<p>9.9%, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>And Harvard admitted 10.3%.</p>
<p>So you are limiting the notion of “selectivity” to acceptance rate? Median SAT scores, and yield rate, don’t count?</p>
<p>And Yale’s acceptance rate was actually 10.1% for the Class of 2008, (with 1,958 admits) if you don’t count incompletes and withdrawns as “applications”.</p>
<p>That 9.9% number was an early figure they (understandably) never bothered to adjust when a few applications melted away and a few more were admitted over the summer to offset “melt.”</p>
<p>The Atlantic Monthly and PR selectivity rankings are in agreement </p>
<p>The top schools for each are the same.</p>
<p>Atlantic Monthly top 10 & PR Selectivity top 10</p>
<ol>
<li>MIT </li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>California Institute of Technology</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
</ol>
<p>Byerly, I am highly amused to see you questioning statistics, considering the way our last exchange went. Good for you. Your questions are altogether valid. </p>
<p>Laertes, the most selective colleges in the US are the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, in that order. Their acceptance rates are in the 3-7 % range, depending on whether or not you count applicants who never completed their auditions. (Cue to pity the musicians on the board.) Also, though I cannot substantiate this, I believe that Deep Springs College sometimes accepts as little as 5% of applicants, but the size of their pool swings a lot from year to year because it is so small and so unusual.</p>
<p>The Coast Guard Academy generally accepts about 5-7% of applicants a year.</p>
<p>Armed Forces schools are specialty schools and therefore not usually taken into consideration in compiling college selectivity lists. Air Force Academy accepts about 3%, and Julliard accepts only 1% of applicants. Their admissions criteria probably also vastly differ from those of conventional universities.</p>
<p>First of all, actually, I believe that the Air Force Academy admissions rate is about 15% (you take the total number of offers of admission, divide it by the number of applicants)</p>
<p><a href=“http://academyadmissions.com/class_2008_profile.htm[/url]”>http://academyadmissions.com/class_2008_profile.htm</a></p>
<p>Second of all, I’m sure you have to agree that saying that the military academies and the music/art schools are specialized and therefore are not usually taken into consideration in compiling lists is a rather arbitrary delineation. For example, I would argue that MIT and Caltech (especially Caltech) are also quite specialized schools and hence tend to draw upon a significantly different applicant pool than most other schools do. Now, are they quite as specialized as the academies or the music schools? Or course not. But they are more specialized than your regular college. The point is that drawing the line to include the Institutes but exclude the Academies and the music schools, is an arbitrary distinction. Whether it’s good to make that distinction is not the point, I’m just saying that it’s arbitrary. At the end of the day, all of these places offer bachelor’s degrees, so they are all undergraduate places of learning. </p>
<p>But that’s neither here nor there. The real point is that it illustrates that merely looking at acceptance percentages is a distorted way of determining overall selectivity. You also need to look at other factors like self-selection of the candidates. The MIT School of Engineering admits about 27% of all applicants into its graduate engineering programs. MIT’s undergrad program admitted 17% of its applicants. Yet you cannot then draw the simple conclusion that the MIT graduate engineering programs are easier to get into than its undergraduate program. The fact is, those people who are applying to graduate engineering programs at MIT are generally the best engineering students in the world. Only if you really enjoy engineering and have done very well in it are you then going to seriously consider applying to MIT for grad-school.</p>
<p>there is no one true ranking.
universities differ in the strengths of their undergrad programs. talk about engineering - Caltech, MIT, Stanford.
talk about the arts & sciences - Harvard, Amherst, Smith, Yale
talk about architecture - Rice, USC
med - JHU etc</p>
<p>also unis differ in sports achievement, community involvement, student life and many other factors. </p>
<p>many low ranking unis advertise first positions in one category or the other.</p>
<p>but the most prestigious university in the world is Harvard. On par are Oxford (in Britain) and Princeton.
Yale and Penn may even be better, but they are not the ‘finest’. Even 9 year olds know Harvard in my home. </p>
<p>top LAC - Smith, Amherst. (first ladies)</p>
<p>basically, if you wanna do tech, comp or eng related stuff at the best - Oxford (in Britain)
the best of the sciences and arts - Harvard.</p>
<p>LOL I never hear Princeton in the same sentence with Harvard or Yale. It’s either ‘Harvard’ or ‘Harvard and Yale,’ but Princeton is often out of the picture.
Also, isn’t this discussion somewhat moot? You make the college, and where you are doesn’t affect your future or your experience as much as you do.</p>
<p>However, I would argue that Harvard is not the best for undergrad arts and sciences, since they don’t give a **** about their undergrads.</p>
<p>rankings are often a load of bs
yield rates can often be manipulated by the college in various ways
and the salaries of alumni often have nothing to do with what college they went to
your salary depends on your ability! you don’t get a high salary because you went to a good school, you get a high salary because you have a head on your shoulders</p>
<p>“LOL I never hear Princeton in the same sentence with Harvard or Yale”</p>
<p>Get out of your house more.</p>
<p>Princeton was rated as the world’s finest university 5 years ago.
