<p>I think someone has mentioned this before, but this dramatic increase in applicant numbers will most likely benefit those with high quantitative factors (GPA, SAT, AP, etc). Since the admissions office will have less time to go over these applications (they will most likely be understaffed as well), they will have to resort to setting a higher cutoff for standardized test scores/ GPA and then evaluating holistically.</p>
<p>how would one explain the number of ed applicants that were deferred/accepted with low sats?
i guess one could say simply that it was the ed round and therefore a more holistic evaluation was allowed, but i doubt it.
and how would they play in urms and other things that would affect standardized scores?</p>
<p>goldowl - </p>
<p>a) they hired more staff in anticipation of this increase.
b) they don’t use cutoffs.
c) part of holistic admissions is the question - if qualitatively you have two students a and b that are amazing, but student b has higher testing and gpa, which student do you choose? rare of course is such a comparison quite directly made, the point is almost always do they prefer students that have the numbers and the personality, so nothing will change. columbia because of the size of the pool can afford to admit students with higher gpas and sat scores without sacrificing the qualitative factors they care about because there is ‘more depth’ in the applicant pool.</p>
<p>similarly if a student is really cool, but has b’s and c’s throughout, a holistic reading of the student would lead to a denial, so i think you should watch what you mean by ‘holistically.’</p>
<p>also columbia doesn’t have a cutoff, formal, informal or otherwise.</p>
<p>@admissionsgeek: I mostly agree with what you said but I still feel that it is highly unlikely that the admissions office will take the time and effort to read/analyze ALL the applications meticulously. Although they may not impose cutoffs, they must have some way of expediting the process through a cursory glance at quantitative factors.</p>
<p>gold well then what is new - they had limited time to truly read and appreciate every word of an application beforehand, and yet they still read holistically.</p>
<p>the problem, and this is coming from someone who has read applications for other things before. is that even if you believe somewhere in your heart that the kid who applies with 1800 SAT scores and a 3.5 gpa is probably not going to get in, you are going to read teh entire application from head to toe just in case things change. that same kid who is at 1800 and 3.5 gpa, might qualify for the opportunity programs that columbia has. depending on the school that 3.5 gpa might actually be very good! for some populations and socioeconomic groups, 1800 sat scores are actually make the student rather competitive (outside of the opportunity program context). in the end it makes it harder than you think to read applications and to say absolutely this student doesn’t cut it.</p>
<p>then there are the thousands applicants that have good stats (2100+ 4.0 gpas) that are just not interesting so you read the whole application. and that is the vast majority of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>^ yes, in a lot of cases an 1800 and 3.5 is applying to Columbia because they have something spectacular about them (the vast majority of 1800s and 3.5s don’t bother with Columbia), so you do read the whole / most of the app, because you are mainly getting the low stat kids who are extraordinary in some way. most times their extra ordinary quality just doesnt cut it, on occasion it does.</p>
<p>Although there definitely are cases in which applicants with low stats have some extraordinary quality/merit, there are even more low-stat applicants whom are simply unqualified and merely trying their luck. With the influx in applicant numbers, I think that it is safe to assume that there are a significant number of “unqualified” applicants (that is, unless this class is somehow significantly superior to past classes).</p>
<p>but you can’t tell before reading an application that the kid is exceptional or not.</p>
<p>further, there are a lot of athletes and legacies that fall into this lower stat category that beckon a full read. </p>
<p>though it is true that most research suggests that switching to the commonapp mostly increases the bottom two quintiles of applicants, but there is trickle up.</p>
<p>Whenever apps rise, yields plummet. So yes, this may actually be good for the upper middle crust, because they will have to admit more to compensate for all of the people who already filled out the Common App for HYPS, and got in, and decided to apply to Columbia for the heck of it. Historically, these sorts of situations have actually allowed more borderline candidates admission because of the drop in yield.</p>
<p>Hey ya’ll I have a quick question lol…you know how the “critical reading” or whatever is suppose to test your analysis and how well you read (which is super important in college, since reading is going to be paramount)? What about international students? I know they take the TOEFL and everything, and even if they get perfect score on that but only like a 500 on the critical reading, doesn’t that still mean they’ll be disadvantaged in college by a lot, since their mastery of the english language probably isn’t on par with like domestic students??</p>
<p>This is not written offensively in ANY way, and I’m asking this actually for my friend, who is falls under the international category…</p>
<p>collegeftw, start a new thread. and think about your question a bit more, it is pretty jumbled.</p>
<p>Going to a military academy is like applying ED to the military: you’re forced to serve. I can’t imagine anyone would be so foolish as to matriculate at a military academy without SERIOUSLY examining their life goals. If you want to be in the military, by all means go to a military academy. If you don’t want to be in the military, why would you even apply to a military academy?</p>
<p>admit rates all things being equal will be…and as far as i know there are no plans to expand a class, and things have been relatively consistent as far as admittances in the post ED era (after princeton and harvard got rid of it).</p>
<p>Harvard - ~6.1%
Stanford - 6.7%
Columbia - 6.9%
Yale - 7.1%</p>
<p>Princeton - 7.9%
Brown - ~9.0%
MIT - 9.0%
Dartmouth - 10%
Penn - 12.4%</p>
