I don’t know why folks that say they aren’t interested in the subject of this thread follow the posts and comment anyway. There are tons of CC threads that I don’t participate in because I don’t find them interesting. Go figure.
@bluebayou @saillakeerie - visit the UChicago forum and you will be amazed (that may not be the right word, tbh) at the arguments among the parents about rankings.
@DeepBlue86 I totally understand what you are saying. I find the mental gymnastics some people go through in the various discussions about rankings to be fascinating.
Navel gazing at its finest.
Here is an interesting graphic that shows the geographic distribution of Parchment customers (note that this article is from 2014)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/04/upshot/college-picks.html?mcubz=1
These numbers are not accurate overall. Be serious there is no way over 1/3rd of the students turned down Harvard to go to these schools. The Amherst and Williams numbers look reasonable but it’s ridiculous to believe 1/3 of the students turned down Harvard to attend Hamilton, Wesleyan or even B or MB. Harvard and Stanford have yields over 80% and that includes Y,P, MIT, Cal Tech and all the other schools combined. Plus Harvard has the best FA. Garbage in garbage out.
Bowdoin 33% vs. Harvard 67%
Hamilton 28% vs. Harvard 72%
Wesleyan 28% vs. Harvard 72%
Middlebury 27% vs Harvard 73%
Pomona 26% vs Harvard 74%
Amherst 15% vs Harvard 85%
Williams 15% vs Harvard 85%
Perhaps only in retrospect then do these decisions become obvious. When the then-candidate, now Massachusetts governor, took the Proust Questionnaire at the request of The Boston Globe, he responded as follows:
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: Not going to Hamilton College. I never really felt comfortable at Harvard.
Wesleyan had a good year. <:-P
I recalculated the preference ratio among cross admits based on the data from a website where you can read essays of students at selective colleges for a fee. For some colleges, the numbers are pretty close to the parchment data. For others, they are way off.
H 83% Y 17%
H 88% P 12%
H 45% S 55%
H 80% M 20%
Y 55% P 45%
Y 24% S 76%
Y 40% M 60%
P 12% S 88%
P 45% M 55%
S 64% M 36%
The term “revealed preference” is misleading. What is being referred to here is only preference between colleges that admitted the student (not even counting the reliability questions of Parchment).
But students express their preferences earlier, when making their application lists. Less preferred colleges may not even make the application list, particularly if they are seen as being more selective (less likely to deliver an admission) than the student’s top choices.
Could we do a whole top 20 rank with this in mind? There are some interesting ones like Berkeley preferred over Cornell 51% to 49%
Hypothetically, if Parchment results were methodologically reliable, it would appear, based upon some of the responses on this thread, that their findings would need to comport with preconceptions regarding certain relationships in order to actually be deemed reliable.
Perhaps some of the respondents were California resident engineering students.
@WarriorJ - the conclusion I draw from your analysis is that Harvard may attract a lot - even a disproportionate number - of the sort of person who will use “a website where you can read essays of students at selective colleges for a fee”. But I think I knew that already…
Not to mention that those (primarily easterners?) that preferred Cornell in a big way would have applied ED there.
Regardless of the speculation, just a perfect example of why the Parchment ‘data’ is meaningless even if we assume that it is somewhat representative of the RD app field.
@ANormalSeniorGuy Understandable given the fact that for many CA residents, Berkeley costs way less than Cornell. Also, Cornell has a severe winter, and its location is NOT ideal. If Cornell was located near a big city, it would be ranked way higher imo. Also, in my opinion, the difficulty of getting into both schools is not that far off for most majors. My kid did not apply to Cornell but if his choice was between Berkeley and Cornell, he probably would have chosen Berkeley. I personally like UCLA campus better. Campus wise, I like UCLA and Stanford for different reasons but don’t like Berkeley campus all that much. Cornell campus is way more beautiful than Berkeley’s campus for sure imo.
We visited UCLA, Stanford, Cal, and Cornell (among others) and came away feeling similar to @websensation. However, had the choice come down to Cal v Cornell, I think Cornell would have gotten the nod.
@Rivet2000 I also would have gone to Cornell over Cal (I studied at Cornell and visited Cal several times) assuming no financial difficulties but my kid doesn’t like the cold weather. He’s not embarrassed to admit that the weather factor was important to him. We also visited Harvard campus during winter, and while the Concord area looked very beautiful with all the snow, Harvard campus had slushy cold snow which made me already miss CA. It seemed like UCLA had the best cafeteria food but Cornell cafeteria food is pretty good also.
@JHS I am indeed saying there is a massive difference between Wesleyan and Yale. Yale is a major research university. Their residential colleges are just that, places students reside. Unlike Oxford or Cambridge, Yale’s colleges do not control admission and the undergraduate experience is centered in the College, not in the residential colleges. Wesleyan moreover is a LAC and Yale does not pretend to be. Like Columbia and Harvard, it has a liberal arts “college” but a major attraction of it is that it is rooted in a major research university. Indeed, having recently visited Yale, I cannot think of someplace more different from Wesleyan.
I’m not certain exactly what to make of your observations regarding admission to PhD programs. I never said that Harvard was superior to Wesleyan. What I said was that they were very different, in the same way that Princeton is very different from Columbia. You might indeed know a woman at Wesleyan you did a lot better than a woman from Harvard, but I’m not certain what the significance of that is.
@Zinhead Agree. I’ve lost track of the number of parents at College Night who spend the majority of time lecturing everyone how XXX university is better than XXX Ivy. I personally preferred the old University of Chicago, the university that didn’t care if it only admitted 4% of its students or was #1 in the rankings. People went to Chicago because of the very unique education the university offered. It was equally outstanding then.
Arguing whether Pomona is better than Princeton or Stanford is better than Harvard is tiresome…and meaningless.