In fact, Harvard and Princeton are the world’s FINEST unis.</p>
<p>True enough, Harvard and Princeton have been jointly listed as the #1 undergraduate institutions in America for the last couple of years by USNews, but a respected ranking of “American Research Universities” comes out differently.</p>
<p><a href=“http://thecenter.ufl.edu/research2003.pdf[/url]”>http://thecenter.ufl.edu/research2003.pdf</a></p>
<p>Then theres the Shanghi ranking of “The World’s 100 Best Universties.”</p>
<p><a href=“http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm”>http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2004/top500(1-100).htm</a></p>
<p>… and the London Times list of the “World’s Best Universities” released in November: </p>
<p><a href=“http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:7hIMJzaWcZ4J:academic-senate.berkeley.edu/news/LondonTimes11-04-04.doc+Times+ranking+of+World’s+Best+Universities&hl=en[/url]”>http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:7hIMJzaWcZ4J:academic-senate.berkeley.edu/news/LondonTimes11-04-04.doc+Times+ranking+of+World’s+Best+Universities&hl=en</a></p>
<p>The London Times ranking is a joke. UMass is ranked as the 20 best University in the world, when in the U.S. it is not even a top 40 public University (UMass SAT scores are 510 - 590).
Byerley how low are you willing to sink to defend H?</p>
<p>Why are you not citing the Boston based Atlantic Monthly poll which has Harvard at #5? (behind MIT, Princeton, Yale, Cal Tech). At least its listing has some measure of reality!</p>
<p>allie, there’s nothing absurd about UMass being highly ranked on grounds of being a very major research center. We prospective undergrads should of course not go there just for that reason, but the education of college students is not the sole measure of a university’s quality.
Byerly undoubtedly has a point about Harvard’s tendency to come out on top in rankings, and naming the few surveys that say otherwise will not change that fact. I don’t have the time or patience to sort through the methodology of all these surveys, but I’m willing to bet that they all factor in the one-- and only-- area in which Harvard has truly unquestionable superiority over any other university in the US: reputation. That’s the key factor in US News, for example. What can beat Harvard for prestige? Nothing. And much as I prefer Yale and honestly believe it to be a better school, Harvard has an unmatched ability to get the most productive researchers in the world to teach there. It also has the largest university library in the world. None of that means that undergraduate education at Harvard is actually superior to that at Yale, Swarthmore, Ohio State, or Earlham, but it does mean that Harvard will very often lead rankings. Don’t worry about it!</p>
<p>Harvard does have the brand name. You are correct. But what troubles Byerly is that in the ranking of undergraduate colleges Princeton comes up #1 more often than Harvard or anybody else. He just refuses to accept it and in doing so comes up with.
With all due respect, my advice to you is to look past the hype and focus on the substance.</p>
<p>So let me see if I understand this now: when you’re a fan of the school, its reputation is based on “substance”, and when you’re NOT a fan of the school, its reputation is based on “hype”!</p>
<p>I get it now.</p>
<p>I understand your irritation with allie, Byerly, but it’s time for you to at least acknowledge the potential truth of certain criticisms of Harvard: removed, inaccessible faculty, pompous students, oversubscribed courses, underqualified TA’s, and the like. If you honestly believe so much in your alma mater’s quality, defend it against those charges, which can’t be rebutted or confirmed with statistics and mock objectivity. I would appreciate it as a favor, too, since I’ve just applied to Harvard, and would like to have some reassurance on those points.</p>
<p>If you buy that silly propaganda then I would withdraw your application to Harvard immediately and request a refund of your filing fee. I can’t believe why in the world you “just applied to Harvard.”</p>
<p>Fact is, the overwhelming majority of the very talented people fortunate enough to gain admittance to both schools pick Harvard. This has been the case for some years. Presumably these superstars visit both schools and make up their own mind about where they want to spend the next four years. (You will note that I have uttered not a negative word about Yale here.)</p>
<p>It is not a sign of confidence and strength to feel that in order to make the case for a school you must rely primarily on cliche criticisms of its “hated rival”. Harvard hardly needs my “defense”, and I certainly don’t need to cast aspersions on Yale in order to “boost” it.</p>
<p>Good luck to you.</p>
<p>You have avoided the question, if cleverly. My sources for those criticisms are all Harvard graduates and accomplished academics; none of them are affiliated (or even encouraged me to apply to) Yale. One also holds a PhD from Harvard and has taught at UChicago; she complains of a 1000 person econ class. The others hold PhDs from Princeton. You, on the other hand, had to be identified as a Harvard grad by someone else, and are rejecting even the possibility of criticism of Harvard by (once again) pulling out irrelevant statistics.</p>