4.3% Admit Rate for Class of 2022

Colleges and Universities A-Z Stanford University
41

BenBen, do you think the college the persons above attended for undergrad decades ago is the primary reason they are billionaires? For example, you mentioned Larry Ellison. He dropped out of University of Chicago after one quarter, 56 years ago in the 1960s. Does that mean University of Chicago was primarily responsible for his business success, and current students have a better chance of becoming tech billionaires if they attend Chicago over Stanford.

If you look at more recent tech billionaires, Stanford often plays a more significant role in their success. For example, you mentioned Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were studying link structure of the world wide web at Stanford, which closely led creating the search algorithm that would later become Google. Page credits his Stanford advisor as giving him the “best advice he ever received” in relation to the studies. Stanford played a more pivotal role in their success than their undergrad school. Many Stanford undergrads also were able to join the company at an early stage and are quite wealthy today, even if they aren’t among your top 10 list

Among more tech billionaires who attended undergrad this millennium, again Stanford is disproportionately represented and in many cases played a more pivotal role in their success. For example, Spiegel, Murphy, and Brown created Snapchat while students at Stanford less than 10 years ago, initially stemming from a class assignment. Now Spiegel and Murphy are the world’s youngest billionaires. Similarly Systrom and Krieger are recent Stanford students who crated Instagram, which was purchased for $1 billion when they were under 30. Now Systrom is one of tech’s youngest billionaires.

Today Stanford tops almost any ranking related to recent tech entrepreneurship or tech startups. For example Forbe’s ranks the colleges with the most billion dollar start-up founders at https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2017/01/27/the-schools-that-graduate-the-most-billion-dollar-startup-founders/#6833cb0c31f1 . They write, “Stanford is the winner by a mile, with 51.”

42

Actually, what’s remarkable about the billionaires list is the number of associations with Stanford. Out of the eleven, you have three from Google (born at Stanford), two from Facebook (which took off when Zuck moved to Palo Alto, plus funding by Stanford alum Thiel), and one from Oracle (origins in Ampex and Apple, closely tied to Stanford). That’s more than half of the guys on there.

43

This thread is from12 years ago when Stanford’s yield was in line with YP.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/196049-stanford-admit-yield-rises-to-69-for-class-of-2010.html One of the reasons why students turned down Stanford was its geographic location.

AFAIK, Stanford has remained in the same location over the last 10 years! So how did they improve the yields to Harvard’s level? Well, they turned location into an advantage as @harvardandberkeley points out. 40% of undergrads are from California and another 15-20% are from the west coast or other western states. In contrast, only ~20% of US population lives in the western states.

44

@CA94309 - I have a somewhat different interpretation.

Anecdotally, as the tech bubble has inflated ever larger over the last ten years, the number of prospective STEM majors has grown dramatically and Stanford’s desirability has accordingly increased, it appears that some top West Coast applicants have decided they don’t need to cross the country to go to HYPM and a number of top East Coast applicants are now more open to going to California to attend Stanford. Accordingly, Stanford is likely winning some more cross-admits than formerly, and its yield has increased.

That said, the geographical distribution of students admitted to Harvard’s class of 2021 (found here: https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics) mirrors the population distribution of the U.S. much more closely, with 18.9% of the students coming from the Mountain and Pacific zones. This suggests to me that Harvard’s appeal is more geographically universal than Stanford’s.

Put another way, Harvard and Stanford both get 80-ish percent yields, but it would appear that Stanford gets theirs by skewing the students it admits towards its home region while Harvard gets theirs despite admitting students roughly proportionately to the actual U.S. population distribution. If Stanford were to admit students more closely in proportion to the actual U.S. population distribution, its yield would fall.

Here’s some rough math: Stanford discloses that approximately 40% of its undergrads are Californian, and that it gets about an 80% overall yield. If the yield on admitted Californians is, say, 90% (due to the effect of preferring to stay in their home region) and that of non-Californians is 75%, the overall yield would be about 80%, as disclosed, but the geographical distribution of admitted students would be about 36% Californian ((40/.9)/((40/.9)+(60/.75))) and about 64% non-Californian.

With a population of about 40 million people, California contains about 12% of the population of the United States. Accordingly, to get to a similar yield to Harvard’s, Stanford appears to admit students from its home state in roughly three times the proportion to actual population.

Now, you might argue that Harvard similarly over-admits students from New England, and you’d be right. The New England states contain not quite 5% of the total U.S. population, but account for 16.5% of Harvard admits. The total New England population is under 15 million, though, a little over a third of the population of California, so the effect of skewing admits locally is much more pronounced at Stanford. About one-sixth of Harvard admits come from the six New England states; more than a third of Stanford admits come from the single state of California.

45

^ It may be the types of students that matter the most. They have been trying to balance the distribution of different interests so that the distribution is not totally skewed to CS or engineering, which could be one of the reasons for the high yield. This is what they claimed about this year’s admitted students in the OP link:

[quote ]

The admitted students expressed a primary academic interest across Stanford’s undergraduate schools, with 65 percent expressing interest in Humanities and Sciences programs, 30 percent in Engineering, and 3.5 percent in Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. The remainder were undecided.

[/quote ]

46

Ivies including HYP admits > 50% of its freshman class EA which games yield rates higher which tells me yield is being gamed deliberately to appear higher than it would be without such high admit EA numbers.

Stanford admits about 35% historically which lowers yield rates comparability… (although they don’t release their numbers anymore)

Harvard student body is 15% from MA… .MA doesn’t even represent 2% of the US population. Harvard admits students from MA at 7 times the rate of the US population by your same reasoning… … Harvard sounds like a state school to me… just saying:)

47

I think you’re getting that from a newspaper article from a couple of years ago, since I see no other source for it and I don’t believe Harvard regularly discloses the data. Per the Harvard Crimson’s surveys of the freshman class for the past four years, though, the proportion from the entire Northeast, from Maine to DC, including such states as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania in addition to Massachusetts and containing something like 65 million people, hovers around 40% - about the same proportion of Stanford students who are Californian.

