4.3% Admit Rate for Class of 2022

It’s published in several places. I was using IPEDS – https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data . College Navigator (https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ ) is a more user friendly version of the database, but it only provides a small portion of the available information. For example, College Navigator lists in state and out of state percentage from the most recent year, but not number from each state or past years.

That was a polite attempt to meet you halfway, @riley2, because I believe you misread my post. I said significantly broader “geographic appeal”, not “diversity”. Both of these schools have ~80% yields and a home region from which they draw ~40% of their students and get a very high yield. One’s home region is much larger (and I’d say 22% larger would be “much larger” if it meant that I weighed 200 rather than 164 lbs) than the other’s, though, with over 60% more people and far more local competitors. That implies, surely, that Harvard has significantly broader geographic appeal.

Put another way, if we had the data I think we’d confirm that, in terms of student preferences, Stanford beats Harvard and the other tippy-tops handily in California, but Harvard and the other tippy-tops generally beat Stanford on the East Coast and Harvard edges out Stanford in most other parts of the country except possibly the (relatively thinly populated) Mountain West.

first the accusation was that Stanford gets disproportionately all its students from CA when it is in fact Harvard that gets disproportionately more of its students by 8X from MA - 15% when it represents only 2% of the US population - or Yale which gets 7% of its students from CT which makes up 1% of the US population.

oh well another myth goes up in flames:) lols

Stanford gets 40% of its students from California, its home state, with 12% of the US population and where it has very little tippy-top competition. Harvard pulls 40% from a much larger area, with 20% of the US population and against a great deal of tippy-top competition very close to home. They have similar overall yields, but Harvard’s population distribution mirrors more closely that of the US as a whole (at least it appears so, since Stanford doesn’t disclose enough detail for it to be clear) and therefore its 80% yield means more, because it’s achieved in the face of greater obstacles. That is the point, not obfuscation about how many students Harvard admits from Massachusetts and Yale admits from Connecticut, when we can all reasonably infer that Stanford admits just as many from the Bay Area alone.

@data10: my reference was to the South as a whole, and I’d be interested to know what the totals are for the rest of the southern states, including other large ones such as Virginia and Georgia. My guess is you’ll find a Harvard skew if you look at the region overall (and I’ll bet you’d find one in the Midwest too), but I’ll happily admit I’m wrong if that turns out not to be the case.

Again, though, my point is that Harvard pulls from a larger area than Stanford, with more people and against greater competition. I don’t think your analysis refutes that, although I respect the use of actual data and appreciate you pointing to the IPEDS database, which I guess I’ll have to figure out how to use now.

your point is false. fact is Harvard and Yale are more of a state school than Stanford. lols:)

I"m sure other schools in the East are the same but frankly I’m too tired of googling to disprove your latest fantasy.

If anyone is interested in a ^^^ TLDR version of this discussion:

much ado about nothing

^ Probably very true. The initial purpose of this OP was to provide the information for this year’s admission numbers.

So, the initial number of admits was 2040, they could go up to 2080 if the yield stays the same as last year’s for a class size of 1703. Even the final number of admits is 2100, the admit rate would be 2100/47450=4.4%, which still would be the lowest for any school.

Another thing is that for the first time in 2 years, they disclosed the number of early admits at 750, though no number of early applications was provided.

In the most recently reported year, Stanford had more from Virginia, and Harvard had more from Georgia. If you define “the South as whole” as states south of Maryland/Delaware, then the totals were 278 students from Stanford and 272 from Harvard. In the Midwest, the totals were 182 Stanford and 181 Harvard. If you exclude Ohio, which is much nearer to Harvard than Stanford, the totals shift to 166 Stanford and 145 Harvard. In short, both colleges have a disproportionately large number of students from nearby states with urban centers, but also get a good number of students from outside of their nearby region.

Looking at the percentage of students from different sections of the country is largely influenced by the location of the college as you noted, but using those results to draw conclusions about geographic appeal for colleges in different sections of the country can be misleading. For example, if you look at percentages of students from different sections of the country, one might conclude that WUSTL and Duke have more geographic appeal than both Harvard and Stanford since they have proportionately less local regional draw and a more balanced percentage of population from the different regions of the US. However, this more relates to the location of WUSTL and Duke than geographic appeal.

