<p>I’m not bitter because I got in, but I was looking through this year’s and last year’s decision threads, and Stanford tended to turn away stellar applicants in favor of less stellar ones (fear that they would flock to HYPM?). It was very weird. Stanford has a high yield right? It seems like this is because majority of people are choosing between Stanford and lower-tier schools. Correct me if I’m wrong.</p>
<p>Totally not bitter here either ; ), but I do think this is a misperception. All the top schools, including Stanford, take lots of stellar applicants, and don’t take some stellar applicants. When a stellar applicant is denied by HYPSM, there is a lot of attention paid to that event (and, of course, the usual whining about other people “taking” their “spots”), but when a stellar applicant is accepted, that is expected, so it draws little notice. If you look at the peer schools’ acceptance threads, you’ll see the same conversations about students with “perfect” or “superior” stats, ECs, awards, yadda yadda, being passed over for reasons they consider mysterious.</p>
<p>Remember, too, that many of the most “stellar” applicants to any top school are not necessarily inclined to post their information on cc, since they tend to be pretty secure in their stellar-hood as a group.</p>
<p>And AFAIK, Stanford’s applicant pool overlaps very heavily with its peers, and Stanford is doing nicely in cross-admits as against these peers.</p>
<p>I was rejected SCEA for the class of 2014, and I was bitter for a while but I doubt Stanford has Tufts syndrome. Like zenkoan has already mentioned, Stanford doesn’t really need to play the game seeing as how Stanford gets a lot of cross-admits from HYPM. Furthermore, Stanford has always said that they are more holistic in evaluating its applicants, and it tries to see the whole person, more than just the test scores/awards. So perhaps statistically they’re “worse” applicants, but in terms of their contribution to society, they are invaluable. The people that I know who got into Stanford started a charity, were in the top 5 in the nation for their respective instruments, amazing Indian classical dancers (which takes a lot of time and discipline), camp counselors for the disabled…in other words, their worth comes not only from their intelligence, but also from their character.</p>
<p>I think Stanford may be trying to find applicants who didn’t spend all their time in high school trying to build up their application.</p>
<p>Stanford and its peer institutions all love academic superstars, and these are the admits you’ll find in the upper quartiles of each of these college’s very similar common data set stats. They’re the kids with the beastly scores and gpa’s, Olympiad medals, unusually advanced coursework, published research, etc. Obviously, each of these schools also admits students into their lower quartiles score-wise, and these will be the students who are academically capable of succeeding at the colleges and have also demonstrated truly outstanding ability in artistic, philanthropic, athletic, entrepreneurial, or other areas. Stanford and HYP all do this by design, because having this variety of talent is what makes these colleges the amazing places that they are. Every year each of these colleges definitely makes a few weird judgment calls, but they are trying to do the best they can with the enormous number of qualified applicants they have to assess in a compressed time frame.</p>
<p>I would like to add but the above posters said it well</p>
<p>WUSTL is the only other school I’ve seen with Tufts’ syndrome. As previous posters said, Stanford doesn’t need to because it gets a lot of cross admits who prefer the West Coast or whatever.</p>
<p>Occasionally, Stanford’s more subjective admissions process can appear to be Tufts syndrome.</p>
<p>No one could use Stanford as a safety school, so the answer is easily no.</p>
<p>Stanford looks for things that are just different from what other schools look for. The results are great though. IMO definitely not tufts’ syndrome</p>
<p>What the Devil is HYPM, and what is this disease we call Tuft Syndrome?</p>
<p>“HYPM” stands for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT, respectively. Tufts syndrome is the waitlisting of highly qualified applicants in an effort to protect yield.</p>
<p>I know three kids that turned down Harvard for Stanford…I don’t think Stanford needs to resort to Tufts Syndrome. Many polls consider it the #2/#3 most prestigious college in the world.</p>
<p>The fact that someone could even propose that Stanford has Tufts’ syndrome is utterly ridiculous.</p>
<p>Yes, Stanford holds it own nicely in the cross-admit contests with HYPM. Tufts, on the other hand, has always lost out to all those schools (and especially Harvard), which is where the syndrome of using the waitlist to “game” their yield had its start. This is so inapplicable to Stanford that the OP’s post seemed kind of trollish to me, to be honest.</p>
<p>Imagining that Stanford has any sort of need to game their yield is absurd.</p>
<p>Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. Honestly, I’m new to college confidential and wasn’t sure how Stanford measured up. I guess I have more of a normal person, outsider perspective.</p>
<p>Perhaps, squirtlebug. Your original post sounded curiously like that of another poster who tends to make groundless assertions in this and other forums, but in any case, now you have a more informed perspective.</p>
<p>Well, everything is groundless on cc, because everything begins with “I’ve heard of, I know of, My friend, My cousin” etc. And people draw conclusions from posts like these.</p>
<p>^^No, some of the information is derived from direct, first-hand experience or knowledge, but there certainly is too much blather on CC.</p>