<p>Thanks for the data! I actually get updates every year from admissions and I keep active at the school.</p>
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<p>I should have realized when I signed on that everyone would assume the ‘h’ was for Harvard! It’s not. My kids go to MIT, Amherst and Dartmouth.</p>
<p>I love Penn, but it is what it is–one of the 2 easiest ivies to get into. This doesn’t make it any worse than the others, just a tad bit easier to get into.</p>
<p>When we look at the ivies as a group, especially if you back out the land grant parts of Cornell, there really is not much of a delta between the hardest to get into and the easiest. As they get more diverse and international, it’s just plain hard for the best unhooked students at all of them.</p>
<p>Way to ignore all of my posts (you know, the ones containing actual information proving otherwise).</p>
<p>As a point of fact, my posts (the ones backed up by actual information) seem to indicate that Penn is actually the 4th or 5th-easiest Ivy to get into, after Cornell, Dartmouth, and/or Brown and Columbia.</p>
<p>Of course, the truth of the matter is this: The Ivy League is stratified into essentially 3 different section, with very minor gradations in each.</p>
<p>1) Harvard, Yale, Princeton
gap
2) Penn/Columbia, Brown/Dartmouth
gap
3) Cornell (especially the land grant schools, which are landing pads for kids who can’t get into Hopkins, et al.)</p>
<p>Now, you can disagree with all those nice opinions of yours, but they certainly aren’t the truth.</p>
<p>BTW, I live with 2 girls who got into Dartmouth and Swarthmore (very similar to where your children go, no?), and who certainly don’t think those are better or more selective schools.</p>
<p>Muerteapablo, I completely follow you. And you shouldn’t have mentioned the 2 girls because hmom will once again completely disregard your facts and just say Swartmore isn’t Amherst.</p>
<p>That’s true, and it’s also largely irrelevant in understanding selectivity. More important than admission rates are 1) SAT averages and HS GPAs, and 2) Preference.</p>
<p>So, for example: Amherst and Williams have an 18% admissions rate (higher than every Ivy League schools’ except Cornell’s), but most agree that they’re as selective as any of their Ivy counterparts.
Similarly, 2 years ago Caltech had a higher admissions rate than every Ivy League except Cornell - but it was still the most selective school in the country (highest SAT and GPA average).</p>
<p>So, while Penn’s acceptance rate was 17%, it was still comparable to schools like Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth - and even considered favorable by many applicants (just look at the Penn forum threads, you’ll find a bunch).</p>
<p>Columbia at 10% is comparable? Seven points. 10% vs. 17% seems like a very big difference. How about the other way? Is it comparable to UCLA at 22.8%?</p>
<p>Caltech accepts 21%, Columbia accepts 12%. That’s a 9% difference; yet Caltech also has an average SAT score of 1525 (!!!), while Columbia’s is 1415.</p>
<p>Consequently, Caltech is ranked 3rd, while Columbia is ranked 7th.</p>
<p>Caltech accepts more students, but is FAR MORE selective than Columbia. To the extent that it is really on a different level - they say HYPSMC(caltech) is the highest level, followed by Columbia, Penn, Brown and Dartmouth - despite the fact that Caltech had almost double the acceptance rate of Columbia. Do you understand?</p>
<p>So, too, can Penn have a higher acceptance rate but still be as selective as its peers. In fact, in the very ranking above, Penn had a 21% acceptance rate and was ranked just one notch below Columbia, which was 9% lower (at 12%). Can you imagine WHY? Because it had the same average SAT score, and more of its students were in the top decile of their HS class (91% at Penn vs. 84% at Columbia).</p>
<p>Again: the mark of selectivity is SAT average and HS GPA/Rank; NOT strictly acceptance rate.</p>
<p>I’ve looked at a couple of C’BadDad’s past posts, and he doesn’t seem to be a remarkably flexible thinker.</p>
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<p>NO, because they do not have comparable SAT averages! What is so hard to understand?</p>
<p>I might also point out that while Brown, Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth essentially share the same applicant pools and accepted student pools and are preferred equally,
they are FAR MORE preferred than UCLA. Meaning, accepted students to Penn and UCLA would drastically favor Penn, whereas accepted students to Penn and Columbia generally split down the middle.</p>
<p>I had a paper due at 12, and I’m about to meet up with some friends but I’m wasting time until then. Still a student. Applying to law schools now, so I’ll be gone before you get here. </p>
<p>Hopefully, Harvard will accept me this time around. Something tells me that they will (that something is a 175 LSAT). Then I can really tell these fools what the deal is around here.</p>
<p>1) “So, for example: Amherst and Williams have an 18% admissions rate (higher than every Ivy League schools’ except Cornell’s),…”</p>
<p>Comparing apples to apples, the acceptance rate to Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences was under 17% last year. One applies to a college there, not some aggregate.</p>
<p>2) IMO one cannot properly discuss the SAT profile of students matriculated to Penn’s Arts & Sciences College without first stripping out the SAT scores of Penn’s Wharton and engineering colleges from the reported aggregates. </p>
<p>Again, if one is applying to a particular college at a multi-college university, look at that college, not aggregates that include colleges there that you aren’t applying to.</p>
<p>3) It seems to me that some truly selective colleges look beyond test scores and focus more on the character and accomplishments of the applicant. For example, in the past when I looked at such things Brown’s selectivity did not run in direct proportion with the reported scores of its matriculants. IMO. that makes such school more selective, not less so.</p>
<p>I think that when comparing universities, one should look at the colleges that comprise them. What I mean, is that Penn can be broken down into: Nursing, Engineering, Arts, Wharton. Cornell can be broken down to: Arts, Engineering, CALS, Hotel, HumEc, ILR, and Architecture. Dartmouth and Yale are just Arts. </p>
<p>So some universities have more colleges within them, and thus (like Penn and Cornell) admit more people. This will, somewhat, artificially, increase their acceptance rates. At Cornell (not sure how it works at Penn) you apply to a particular college. You’re not really applying to “cornell” as much as you are “cornell arts” or “cornell engineering”. So you should be comparing Penn Arts versus Cornell Arts versus Dartmouth Arts. </p>
<p>I have done no research, I have no idea which school is easiest to get into. To me, selectivity means absolutely nothing. However, one should realize that blindly comparing universities is rather pointless. Compare specific colleges. Just my two cents.</p>
<p>Agreed. Penn’s College SAT average is 14 points below Wharton’s (this was in 2004). That means that the average Penn College student got 1/2 a question more wrong on his SAT than the Wharton kid. In other words, all the colleges at Penn (except Nursing, whose admissions is really totally different and more “holistic”) have essentially the same SAT scores - the engineers, I think, score in the same ball park, although tend to have higher math and lower verbal (obviously).</p>