<p>I think that going forward Columbia probably will remain with Harvard and Stanford as the top three applicant schools for a lot of obvious reasons (location, the size of the name brand, diversity of offerings). Penn should continue to close that gap however. This means that Columbia will always be competitive from an admit rate point of view, but I would like to see a few things happen going forward. I’d like to see Columbia’s yield rise from the mid to upper 50s into the mid to upper 60s by the lets say 2018. It will never be Harvard level unless a huge change in branding occurs writ large, and there is something slightly disarming about the nyc urban experience that will always work against Columbia. I would also like to see Columbia make good on its promise to expand the class by another 150 students. By that projection - if columbia improves its yield from 55 to 65% and expands its class, it would in the end be admitting just about the same as it does now if a bit more at 2440. That would give Columbia a size more comparable to its more direct peers (Harvard, Stanford and Penn), and therefore an admit rate and yield rate that more accurately reflects its ‘stature’ among other schools. Right now Columbia’s smaller size relative to size of institution and size of applicant pool is overstating its stature. But the above ‘thought scenario’ is very possible, especially with recent movements and rankings. If the above does happen, I think Columbia would without question find a permanent home in upper echelon conversations.</p>
<p>Columbia is not HYPSM, nor will it ever be. Just live with it.</p>
<p>^ lmao what?</p>
<p>and coming from someone with a username like “greedisgood?”</p>
<p>lmao. lmao.</p>
<p>Columbia was HYPC for a very long time (and frankly HC for most of it). How long do you think the current balance of power has existed? The problem folks have is that they presume status to be static, it isn’t.</p>
<p>^I agree that status isn’t static, but (and this is just a question) how were things ever HC? I can imagine HYP changing, sure, but I didn’t think it’d been very different in a long time either.</p>
<p>The USA was definitely HC in the 1930s and 1940s when Columbia Law had four alumni members of the Supreme court, FDR sat in the White House with numerous Columbia professors charting out the New Deal, and where in the 1944 all Columbia election, he duled Thomas Dewey for the White House. Richard Rodgers ruled the stage, Enrio Fermi was developing the A-Bomb, Jimmy Cagney was the most popular Hollywood actor and Lou Gehrig was the nation’s most popular athlete. Columbia was building up the mountain of Nobel Prizes that to this day rank it first among world universities and would soon have a future US President, Dwight Eisenhower, serve as its President for about five years. The faculty was full of icons in those days as well-Van Doren, Barzun etc. Leading intellectuals like Merton, Welty, Keourac and Ginsberg were among its young graduates. </p>
<p>A lack of vision and New York’s decline as a city followed by the 1968 riots led to Columbia’s future decline. But there was an era of true greatness. Columbia was arguably the most influential university in the world at that time.</p>
<p>from about 1890-1950 the two most important institutions in the country were without question columbia and harvard. they were the two wealthiest institutions, the most academically important institutions, and were models that most universities followed in establishing themselves. y and p were prestigious in the way they in many ways continue to be. if you came from money you knew which school you were going to attend often based on where your dad attended - and usually unless you lived in nyc and would many times choose columbia, you were going to hyp. but the quality of the education was not quite as it was at h and c - no professors at y or p (with the rare exception, wilson being one) gained great notoriety the way that h and c professors had, and h and c had the cache and the ability to attract foreigners in droves unlike y and p. it was also the last time in which columbia continued to have its pick of the litter of prep school boys from nyc and the ne boarding schools. </p>
<p>after 1950 things changed and columbia weakened, in part because of the emphasis on the residential campus became stronger and stronger, the beginning decline of nyc was in part, the rise of other institutions, the death of the imperial president (butler) left a huge vacuum at the university and the economic frailty of columbia began to show.</p>
<p>beyond h and c, the three other most important academic institutions were chicago, jhu and berkeley, which sort of continue to this day, but the latter schools didn’t have the wealth and pure name recognition that columbia or harvard had. nor the prestige that hypc all had.</p>
<p>penn, dartmouth and brown would remain regional schools until pretty much the 1980s with tiny applicant bases. stanford was always relevant on the west coast, but doesn’t rise to prominence really until the 70s and 80s. and mit was always good, but also doesn’t really gain its heydey until the time of ww2 and after when engineers became more prized.</p>
<p>hyp certainly was always an idea - mostly because of the football rivalry (that predated the ivy league) and they certainly battled for the longest time amongst old blue blood families (something columbia felt it needed less as nyc families almost exclusively made up their student body), but it doesn’t become the way we think of it today in which hyp is synonymous with the three most prestigious schools even outside of old money families, and also being considered the ‘best’ schools. this starts to happen the 60s, when financial aid became the norm, and therefore endowment size and endowment spending meant a lot when it came to how you could support folks who wanted to pay for college education. before then, if you weren’t rich, you didn’t go to an ivy league school, and if you did go - you were the usher that cleaned up after the richer kids. this new arrangement is not fully cemented until the 80s after coeducation became the norm for all those schools and that transition went off without a hitch. it was also certainly aided by the emergence of USNWR that took something that wasn’t nationally known and certainly not known outside of blue blooded worlds and made it into doctrine that the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich would find equally compelling (for a long time folks who came from poor backgrounds in the pre-financial aid world almost exclusively went to public schools, or if you were smart, poor, lived in nyc and could live at home you went to columbia - which is why columbia throughout the 60s-80s often had a larger percentage of folks from lower socioeconoimc groups, which now is rearing its head with Obama and Holder in office). these dynamics are interesting, complicated, but ultimately i think at least gives a perspective of how things have altered over the course of the past few decades to create what we now consider sacred, when it never always was.</p>
<p>Columbian Herman Wouk was the nation’s most popular novelist and even people like Amelia Earhardt and Sandy Koufax spent a short time studying in Morningside Heights in the golden era.</p>