Once again, my no-name alma mater did not qualify for the list. I’m not certain if that speaks badly of the school or of Forbes.
@ExpertOnMistakes totally, too much weight is ascribed to the metric of rankings.
@SeinfeldFan1 There are also clear contrasts between different sets of rankings. Don’t know if it will make it this year, but my college qualified for the Princeton Review’s best colleges list last year. It’s kind of odd how the school was able to appear on a list of 380 colleges, but not a list of 660 colleges.
Yes, in state vs out of state is one factor that can dramatically change the degree of correlation between regional diversity and name recognition. There are many others. For example, I’ll compare Harvard and Tulane, which are both private schools. Harvard is probably the most well known private university in the United States. Nevertheless, it’s far from the most regionally diverse one. In most years, nearly half of Harvard’s US students are from the northeast, and the majority are from just 4 states.
In contrast, the top 6 states for Tulane are usually NY, CA, LA, NJ, TX, and IL. 4 of the 5 most populous states appear among the top 6, and the 5th (Florida) appears elsewhere in the top 10 most represented states at Tulane. NY and NJ seem overrepresented, but to a much lesser degree than at Harvard.
Tulane obviously has nowhere near the name recognition as Harvard, yet it appears to be more regionally diverse than Harvard. There are many factors that contribute to this inconsistency between name recognition and regional diversity, but a big one is differences in location. Tulane’s area of the south has a smaller portion of students who are the type that are qualified, interested in, and believe they can afford this type of excellent private university than the northeast; which leads to the appearance of less of a regional bias.
You can make similar examples for other reasons than differences in location such as schools that attract a special type of niche student, schools that make more/less of an effort for geographical diversity and/or attracting out of state students, schools that are more/less affordable due to grants/scholarships, etc.
^ Harvard has also said that it doesn’t want to lose its identity as a New England and Boston institution and has a policy of favoring Boston applicants.
This is something that I don’t think many people on CC get. Unlike some elites in other countries that are truly national in that they don’t favor home regions (Oxbridge comes to mind), many elites in the US do have “good neighbor” policies.
Best school is a label and a brand.
Best school for a specific student is ultimately the only list that matters. The best college for a student is the one that he/she learns, matures, gets educated, thrives at, graduates from and builds a solid career foundation upon.
Yes, and I think this is true for all highly ranked privates in Massachusetts. At our local high school in MA, the admission rate to Harvard is much higher than the rate to Stanford (although part of that might be Stanford punishing our school, since it’s yield is only about 20%). Our early admit rate to Amherst is 50%.
Yes, of the 30,000 high schools in the country, yours is SO very important to Stanford that they feel compelled to “punish” it. It wouldn’t ever occur to you that maybe they turned down the 10th consecutive upper middle class applicant from your school for the kid on a ranch in Wyoming or from the farm in rural Alabama. Nope, it’s got to be because they looked at your school and said “we need to tell them who’s boss here.”
Did you not understand that I was just talking about yield protection? You have been around these forums long enough that I thought you would know better.
And I am sure that our HS is not that special and that they “punish” others as well.
It’s not about “punishing,” it’s about statistical prediction. If Stanford knows from past experience that students from your school who they admit are also likely to be admitted to Harvard and are far more likely to accept at Harvard in their backyard if so, they might be conservative in using some of their acceptance quota on low likely prospects. Yes this is yield protection, but it’s not punitive. We live near an East Coast Ivy and the perception of the students and the counselors is that other Ivys bias against our students for exactly that reason – that they are more than likely to pick the Ivy in their back yard. I used the word perception because I have no idea if it’s really true or just what they tell themselves. Out of a graduating class of about 475 students, I counted 38 going to Ivys (plus about as many again going to equivalents – Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, the top LAC’s, etc.), but about 20 of those were for near by Ivy. And I can only see where they decided to attend, so no idea where they were accepted at other Ivys or if they even applied. It does seem like some break through every year though to those other schools.
Stanford does not know who Harvard is admitting. They can make a guess- and can likely guess with close to 100% accuracy who within their admit pool doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of getting into Harvard- but they don’t know who is getting admitted.
You guys are assuming that every adcom at every elite has an excel spreadsheet in front of them and are playing “applicant bingo” by calculating that the kid who likes to ski will end up going to Dartmouth (“so let’s ding him now”) and the kid who plays the flute will end up Princeton (“their entire flute section is graduating this year”).
I would be absolutely flabbergasted by a shred of actual evidence that Stanford engages in yield protection to the degree you are suggesting. Flabbergasted. Stanford doesn’t give a rats %^& about protecting its yield- and it doesn’t have to. Stanford Adcom’s admit the kids they want- they get to cherrypick from among the top HS kids in the country- and the fact that a certain percentage of them end up going elsewhere is why they admit MORE than they expect to enroll. That’s the science of being an adcom.
Not by pushing the skiers to New Hampshire and the theoretical mathematicians to MIT and the ballet dancers to Columbia. If they want the ballet dancer (all things being equal) that’s who is getting in. And if the dancer decides that Palo Alto is a terrible place to continue to dance, that’s not the Adcom’s problem.
Lower down the food chain? Sure. Brandeis, Franklin and Marshall, Conn College, BC- this is where your conspiracy theories come into play. But Stanford, Harvard et al?
I’d love the evidence. And the admit rates from one single HS in Massachusetts is not evidence.
The data is anecdotal, but in earlier posts on this thread, someone from California had exactly the opposite experience–a strong rate of admission into Stanford and a weak one into Harvard. Also, for what it’s worth, our school’s Naviance data shows that the basic stats of kids applying to Harvard and Stanford is about the same.
