it compares very well with the Ivies and many top privates that might have a higher profile among academics. </p>
<p>Historically, the academic world has been hostile to schools of a religious nature and ND certainly suffers from this. USNWR’s Peer Assessment score, the ranking among academics, is but one example of this as ND scores only at the 3.9 level, the lowest of any school ranked in its Top 25. Frankly, ND should probably join the protest because their PA score very negatively impacts their ranking. But I doubt that the administrators at ND care as their reputation among their students and alumni and the general public is very good and does not need USNWR for any validation or publicity. </p>
<p>The student population at ND is 83% Catholic and 42% of these students attended Catholic high schools. This certainly supports your comment that their applicant pool is self-selective. However, qualitatively, ND attracts the premier students from this realm and sports an average SAT over 1400. I would consider the students to be peers of the lower Ivies and, in cross admit battles, ND likely more than holds its own against this group. Also, while the school is located in the Midwest and takes the largest number of its students from that region (37%), it is definitely a national university with 24% from the Northeast, 12% from the Southeast, 12% from the Southwest, 11% from the West and 4% International.</p>
<p>hawkettte:
JHS did not talk of Ivies, much less lower ivies. He wrote specifically about ND and Harvard.
The revealed preference tournaments are one-on-one.</p>
<p>It’s far off the topic of this thread, but this seems an appropriate point to repeat a story I’ve told before on CC:</p>
<p>One of my law school friends was a woman from my home town (Buffalo) who had actually gotten her degree from Notre Dame when it was still all-male: she was an engineer, and it was admitting women (not very many) into its engineering program because St. Mary’s didn’t offer one. Anyway, Christmas vacation her senior year of college she was hanging out at a popular ex-Catholic-high-school-jock bar (a fun place, I liked it too) one night when a very cute boy started to chat her up, something she didn’t mind in the least. Except when she asked him where he went to school, he said Notre Dame. She was pretty sure he was lying, because if there were a boy that cute from Buffalo at Notre Dame, she would know him already. (He forgot to ask her directly where SHE went to school, of course.) So she basically asked seemingly innocent questions until she had him completely trapped, and then confronted him with the fact that she went to Notre Dame and he was clearly b.s.ing her.</p>
<p>Who was he? The then-current starting quarterback at Yale, a premed molecular biology major. She: “I was way more impressed with that, but I had a hard time getting past the lying.”</p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that, in 1978, at an ex-Catholic-high-school-jock bar in Buffalo, talking to a pretty girl, it was more prestigious to be a run-of-the-mill student at Notre Dame than the starting quarterback at Yale.</p>
<p>Hmmm. At first I assumed that the quarterback was delighted to find a pretty girl who didn’t <em>know</em> he was the Yale quarterback, and named a non-Ivy school to see if she would still talk to him!</p>
<p>Good points, JHS. These prejudices are part of the reason my husband and I are not sending our kids to Catholic colleges.</p>
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<p>prestigious ? Or desirable? Two different things.
