<p>One of the things I can't fully comprehend is :</p>
<p>"Each of the top 10 schools roughly admits 2000 students from a pool of 30,000 or so. These 30k students are likely cream of the crop. That said, how does each of the college pick unique 20,000 people? Won't the 2000 Harvard picks pretty much have similar credentials to what Yale cares about for example? Each of the top 10 schools is probably vying for the same top 2000, correct? Then how do 20,000 unique students eventually accept at these top 10 schools? I understand most of these schools have higher than a 70% yield, so what gives?. For example at my school, the top 20 or so students got into multiple top10 colleges, while 21 onwards didn't get into any top 10. Rough numbers here."</p>
<p>That’s an interesting point. I think that two reasons are that many people will only apply Harvard and not Yale or vice versa, and that because of randomness and limited information, many people will be admitted to Harvard and not Yale or vice versa.</p>
<p>With all top 10 colleges accepting the common app, the number of people applying to all the top 10 has increased significantly. Add to that the crap shoot factor associated with these top schools, and you likely have candidates applying to most if not all top schools. At least that’s what I’m seeing in my high school. Thx</p>
<p>Regionalism, major, no consensus on the top ten, etc. spread the applicants out a bit. Not as much as say 15 years ago, but it isn’t the same 3,000 students getting accepted into each school.</p>
<p>Your numbers aren’t correct. H’s yield is above 70, Yale about 68%, the others are lower. Plus H offers admit to ~2000 out of 35K, Yale ~1950 from about 28K and so on. I’ll use HYP as an example, the actual cross-admits are studied by each school. It’s not that huge an overlap. Statistically significant but not enormously so. It’s probably safe to say that both Y, P and H admits probably have offers from other top ten schools too, granted. But not always the other way around.</p>
<p>One is that the applicant pool is just too large. The country graduates about 2 million high-school students annually who then go to college. Clearly, not all of them are Harvard material, but even so, the number of graduating seniors who are clearly at the top of the heap and basically indistinguishable from each other on the basis of academic merit really exceeds 2000. By a lot.</p>
<p>Furthermore, admission to Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other exceedingly competitive universities isn’t strictly on merit. These institutions are trying to build a freshman class, and to populate it with a mix of people who will succeed academically, of course, but who will also create a stimulating milieu; give the class and the college a balance of artists, athletes, entrepreneurs and so on; give the class a balance of scientists, linguists, economists and so on; reflect well on the institution; become alumni who are kindly disposed to their college; and so on.</p>
<p>So the notion that all these colleges want the same 2000 applicants just doesn’t pan out.</p>
<p>What is a constant for the top college admitees is that they are excellent. What they also share with the next 30,000 students who didn’t get admitted is that they are excellent too. So you see, you’ve got about 50K (in my hypothetical example) kids who are great and could easily switch places with one another.</p>
<p>I think that while there are cross admits, a student high on Dartmouth’s radar wouldn’t be ranked as highly on UChicago’s radar. For example, someone more interested in a classical education would likely choose UC over Dartmouth, while the situation would be in reverse for someone interested in finance. Thus, the Dartmouth kid probably wouldn’t apply to UC.</p>
<p>Colleges an adcoms have different personalities, too, so an essay someone at Columbia thought was great could possibly irk someone at Duke (i.e. “Why I quit my varsity basketball team to pursue photography”).</p>
<p>This definitely isn’t true. I’ve seen many kids in my school and friends from other schools apply to the ivy league and top 10 schools even though their SAT scores were sub 2000 and 2100 at best, and their class rank was far from the top 1%. They and many other applicants have no shot to begin with applying to top 10 schools, as do a significant portion of the applicant pool annually to these schools. You get many students who really have no clue how competitive those schools are, or you have parents who are uninformed and force their children to apply.</p>
<p>This is the fatal flaw in your reasoning. There is no consensus on who are the top 2000. I once heard an admissions officer from a top 3 LAC say that about 80% of those who apply there are very well qualified, i.e., they’re fully plausible admits. At that level, schools aren’t making fine-grained determinations as to who are the “top” students among the 80% of the 30,000 or so who apply. They’re looking to assemble a class in which people have a range of talents, accomplishments, backgrounds, and interests, and a decision to admit candidate A over candidate B isn’t a judgment that in some objective sense candidate A is “better” than candidate B; it only means that, in the context of who they’ve already admitted, they want someone with A’s profile more than they want someone with B’s profile. But since these schools are making these decisions independently of each other, and since their applicant pools aren’t identical, there will be only a moderate amount of overlap in their admit pools. At the end of the day, almost all the top students will be admitted to top schools, but very few students will be admitted to all the top schools.</p>
<p>Thanks for an excellent explanation, especially this:
which should be carved in stone around here somewhere. I’m going to remember these wise words when the inevitable threads surface next spring about “my class rank was higher but HYS admitted a less qualified applicant from my high school.”</p>
