<p>agreed. but then wouldn’t an urban education, regardless of what part of the world it comes from, still have great merit?</p>
<p>Absolutely, admissionsgeek! I think an urban education confers many advantages over a suburban/rural location, at least for most type-A personalities, and that’s why I chose one, and more and more applicants are as well.</p>
<p>This works to Columbia’s advantage. But it also works to the advantage of Penn, UChicago, NYU, Harvard, Georgetown, USC… any school in a city of considerable size and/or importance.</p>
<p>Cornell and Dartmouth however are long-term sell. Yale and Princeton might be powerful enough brand names (or close enough to NYC 
) not to drown in the urban school tide (then again their apps aren’t among the “skyrocketing”) category this year</p>
<p>i have been on the penn bandwagon for awhile, i think that its applicant size is far too low compared to the size of the school and the potential it holds as an urban school. though columbia leapfrogged them this year, i fully anticipate penn and columbia will have similar applicant loads going forward.</p>
<p>if there is another school that can generate a lot of momentum it should be penn.</p>
<p>i think it’s time for admissionsgeek and i to hug it out.</p>
<p>Hug it out, bro.</p>
<p>Here’s an article from the NYPost on Columbia’s surge in applicants and their adoption of the Common App:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[Columbia</a> University second to only Harvard University in freshman applications - NYPOST.com](<a href=“http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/columbia_growth_spurt_ujVeEcw7RB7Q2hx1OGgWRL]Columbia”>Columbia sees 32% applicant spike)</p>
<p>^I wouldn’t be too surprised if the University of Michigan came close to these kinds of numbers this year when the Feb. 1 deadline passes and the dust clears. They were in the neighborhood of 30,000 apps last year BEFORE moving to common app this year, and their EA apps were apparently up considerably. On one hand, I do agree that these recent common app moves are more egalitarian or give easier access to students across the board, many of whom do not receive stellar counseling in poorer school districts.</p>
<p>At the same time, I do wonder about what can seem to be a form of statistical gaming shenanigans (when it relates to “elevating prestige” which is to my mind a faulty syllogism). Will the capability to apply to multiple top or ivy schools actually start impacting the yield rates in a way the colleges did not predict? If the same statistically “super students” receive acceptances via the stat filtering at all or most of their common app selections, it is bound ultimately to reduce yield.</p>
<p>Prior, having separate apps at least spoke to “intent” - as in perhaps this applicant actually wants to ATTEND this institution instead of play the lottery It’s kind of sad to see something as quantitatively suspect as the USNews rankings apparently swaying opinion at top schools. If you bend, they’ll bend ya!</p>
<p>^Well, you still have to fill out quite hefty supplements for a lot of the schools. Not as arduous as a whole other application, but I don’t think people apply to those schools on a whim.</p>
<p>kmc - </p>
<p>a) the article is dumb nypost headlines, they mean second most in the ivies, UCLA has the most applications of any american school.</p>
<p>b) there are real reasons regarding access as to why columbia went to the common application. 1) some pub high schools were refusing to help students apply who didn’t use the common app, too much of a case load issue, 2) some folks weren’t savvy enough, 3) there was an elitism held against columbia for avoiding the common app. now people don’t have these issues to apply, and a lot of highly qualified and great students can apply that otherwise could not.</p>
<p>c) yield has stayed relatively consistent for most ivy league schools over the past few years with the only major hit to yield rates being the princeton and harvard getting rid of ED, which did screw up yield because other schools didn’t know who was in the pool that otherwise wouldn’t have been.</p>
<p>Highly qualified and great students who weren’t savvy enough to fill out Columbia’s application? Or highly qualified and great students for whom the counselor wouldn’t write a recommendation on paper (presumably because it’s a hassle to copy paste it online from a .doc file)? Give me a break.</p>
<p>hi polyglot - have you been to an inner city or rural high school? where the gcounselor has a case load of 1000 students, or is mostly there to counsel students about other kinds of life choices?</p>
<p>have you hung out with students who have never been told they could go to a school like columbia or college at all, and therefore don’t apply. or the fact that most schools and parents have always presumed that columbia was on the common app and have been applying to columbia college chicago instead?</p>
<p>the day you make a minor mistake, remind me to be insensitive toward you.</p>
<p>Reading this made me cover my face in despair. 
#justsaying</p>
<p>-Someone who desperately loves Columbia</p>
<p>^Thanks, admissiongeek, makes a little more sense to me now.
Instead of just moving the ivies to the common app, though, I’d like to see some kind of real effort to more generously apportion guidance budgets in public schools – you know, like a 100 to 1 ratio or something. I know that sounds utterly naive. Sigh.</p>
<p>no i’m completely with you, its just hard to see that happening when many school districts are firing personal and not putting attention to the need for proper guidance. but the situation you describe is precisely what is wrong with high school situations and why some schools (especially private ones) have a huge advantage in applying to college.</p>
<p>To me, this increased number of applicants @ Columbia and elsewhere can only mean two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>A large increase in the underqualified applicants wrt the previous years.</li>
<li>A large increase in cross admits among the top ranked schools – which will lead to a much decreased yield than previous years.<br></li>
</ol>
<p>Both decreased admission rate && decreased yield, and its combined effect on the college ranking could just be nil.</p>
<p>@Roger: Cornell is still first in the Ivies…with 36k applicants. 
I doubt that Columbia will be able to overtake Cornell’s numbers anytime soon though.</p>
<p>Sure, but it accepts more students as well</p>
<p>realmadrid, Cornell has accept more students because they have a larger freshman class size.</p>
<p>Ugh I bet there will be sooooo many cross-applicants who just wanted to apply to all of the Ivies + Stanford + MIT. Common App is good for some things, but it definitely helps feed a society where the majority of high school students believe that whatever elite school you get in is where you should be, regardless of fit, and therefore you should apply to every school in the Ivy League. Good-bye my Columbia dreams, it would have been nice to have been accepted, but hey, at least I’m saving myself $57,000 annually :/</p>
<p>I think that i’ll still get in. Hopefully.</p>
<p>Will this effect transfer admissions?</p>