<p>“yea, hardly economically diverse. the aid initiative sets the bar really high, 80,000, so plenty of people qualify for it that i wouldnt say necessarily bring any type of economic diversity to the school.”</p>
<p>um…the aid initiative is set at $60,000. Please get your facts straight before you make an assertion.</p>
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<p>The authors make claims about the rankings (not the probabilities) being reliable under their method. Even if that’s true, their method relies on a lot of indirect rankings and inadvertently puts a big premium on self-selection such as at Caltech, Wellesley, Middlebury etc. The first feature makes it hard to interpret the results; the second puts it at variance with more mundane rankings such as SAT, endowment, admission rate, and yield. Their rankings only make sense because of correlation with all the other measures, so in some sense are redundant.</p>
<p>(edit: ) re: financial aid initiative, it goes up to $80000. When the Harvard press release mentioned that 74 percent are “eligible for financial aid under the new plan” they meant 80K. 60K is the cutoff for elimination of the family contribution, at 60-80K there is a reduction relative to previous years, above 80 it’s as before.</p>
<p>Around what level of income do most families stop receiving financial aid?</p>
<p>That would really depend on other circumstances, such as household size, how many kids in college, other assets, special situations, etc.</p>
<p>Right, but can anyone give me a ballpark estimate assuming a family of four with average everything else?</p>
<p>re: finaid cutoff, the number changes from year to year, but in the neighborhood of 150K/yr at Harvard and Princeton means full payment of tuition, room, board, certainly no federally subsidized loans. I don’t know whether there is any cutoff for loans through the university, which may not be contingent on FAFSA at all. Loans for some special purposes have been available to all students (e.g. for purchase of a computer).</p>
<p>re: Harvard vs Columbia, here is another data point on the dual-admit probabilities.
For the first 2700 students in the study, exactly 49 were admitted to Columbia and 99 to Harvard. This again suggests that the number of dual-admit battles between these schools was small and the number producing a win for either school was even smaller.<br>
Be that as it may, what is known is that the 91 percent figure is NOT derived from the direct Harvard versus Columbia data, it is from the much more complicated indirect ranking procedure. NY Times published the chart without the fine print, unfortunately.</p>
<p>Actually, Harvard did not change a thing number-wise. The admission rate just changed simply because more people applied. So, in terms of Harvard’s action, nothing changed. Though I am wondering. How come none of these amazing colleges dont increase their size, build additional buildings and get more students?</p>
<p>“How come none of these amazing colleges dont increase their size, build additional buildings and get more students?”</p>
<p>Some, including Harvard, have plans to increase their size a bit. However, if they increase their size too much, they wouldn’t be the great universities that they are now. An increased size would affect things like faculty:student ratios as well as the overall size of the university. Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard if it had, for instance, 15,000 undergraduates even if all of those undergrads had excellent stats and ECs.</p>
<p>I agree with you entirely northstarmom, I also think that the reason they are vacillant in doing so is because if they can house more students then the admissions % would go up----->which no longer makes the university top notch in terms of selectivity----->which might cause its acclaimed rank to fall…</p>
<p>If you notice thats what happened with Cornell… if the university was Harvard’s size then there would be superselectivity and it probably would be looked at as “toughest, best, strongest” and whatever other adjectives are used to describe its peers such as Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. </p>
<p>Some say the value of a Cornell education is not the same as one of Harvard. WRONG… its the same!!! just Cornell is much larger therefore is easier to get into because of space. I feel Cornell is exactly equivalent to Harvard in terms of academics.</p>
<p>Though I value your opinion and it could very well be the case, i do think that unless one has experienced both, it is not a very successful comparison. Plus. let us consider the sections, namely the graduate, undergraduate section. Some say Yale has a better undergrad and Harvard a better grad. My opinion, you can never tell unless you have attended both Yale and Harvard’s undergrad section. </p>
<p>The opinion of a transfer student would be greatly appreciated therefore.</p>
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<p>What evidence would you show to convince someone to share your feeling?</p>
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<p>I feel differently. Not because I have any sort of a low opinon of Cornell, but because it’s impossible for ANY two schools to be exactly equivalent. There are way too many uncontrolled and unknown variables for such a thing to turn out to be true.</p>
<p>I do agree that Cornell has high-caliber professors, curricula, programs, etc.</p>
<p>However, Cornell’s ED acceptance rate (for the College) typically hovers around 50%. Harvard is much more selective, and its matriculation rate is one of the highest. Therefore, IMO, the Harvard student population is more impressive as a whole in terms of their accomplishments.</p>
<p>It is difficult to understand how anyone can say Cornell is exactly the same as Harvard in terms of academics.</p>
<p>Cornell is a great university. In fact, one could say the top 50 are all great universities.</p>