<p>This may be out of line but so what. I think that if anywhere in your application you indicate that Harvard is your first choice you should be rejected on the spot. Harvard is a dream for everyone who applies, no matter what your stats are. Boys and Girls, dont freak out about waiting for a decision from them. You all should be qualified to do very well for yourselves without Harvard. And Remember everything happens for a reason.</p>
<p>What are the reasons behind this dogmatic statement?</p>
<p>If you got waitlisted at B.U. I expect your odds are rather long when it comes to a Harvard admission, so that you are right to be philosophical about it.</p>
<p>What’s wrong with Harvard being your first choice? There ARE lots of Harvard admits who ultimately choose a different school. It only happens about 20% of the time, but still. </p>
<p>If you have a very strong attraction to Harvard, and if it is for a good reason, there should be no reason NOT to include it on your application. The admissions officers may not care, because Harvard has such a high yield, but it certainly will not hurt you to express a specific interest in a school, no matter how high it is ranked.</p>
<p>Joey</p>
<p>hmmm what’s the point of this thread?</p>
<p>I think you are confused, ashiglee:</p>
<p>4 out of 5 common admits pick Harvard over either Yale or Princeton.</p>
<p>When someone turns down admission to Harvard, it is most often for a very practical reason relating to money: ie, they got a huge “merit” scholarship, or an “athletic scholarship,” at a school offering such enducements, or there is familial pressure to select a school where they may be a “legacy.”</p>
<p>Harvard can lose a few common admits to Stanford based on geography - ie, California kids who have concerns (or whose parents have concerns) about going to school 3,000 miles from home.</p>
<p>byerly, I agree with you.</p>
<p>but if accepted into comparable schools, like Harvard and Pton or Harvard and Yale(this probably only occurs in my dreams) I wouldnt necessarily automatically visit harvard. Instead I would visit once again(I’ve been there twice already) but I’ll be able to look at the campus from a different perspective</p>
<p>It is very true that one’s perspective can change after being admitted. That is why visits both before and after admission are important.</p>
<p>Well, you can say every school is your number one choice.</p>
<p>… since you have little understanding of which school's are hardest to get into, and which school's the top student's aspire's to.</p>
<p>To be honest, I really see no point in differentiating in selectivity between all of the schools on that list. The Ivies probably do get a couple hundred or so applications by people who know they are underqualified but submit anyway just for the heck of it because of the name status, but a great majority of the applicants to any of those schools are supremely qualified and self-selected. A difference in a few percentage points on the ratings used to determine selectivity won’t really affect <em>our</em> chances of admission nor will it undermine the fact that all of those schools are extremely difficult to get into. The Princeton Review comes up with dramatic ratings like that to affect competition between the schools to keep their SAT help books selling strong.</p>
<p>Yeah, I read the critieria they use. </p>
<p>It’s commonly known that those schools attract top kids and only admit the best of the best. Those rankings don’t really mean much. MIT gets top because of self-selection, most likely. Kids don’t apply there unless they are already super-focused on their engineering and science studies. Harvard and Princeton have lower acceptance rates, unless you apply early and then you get a higher rate than either MIT’s early or regular. There are so many factors that the difference in the top five really doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>since when is saying a school is your first choice also assuming you will get in? if you have a school that is your dream school-that you would most probably go to if you got in-while realizing that you probably wont get in, there is no problem in saying it is your first choice. because it is. bflaug is being overly touchy.</p>
<p>I think bflaug might have actually been advising us somewhere in that dogmatic statement. I guess what he/she may be trying to say is that because harvard and the other ivies plus a load of tier one schools are soo selectives, we should keep in mind that it is okay to be rejected from such schools and be accepted to another. Yes, you may keep harvard or whichever school as you # 1 choice, but that doesnt mean you’ll get in and its useless to cry over spilled milk. Whatever happens, happens and we’ll all do well no matter where we go. But im not in any way saying dont dream big and keep ivies as a dream school, but also be prepared for the worst b/c you never know what happens with these admissions.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s just plain stupid to bank all your happiness on getting into one school. That isn’t what I took objection to. This is the line in the original post that I have problems with-
It seems to me that this is too fundamentalist a way of looking at things</p>
<p>If you convey to Harvard that you truly want to go there, that will definitely increase your chances of being accepted. It may not be much, but it does influence admissions officers a bit.</p>
<p>I noted on my Yale application that it was, in every way, my first choice, and that I hoped my application reflected that. I don’t see how that is an unfair ploy to win over admissions officers…they won’t excuse gaps in your application just because you claim devotion to the school. After all, at Harvard, admissions officers can expect almost 80% to show devotion to the school in the end, regardless of what their applications said.</p>
<p>According to your odd way of thinking, WalMart is more “selective” than Tiffany’s because it has “more customers per door”.</p>
<p>The only reliable measure of “selectivity” for a college is whether it attracts the best applicants, and whether, given a choice, the best applicants tend to choose your school.</p>
<p>ED doesn’t always work out thatway for everyone. I say it’s economically discriminatory because someone could absolutely love an ED school, but not be able to apply early with a contract because they are so unsure of their financial ability to pay for an extremely expensive school. </p>
<p>Selectivity is so subjective. I really don’t think that between the very top schools it can be compared. Harvard is most selective in some ways, MIT in others, etc.</p>
<p>I’d say the best way to compare “selectivity” numbers is to normalize the SAT score for admits/matriculants at each school, and multiply that by the number of applicants for every admission slot. In the case of Harvard, for example, the (2008) SAT number would be 1495, in the case of MIT it would be 1485, and in the case of Princeton it would be 1460. Harvard will have roughly 10.8 applicants for every anticipated admission slot this year, while Princeton will have 9.5 applicants per anticipated admission slot.</p>