I personally have no idea if the top schools engage in yield protection – note I said this is the perception but I didn’t know if it was true. However, your logic that they don’t because they don’t need to falls flat with me if only because I could also easily say that Stanford, Harvard and their like don’t need to waste money and resources marketing to students to get them to apply either. And yet they do. A lot. I was shocked how many brochures my son got from the Ivys and their equivalents. Over and over again. How many thousands of students did they waste money on sending to kids who in many cases were extremely unlikely to be admitted if they applied, based at most on the fact that they scored middling to better on the PSAT? We could fill a room with the mail he got for two years from colleges, with no discernible difference in quantity from the less prestigious schools than the most selective ones.
Why does Harvard need to market to applicants so much in the first place, and since they do why wouldn’t they also engage in yield protection? Don’t the two logically go hand-in-hand because if they spent money to juice your total applicant pool don’t you also want it to look like you weren’t just getting a lot of uncommitted applicants? Isn’t yield a factor in some ratings and doesn’t Standard, Harvard, Princeton, all deeply care which of them is #1?
Again, I don’t know. I do know they market a lot. The rest are just logical questions that follow that.
I cannot speak to Harvard, but I can speak to Brown although i was only a volunteer.
Every now and again, a stellar applicant who has never heard of Brown, or didn’t think that he or she was “Brown material”, or whose sights were set on a local directional college reads a view book or gets a piece of mail… and applies. And some of these applicants are beyond awesome. First Gen college kids whose accomplishments are off the charts, even though mom is a domestic worker and dad is a landscaper. It happens. And it’s worth the mailings that end up in recycling when one or five or 8 of these incredible kids applies, gets in, and does tremendous things with his/her life. One of the kids who I interviewed who was set to attend his community college (and his family and HS were so proud of him- the first in his family to even graduate from HS let alone go to community college) was likely the top student I have ever interviewed. He got a brochure in the mail, and rather than throw it out, brought it in to one of his teachers to ask “Have you ever heard of Brown?”
Hebegebe- the data isn’t anecdotal, it’s not data. I’m prepared to posit that a HS in California with higher admit rates to Stanford vs. Harvard, and another HS in MA with higher admit rates to Harvard vs. Stanford reflects that MORE Stanford legacies live in CA than in MA… and the opposite is also true.
So the so called yield protection is actually evidence of the tip factor of legacy admissions (all things being equal). Not every qualified legacy gets into to his/her parent’s alma mater of course. And not every kid from California who applies to Stanford is a legacy (of course).
But you are muddling apples and oranges with this so-called data.
@citivas, note that various private elites also favor applicants from their home city/metro/state/region as part of their “good neighbor” policy (cynically, you could argue as part of their yield enhancement strategy as well). And many alums stay in the same metro of their alma mater. So the discrepancy you see in your HS could result from positive discrimination to the benefit of your HS as well.
@blossom But if the goal is to reach underprivileged, first gen college kids like your example, these schools could easily target them. These colleges have all kinds of data on the demographics of the schools and communities of the kids they are sending to. They don’t need send multiple mailers to kids in expensive private schools or who lived in prosperous neighborhoods. These kids will have resources at their schools so in the extremely unlikely event they haven’t heard of Harvard their GC’s would steer them if they were on the right track. In fact, consider all the ways Harvard (or Brown) could even better reach those kids if they took the money they spend sending books to 100,000 students (or more) and focused it in a targeted way on kids like your example? The colleges have way too much data and are way too sophisticated to logically claim that sending everyone a mailer is the best way to reach a handful of special kids.
But that doesn’t explain the abundance of mailings we get in our town, where every teacher and most students have heard of all of the Ivies, Stanford, UChicago, Michigan, Berkeley, several LACs, etc. We still get that same deluge of mail.
If it really was about getting the kid that never heard of Brown, it is trivial for the company that does the mailing to filter zip code based upon income. And that money saved can likely provide two more kids with full tuition assistance, each year.
ETA: citvas and I basically said the same thing at the same time.
@PurpleTitan Oh, there is definitely an advantage for my kids school with the local Ivy. For one, many of those who get in have the most obvious hook of all – parents who are faculty. Some attended advanced classes at the Ivy while still in high school. And others were spotted by the coaches, band directors, etc. at local high school events. It cuts both ways though. Kids who don’t have any of these hooks have developed the perception – rightly or wrongly, but not disputed by the GC’s – that it’s not even worth apply to the local ivy because they are already going to be over-subscribed by kids with hooks.
I live in a zip code which has two housing projects, a “garden apartment” style complex for low income families (most of whom have at least one working adult), several condo complexes with units which sell for 600K+, and many streets with houses which sell for low seven figures. (and my own somewhat ordinary block. Just describing the extremes).
I’m sure the Stanford Adcom’s can tease out which kid from our diverse HS’s (there are two in my city, neither is a magnet/admissions only program) are first gen and which are not on the basis of their zip code. (Huh? We have children of two physicians in the HS sitting next to the children of day laborers).
Yes- gated community on a two acre piece of property with zoning which keeps out the rif-raf. Shame on Stanford to mailing brochures to those towns. But for urban areas where the “good part of town” and the “bad part of town” are in fact- on the same street? or adjacent properties?
@blossom "I’m prepared to posit that a HS in California with higher admit rates to Stanford vs. Harvard, and another HS in MA with higher admit rates to Harvard vs. Stanford reflects that MORE Stanford legacies live in CA than in MA… and the opposite is also true.
So the so called yield protection is actually evidence of the tip factor of legacy admissions (all things being equal). Not every qualified legacy gets into to his/her parent’s alma mater of course. And not every kid from California who applies to Stanford is a legacy (of course)."
This is a really good point.