There are many ways you can draw conclusions about college preference. For example, if you wanted to show Harvard was preferred over Stanford, you might emphasize competition from the Ivy League, as you have done. And if you wanted to show Stanford was preferred over Harvard, you might look at surveys of students across the country about their first choice college, such as the survey at https://www.princetonreview.com/cms-content/2018-College-Hopes-Worries-Survey-Report.pdf , Most of which I have seen favor Stanford over Harvard. Or if you wanted to emphasize yield, you might assume that virtually all early applicants select Stanford and Harvard, and then compare the yield of RD students. This would lead to the conclusion ~74% RD yield at Stanford compared to ~62% RD yield at Harvard.

However, all of these metrics are severely flawed as a measure of preference, particularly yield. I consider yield more of measure of selectivity since students who prefer the less selective college often do not bother applying to the more selective college as a backup. However, students who prefer the more selective college generally do apply to less selective colleges as a backup. For example, far more kids prefer UCB or UCLA over Stanford than would be suggested by yield or cross admit since this UC group often doesn’t apply to Stanford as a backup.

Going back to the topic of this thread, with Stanford’s 4.3% acceptance rate, I expect the primary reason why Stanford’s acceptance rate has been decreasing more rapidly than other similar selective private colleges relates to tech being especially popular in recent years. Stanford is a top school in CS and engineering, and is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. CS has become Stanford’s most popular major by a wide margin. Students who are primarily interested in CS and engineering are more likely to favor Stanford over Harvard. And students who are primarily interested in certain other fields are more likely to favor Harvard over Stanford. As such, if we have another tech crash, like occurred in early 2000s, then I’d expect Stanford’s applications to be more impacted than Harvard and other colleges where fewer students choose CS and engineering.

That seems right to me, assuming that year’s data is correct. I figured out how to use the database and tried to pull the relevant data for multiple recent years but a lot of it appears to be missing, so I’m not sure how reliable the source is, to be honest.

As arguably the top two universities in the country in terms of lay prestige, Harvard and Stanford are highly comparable direct competitors seeking similar students from all over the country, and in principle either could be the top choice of any top student anywhere. I was making no argument other than that the home region from which it draws ~40% of its students is larger for Harvard than Stanford, and that Harvard faces greater competition there, so one could infer that Harvard’s geographical appeal was broader. WUSTL and Duke aren’t peers of Harvard and Stanford, and I have no view on how competitive they are with each other or any other school, what their targeted student profile is, what kind of student would find one appealing vs. the other and, indeed, how comparable they are at all, so I wouldn’t attempt to compare them in this way.

The thing is, you also have to consider those surveys In light of the in-region competition. Among the population of students that would consider responding to such a survey that Harvard or Stanford is their first choice, those west of the Mississippi have a powerful reason - geographic proximity - to choose Stanford. Those east of the Mississippi have the same powerful reason to choose Harvard - or Yale, or Princeton or MIT. So Stanford is more likely to win, all else equal. The same logic applies to yield comparisons.

Agree, and would also note the rapid increase in applications to US colleges from Asia. Since Stanford is the closest tippy-top to Asia, located in a state with a large Asian population, and those Asian applicants are probably a lot more likely to want to come to the US to study CS and engineering than, say, English literature, I would guess that Stanford has been one of if not the chief beneficiary of this trend. If there’s a crash in the Chinese market, that could also change.

Back to my point, I just received an email from a college advisor service on the final 2018 admissions results. The article claims that admissions were up among all the top universities - ie Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Chicago, Washington University, Dartmouth…etc this year because every college had a more active marketing effort toward first-generation students across the country. This was exactly what I was saying in my first post that people tried to argue. The people on these boards are typically wealthier and have parents that are educated so they would not see what is actually happening. The new hooked category of first generation is why applications are up so much, and why admit rates keep going down. And given the extreme bias in college admissions against upper class students from the top secondary schools as colleges try to socially re-engineer the country far to the left given they do not have to pay taxes on their endowments so can offer financial aid to almost everyone, many truly exceptional students can no longer go to Harvard so they go to Cornell, JHU, WashU, Dartmouth, Brown etc.

MODERATOR’S NOTE:
I’m not sure what is left to say. It is what it is and the discussion long ago devolved into debate, which is not allowed. Closing thread.