I do not think that the revealed preference study reveals prestige; just preference. For example, Harvard is not more prestigious than Princeton or Yale, but it gets chosen more often. Location might be an important reason.</p>
<p>So, another anecdote. While in grad school at Harvard, I went to Paris on family visit/research, equipped with an international student ID card. A a cinema, the cashier, upon seeing my student ID, asked me where I went to school. “Harvard,” I replied. “Ah,” he began rhapsodizing, “the Harvard Business School.” “No, Harvard graduate school,” I retorted. “I did not know that Harvard had other schools besides the Business School.” Harvard College? He would never have heard of it (and neither had most of my relatives). Of course, that was a long time ago (the movie was Cousin, Cousine).</p>
<p>vossron: Yes, that might have been true in other contexts, but that wasn’t the story she told me, and I believed her. I knew the guy in question, and I knew the bar (which was a couple blocks from my house) and the city. He was the biggest of BMOCs and not the least bit shy about using his “advantages”, but Yale meant practically nothing to anyone except for a very thin affluent crust. My friend could easily have been the only girl in the bar that night who might have been more impressed by who he really was than by who he pretended to be.</p>
<p>I just checked the Yale athletic records. They had some pretty good football teams back in the 70s (Ivy champs in '74, '76, '77, '79), so not sure why he would want to run from that. Just one girl’s view, but maybe he felt that she would be intimidated by the Yale name and ND was still great, but much more approachable and down to earth in the Buffalo bar setting.</p>
<p>JHS, I guess we live in different worlds. I agree 100% with hawkette that schools with a religious mission are sold short in academia. But the admit rate at med schools, professional schools, and high caliber employment oportunities for ND grads prove that your world is much smaller, and more parochial, than you think. Are you aware that over 25% of Americans are Catholic? And many, many ND applicants turn down ivies and other top tier schools every year when the ND acceptance letter arrives.</p>
<p>Given ND’s location in South Bend, Indiana it is remarkable that they draw the caliber of students they do. Boston College, another wildly popular Catholic school, has the city of Boston as a wonderful draw.</p>
<p>You are right, SS, of course. But I wouldn’t pay all that money for college when there’s a strong possibility that over half of our population will turn up their noses at it based on old-fashioned prejudice. No matter how good a Catholic school is, for this reason it will always be “second tier.” </p>
<p>Our public high school even thinks it’s better than our local parochial school. Why? Because kids have to take a religion course each year. They are so blind to how poorly they stack up against the parochial school, it’s just laughable. </p>
<p>I know you love ND, SS, but this is just the reality.</p>
<p>My friend went to Yale with Stone Phillips, who was the QB at the time. Wonder if it was him? He’s easy on the eyes.</p>
<p>And marite is right that preference and prestige are two different things. Look at the College Board link someone posted earlier in the thread, showing the colleges to whom CB had sent the most SAT scores in Texas. The first dozen or do were all Texas schools. Texans, in my experience, are fiercely loyal to their state and its institutions. I imagine most of those kids are aware that Harvard is universally considered more prestigious than UT, but they have no desire to attend H.</p>
<p>That being said, I find the preference stats very interesting & useful as a component of ranking.</p>
<p>HH, there will always be ignorance, but it wouldn’t stop me from sending my kids to whatever school fits them the best & embraces a value system of which I can be proud. Yes, I’m a ND nut. But dear friends had the same experience when their D chose Sarah Lawrence. How did these typeA MBA/finance parents give birth to the mellow/artsy gal who fits into the SL lifestyle perfectly? I don’t know, but they gave their blessing. Hippie/artsy school reputation so be it. (That family has several ND grads, mostly CPAs & such, including football players who made it to the NFL.)</p>
<p>Sticker Shock: I think we’ve had this conversation before. Of course my world is small and – funny word, in this context – parochial. I wasn’t pretending otherwise. I grew up in a city that was at least 70% Catholic, I live in a city that is probably close to 50% Catholic (and my first house here was practically next door to a parish church and school), and I have spent a good part of my non-professional life studying Spanish, Italian, and French literature, so emotionally the Catholic population feels much larger than 25% to me.</p>
<p>Hawkette: What can I say? The guy in question was the quarterback for two of those championship teams. He wasn’t exactly into “approachable and down to earth”; he was a TOUCHDOWN! kind of guy. If he had wanted to seem down to earth, he could have said he went to Niagara or St. Bonaventure.</p>
<p>EDIT: Not Stone Phillips (who is not, as far as I know, Catholic, and certainly not from Buffalo). Stone’s successor.</p>
<p>JHS,
Who knows what the guy was thinking. But, no matter what, it’s pretty clear from your story that he didn’t get over the goal line that night. :)</p>
<p>I never realized that Philadelphia was 50% Catholic. I guess I should have with all of the Italian and other immigrants, but I always thought of Philly as dominated by its African American population whom I don’t automatically identify as Catholic. And aren’t there several Catholic colleges there?</p>
<p>South Philly–Rocky Italian. St Joes, Lasalle, Nova come to mind.</p>