<p>I’m also tired of poster X repeating “most selective undergraduate college” blah blah blah all over and over. Never mind that it’s for just one year and by the slightest number and of course amounts to meaningless background noise. There is some intellectual dishonestly in conveniently glossing over the fact that it’s clearly easier for smaller schools to have a lower acceptance rate. Pretty much all of Harvard’s grad schools are several times the size of their competitors - Harvard Law Schools vs. Yale Law School, Harvard Business School vs. Stanford Business School, Harvard Medical School vs. Johns Hopkins Medical School - and have higher acceptance rates - but so what? They also have much greater resources (e.g. HBS has more than 3 times the teaching cases than Stanford), more faculty, more courses, more research opportunities, larger library, more money, more programs, better alumni network, pretty much more of everything. An acceptance rate of 7% versus 10% is utterly meaningless especially if the school with the 10% acceptance rate is much larger.</p>
<p>Also, Yale has been desperately trying to appear selective by admitting a smaller number of applicants than it can afford, trumpeting its “Ivy record low” acceptance rate, and then quietly taking people off the waiting list one by one to artificially inflate its yield. Why hasn’t Yale announced its yield this year when every other school has - could it be that it’s not as high as it would like? Byerly also pointed out elsewhere on this board that Yale’s actual yield last year was merely 70.4% but they’ve been repeatedly citing 73% and 74%, apparently hoping that others will repeat these figures and perpetuate the fraud. </p>
<p>If you really wanted a numerical measure of a school’s desirability, it should take into account 1) acceptance rate, 2) size of school, and 3) yield, since just because lots of people apply to a school, it does not mean that it is their top choice.</p>
<p>The desirability index should then be calculated as:</p>
<p>(size of school)x(yield)/(acceptance rate).</p>
<p>Based on these criteria, the desirability indices for the schools are:</p>
<p>Harvard College = (6563)x(78.3)/(9.3)=55256
Yale College = (5316)x(70.4)/(8.6) = 43517</p>
<p>I used last year’s yield numbers and this year’s “record” acceptance rate to make it more favorable to Yale, but Harvard still clearly has a better admissions profile based on this index.</p>
<p>With the law schools,</p>
<p>Harvard Law School = (551)x(70)/(11.5)= 3354
Yale Law School = (183) x(87)/(6.9) = 2307</p>
<p>So Harvard again has a better admissions profile. Given that it’s 3 times the size of Yale, it’s pretty amazing that Harvard’s acceptance rate is less than twice that of Yale. This is because Harvard Law draws nearly double the number of applications per year. It is the most sought after law school in the U.S.</p>