<p>“These 30k students are likely cream of the crop.”</p>
<p>I also dispute this statement. </p>
<p>We have strong public university system and many of the top students (4.0, 2300+ SATs) at our local high schools don’t even apply to the top 10 schools. Their families have already decided that they are going to the local public uni (probably with close to a full ride). Or their middle class parents have decided that their kids are applying only to the lower tier schools where they are more likely to get a full ride given their academic achievements. The ‘top 10’ have no monopoly on the ‘cream of the crop.’</p>
<p>Is this what is happenining to top 10 school admissions. If you are rich you go, no matter what. May be legacy or good scores. If you make less than 140k you get full ride. If you are middleclass and god forbid you are good enough to get 4.0GPA and above 2300 SAT you go to your state school. Not that there is anything wrong with state schools but I think Top 10 schools are becming impossible for people in the middle. Especially in families there are two kids in college at the sametime Ivy leagues have become impossible.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You don’t get a full ride, anywhere, with $140K income (unless there’s merit aid, which the most selective schools don’t provide, at least not in theory). A very, very few of the most selective schools have committed to giving full rides if your income is under $60K - and even then, if you have significant assets, that may mean you have go pay something.</p></li>
<li><p>The only choices are not top 10 schools versus state schools. There are hundreds of less selective private universities and liberal arts colleges that offer just as good an education as the so-called top 10 schools do and where a student with the stats to be competitive for a top-10 will be showered with merit aid offers. (Not that there is anything wrong with state schools. Most state schools will provide a motivated student with an excellent education, equivalent to that he or she could get at a highly prestigious private.)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Only ones getting anything close to a full ride are those with under 60k income at most schools. Even then, some schools will give you loans in all probability.</p>
<p>Most of the top 10 schools are admitting a large chunk of their incoming class in EA/ED now. The yield is about 99% for ED and above 80% or more for EA at this level (except for Chicago - 80% yield for EA would have filled their class at 1800 admits in EA). Princeton started SCEA after a 6 year gap and claimed 86% yield and Harvard claimed 94% or more. It is much harder to get admitted in RD at these schools.</p>
<p>People who have applied ED to Columbia, UPenn, Dartmouth/Duke and got in are locked up. They are not applying anywhere else. People who have applied early to HYPS have not applied anywhere else and if they get in, a bunch no longer care to apply to their competitors.</p>
<p>The top 10 schools, at least according to USNWR, are pretty diverse in location and feel to me that it is strange when students just apply to all of them. Of course a student could feel comfortable at all of them, but that could be said for hundreds of schools for some people. When people apply according to their personalities or interests they likely won’t like every single school or even a majority of the schools. I would say Yale (“interesting” town, artsy) is similar to Princeton (smaller town, more quiet) and Harvard (more urban, competitive) but Columbia (Core, NYC) is incredibly more urban, but has a different feel from UPenn (parties, outgoing, lively). Caltech is sorta the outsider since it is much smaller and tech focused, whereas MIT is tech but large and in-charge and location similar to Harvard. Stanford is west coast, large CA student amount, apparently relaxed environment. UChicago is midwest, quirky, highly academic and Duke is southern, sports, and more outgoing. (Yes these are broad stereotypes, but that’s how I determined if I would like the environments of schools to apply to) It costs a ton (I applied to 15 schools, some were free apps or no essay apps) and takes a ton of time to make essays well done for each school. I applied to 2 top 10 schools, Yale and UChicago, and was admitted to UChicago. Also applied to Brown, a very near top 10 school. These 3 schools, I think, fit me well, so that’s why I chose them, not cause they were in the top 10. I’d say most people apply this way and so would not apply to all 10 of the top schools or all of the Ivy League (some people do do this though).</p>
<p>Interesting data, and consistent with a lot of other elite privates. Looks like ED/EA acceptance rates at these schools run 2 to 4 times the RD rate, and Ivies with ED are filling roughly 40% of their class with ED admits. Keep in mind, though, that recruited athletes and legacies are generally encouraged to apply ED, so some of this may be an optical illusion: it’s doubtful an unhooked applicant’s chances increase two- to four-fold by applying ED.</p>
<p>FYI, here are the percentages of full-pay (no need-based FA) students at the eight Ivies:</p>
<p>Harvard 39.5%
Princeton 40.6%
Yale 43.3%
Dartmouth 45.9%
Columbia 48.5%
Cornell 52.2%
Penn 54.2%
Brown 54.5%</p>
<p>At HYP, most students from families with household incomes up to about $200K receive need-based FA. So full-pays at those schools come from roughly the top 3 to 4 percent of income-earning families in the U.S. The income cut-off for need-based FA is probably a little lower at the other Ivies. I don’t think these schools are specifically seeking out full-pay students from high-income families, but the criteria they use in selecting their student bodies generally tend to favor such students.</p>