You would naturally expect the immediate area of any college to be substantially overrepresented, due to the high concentration of faculty brats and alumni children, familiarity of the admissions office with the local schools and a high propensity of students to choose to go to college in their own neighborhood. You find lots of Yalies from southern Connecticut and Princetonians from central New Jersey for the same reasons.

Given that 40% of Stanford students are Californian, I’d bet that more than 15% come from the Bay Area alone. By your logic, that would make Stanford a community college.

48

actually I was wrong. Harvard admits students from MA at 8 times the rate of the US population by your same reasoning.

Not as good as UMass but good for a state school:)

49

Yale admits at 6x the rate of the US population from Connecticut… which makes it a decent high school.

50

OK, and the population of the Bay Area is about 7 million people, about 2% of the US population (similar to Massachusetts), but if something like 15% of Stanford students come from there, it means…that Stanford admits students from the Bay Area at eight times the rate of the US population. Are you suggesting that Stanford is therefore comparable to, say, Berkeley City College or the College of San Mateo?

51

if something like? lols… Fake News

52

I think two serious studies that compared H vs S–the 2012 Avery paper and 2014 Stanford’s own internal report—all indicate that Harvard still enjoys an advantage among cross admits, at least till 2014. Anecdotally, I find more variation among S admits than H’s. Every year I see some unhooked kids with mediocre stats who got in Stanford that makes me scratch my head. And this year I know one S admit whose GPA and ACT were so average that he was rejected by UCB and UCLA, and another kid who was turned away by every Ivy she applied to yet accepted by Stanford. Both were unhooked kids and both were poor writers. Its not unusual to hear about unhooked kids with ACT 33/34 and bad writing accepted at Stanford while at Harvard its almost unheard of. I think Stanford gives the impression among rising seniors that everybody has a realistic shot though statistically it is more daunting.

53

I actually think both schools draw a lot of no-hoper international applicants, which distort their selectivity numbers, but we don’t have the data to analyze that.

No one is suggesting Stanford isn’t a tippy-top school. The bottom line is, though:

Stanford is the unquestioned top dog in territory amounting to half the country; its nearest tippy-top competitor (with the exception of Caltech, a much smaller, niche school) is thousands of miles away.

In contrast, the other tippy-tops (HYPM) are clustered in a strip of the East Coast less than 300 miles long and consequently have far greater regional competition.

Given a choice between two colleges of similar perceived quality, most students will choose one in or near their region of the country over one on the opposite coast (I don’t have the data to prove this, but does anyone really doubt it?).

Basic math suggests that about 36% of Stanford offers are made to applicants in Stanford’s home state, California (with a population of about 40 million), because Stanford discloses that Californians represent about 40% of its undergraduates.

On the other hand, Harvard discloses that about 37% of its offers were distributed across the New England and Middle Atlantic regions, representing 11 states (plus DC) and about 65 million people, and Harvard student surveys show that about 40% of enrolled students come from there.

The two schools have similar overall yields, in excess of 80%.

Accordingly, while distributing a similarly large proportion (close to 40%) of its admits over 11 states (plus DC, and including its home state), containing all but one of its principal competitors and 65 million people, rather than one state (its home one) containing no principal competitors and 40 million people, Harvard overall has about the same yield as Stanford.

I therefore conclude that Harvard has significantly broader geographic appeal than Stanford, and that Stanford’s yield is enhanced by its proportionally much greater in-region allocation of admits. I don’t think anything I’m saying is controversial or unsupported by the data we have.

54

“with the exception of Caltech” and Pomona…

55

@DeepBlue86
You make some interesting points, but one major flaw in your argument is the assertion that the New England/Mid Atlantic region, presumably because it comprises 11 states, represents more geographical diversity than the entire state of California. That is simply not the case: not culturally, not economically, not politically, not in any other sense.

56

We may have to agree to disagree on this, but I would argue that 65 million people in 11 states (plus DC) comprising about 200,000 square miles and ranging from the largest city in America (New York) to vast swaths of Appalachia in Pennsylvania and frozen wilderness in Maine, is at least as diverse as one state with 40 million people comprising 164,000 square miles, even though that state contains both LA and the Mojave desert.

My fundamental point is that Harvard gets close to 40% of its students from an area containing 20% of the US population; Stanford get close to 40% from a much smaller area with 12% of the US population. If Stanford disclosed student origin data beyond California and non-California, we could assess which school had greater pull in the South - but I’d bet it’s Harvard.

57

I have come across admission by state data. Let me find it and I will share.

58

All US colleges are required to report this in the federal database. Number of undergrads averaged over the past 4 reported years for the two largest population southern states are below.

Texas
Stanford: 111 students
Harvard: 79 students

Florida
Stanford: 51 students
Harvard: 60 students

The specific numbers in the federal database above are an average of 34% in state at Stanford and ~38% northeast at Harvard. Both schools had the same number of students in Vermont and Maine (5 each) in the most recently reported year. The northeast total for Harvard was dominated by MA and NY, which together accounted for ~27% of the Harvard undergrad students.

One could present the data to draw whatever conclusions are desired. In the end, both colleges are quite selective and both colleges admit a disproportionately large portion of students from nearby locations, particularly nearby high SES locations.

59

No need to agree to disagree, @DeepBlue86, now that you’ve downgraded “significantly broader” to “at least as”! (Though I could quibble over whether 164,000 is “much smaller” than 200,000)

60

@Data10 - forgive my lack of knowledge. Where is this information accessed? Thanks!