East Coast admissions

JHS
Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:58:42 +0000

If you look at geographic representation at HYP but for areas equal in size to California but on the east coast, I’m pretty sure you’ll find a very similar ratio.



Nope. Harvard and Stanford are the same size. Stanford accepts roughly 600-650 kids from California each class. To find that kind of concentration at Harvard, you would have to use all of New England, plus New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania . . . and Delaware, Ohio or Maryland if you wanted to get close to (not over) the upper end of Stanford’s California range. In terms of population, that’s an area 60-80% larger than California.

There’s a reason for that. Harvard, while recognizing that it has a certain mission to New England, has always sought geographic diversity. Stanford probably cares about geographic diversity to some extent, but for a long time its general philosophical position is that California is the most diverse place on Earth, and it doesn’t need to seek geographic diversity to have a diverse student body. That said, I don’t think they want to go much over 40% Californian. I continue to believe that admission to Stanford from places other than California (and maybe New York) is slightly less competitive (in the same sense that the Battle of the Bulge may have been slightly less competitive than Normandy).