Princeton vs Yale

PtonGrad2000
Mon, 29 Aug 2011 21:03:16 +0000

Cmburns, it’s difficult to know where to begin here but I’ll start by echoing a bit of the previous post.



cmburns14:

. . . through the annual giving process, the tacit message is a quid pro quo- you consistently donate to the university and your child will be held to a lower admissions standard.



This is absolutely not true.

Princeton gives some preference to alumni children (as do all similar schools) but there is absolutely no preference given to alumni children whose parents contribute regularly to Annual Giving as opposed to those legacies whose parents do not contribute. Let me repeat that–absolutely none. The only ‘development’ cases (and only some of these are alumni children) are those where the potential donation is in the tens of millions of dollars. Even a million dollar donation to Annual Giving will not put you in this class.



cmburns14:

The stats you refer to also include recent alums, who may have attended or taken pre-med science before grade deflation really took root. These applicants are likely to have fulfilled college physics, calculus, general chemistry and organic chemistry requirements over the summer at an easier school or in a post-bac.



Cm, you are pulling these beliefs of out of thin air.

The numbers and percentage acceptance rates I cited above for the years 2004 through 2010 are about 50% graduating seniors and 50% recent alumni. Do you have any evidence that the 50% who are recent alumni are “likely” to have done their premed prerequisites somewhere other than Princeton? Do you have comparable statistics from other schools? Here’s a little simple math. If the current medical school acceptance rate for all Princeton applicants is 93%, then the lowest acceptance rate these current undergraduate applicants could have had would have been an 86% acceptance rate and this would have required the other 50% who, according to your theory took their prerequisites at an easier school, to have had a 100% acceptance rate. Now, really, how likely is that? Even assuming that the alumni were more successful than the current undergraduates, it’s nearly impossible that the current undergraduates could have had less than a 90% acceptance rate (with a 96% acceptance rate for the alumni). There are very few schools in the country with a 90% acceptance rate to medical school.

Here’s the bottom line. Since the institution of the new grading policy there has been no drop in the number of Princeton undergraduates applying to medical school or in their rate of acceptance to those schools.



cmburns14:

It is extremely difficult to get a 3.75+ as a science major at Princeton



It is tough but not “extremely difficult”. But this has always been true and it is currently true at Princeton’s peers as well. The highly inflated GPAs at other schools come from those majoring in the humanities rather than in the sciences. Also, as I noted above, since the institution of the new grading policy, there has been virtually no change in the GPAs of students majoring in the sciences.

These numbers, drawn from a public website compiling the statistics for thousands of medical school applicants may shed some light on this.