Applying To All Ivies

Applying to College
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<p>I'm not doing this lol. But, for those people that are, wouldn't there be a really good chance (purely mathematically of course) of getting into at LEAST one school if they applied to all the ivies and stanford MIT caltech? Admissions percentages are taken from collegeboard.com.</p>

<p>cornell accepts 21% of students.
dartmouth acceprs 15% of students. </p>

<p>P(cornell and not dartmouth) = (.21)(.85) = .1785
P(not cornell and dartmouth) = (.79)(.15) = .1185
P(cornell and dartmouth) = (.21)(.15) = .0315</p>

<p>P1 + P2 + P3 = .3285 or ~33% of getting into cornell or dartmouth or both.</p>

<p>doing that for all the schools would be retarded, you'd have to do like >1000 calculations using that method (im sure there's prolly some other method that doesn't take much time) but is it not safe to say that the chances of getting into one are actually pretty good (provided you have good stats and some ECs and a good essay)?</p>

<p>btw, this is based purely on chance. As if admissions were drawn out of a hat. Which doesn't seem so far from reality, sometimes =P</p>

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<p>This is a Frequently Asked Question, so there is a FAQ file with the answer. </p>

<p>APPLYING TO ALL EIGHT IVIES </p>

<p>Wrong extreme idea 1: </p>

<p>Some students "reason" that if an applicant applies to all eight Ivy League colleges, his chance of admission at any one of them is the same as the average base admission rate for all of them (which is wrong assumption a). Then the students "reason" that because the eight admission committees don't all meet in the same room, that they select students "independently" in the STATISTICAL sense (which is wrong assumption b). The students then misapply a formula learned in high school that only applies to differing situations, to calculate that the chance of getting into some Ivy League college is almost a sure thing. </p>

<p>What's wrong with wrong assumption a is that a weak applicant for admission at the least selective Ivy League college is a weak applicant at all the other colleges in the league, and that means that applicant's chance of admission anywhere is well below the base rate of admission for any Ivy League college. </p>

<p>What's wrong with assumption b is that usually colleges don't have to actively collude to end up choosing similar kinds of applicants. ALL colleges prefer stronger applicants to weaker applicants. A teacher of statistics explained to me what "independence" means in the sense used by statisticians: "What is independence? It means that when you learn about the outcome of one event, it has no influence on your guess about the probability of success in another event. However, in this case, if a student gets rejected from 8 schools, that DOES influence my guess about how likely he is to get rejected from the 9th school. I'd say someone who gets rejected from 8 schools is more likely to get rejected from the 9th than someone who didn't get rejected from 8 schools." In other words, even if colleges act independently in the layman's sense of the term, you can't use the multiplicative rule of probability to figure out the joint probability of being admitted to one out of the eight Ivy League colleges. Plenty of students get rejected by all eight. </p>

<p>Other threads from time to time bring up </p>

<p>Wrong extreme idea 2: </p>

<p>Ivy League admission officers are thin-skinned and personally offended if you apply to their "competitors," and will reject you if you apply to all eight Ivy League colleges. </p>

<p>Well, that's just ridiculous. There are plenty of students each year who are admitted to more than one Ivy League college (of course, those are rather extraordinary students) and there are at least a few each year who apply to all eight and are admitted to all eight. Ivy League colleges do NOT collude in this manner when making admission decisions. They admit the students who they think will fit well into the next entering class and contribute to the campus community. The bottom-tier Ivy League colleges admit a lot of students who don't enroll (that is, those colleges have rather low "yield,") because they admit some students who prefer to enroll at one of the OTHER Ivy college colleges that admitted them. Each college has its own tricks, in five cases including binding early decision programs, to identify students who genuinely prefer that college, but in the regular action round, every college admits some students who are also admitted by some of the other Ivy League colleges, perhaps all of the Ivy League colleges. </p>

<p>Bottom line: don't worry about either wrong, extreme idea. Apply well to all of the colleges that interest you. There is little point in applying to a college you wouldn't possibly attend if admitted, but there is every reason to apply to a college you like, because you can't get in if you don't apply.</p>

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<p>If you are actually qualified, then you can probably get into at least one. But otherwise, it really does not help.</p>

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<p>lol i know. i was just wondering. and i know how to calculate for all 11 ivies + mitcaltechstanford now if anyone's interested.</p>

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<p>lol i am kind of interested. would you mind doing the calculation?</p>

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<p>well, im using stats from collegeboard.com, so idk how accurate they are.
percent REJECTED from following colleges:
MIT: 88
Caltech:83
Stanford:90
Harvard:91
Yale:90
Princeton:90
Columbia:89
Brown:86
UPenn:84
Dartmouth:85
Cornell:79</p>

<p>So...multiply all those together...and subtract from 1.</p>

7

<p>drav: Did you read any words in tokenadult's post?</p>

<p>I sure hope you take some stats/quantitative coursework in college.</p>

<p>Tokenadult: you have the patience of a saint. I think this is about the twentieth time I've seen you post this missive!</p>

<p>HAHAAHA</p>

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<p>yes, i read it, and i get it, but still...it is interesting to think about...admit it.</p>

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<p>okay what if your stats and ECs are "competitive" for all the ivies? then doesn't it make sense to apply to all of them plus mit/caltech/whatever? because obviously no one is a shoo-in, and admissions is a crapshoot: all the time, especially here on CC, we see 2300+/4.0 kids get rejected from like Brown and Cornell only to be accepted to Harvard or vice versa. everyone at my school got rejected from princeton last year, but many of these rejectees got into harvard, penn, brown, stanford, and northwestern.</p>

<p>so if you really have your heart set on attending a top 10-20 school, and you have good reasons for loving them all, and you are a competitive applicant, then why not go ahead and apply to all of them?</p>

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<p>^ because why would someone interested in.. say, Columbia, be interested in Dartmouth (I'm thinking extreme location differences here) or Brown (obviously curriculum).
I know someone who applied to all ivies, got into two, and crossed them off immediately because of things that could've been taken into consideration before (like rumors at Cornell).
Even if you are willing to suck it up for the prestige or whatever, you can probably find other schools (not in the Ivy League) in the top 10-20 newsweek that will fit better.</p>

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<p>^ True. I'd rather go to UVA than some Ivies.</p>

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<p>well mathematically (and PURELY mathematically), you have a little over 79% chance of getting into one of those schools if you apply to all. Remember this is assuming that college admissions is done by placing all applicants' names into a hat and just pulling out names until they're all full. Which isn't how it actually works. Although it seems like it does.</p>

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<p>haha sure doesn't feel like i'd have a 79% chance, wow!</p>

<p>and as for liking ALL the ivies, it's possible. here's a short, really quick, somewhat superficial reason why i like each ivy:
1)harvard--cuz it's harvard, duh. actually i'd love to "drop the h-bomb" if i got in
2) yale--i'm in love with the regional officer who visited us
3) princeton--i have really good friends who go there
4) upenn--love the interdisciplinary studies, also have good friends who go there
5) brown--happiest school in america=), plus good med school = good resources, open curriculum should make it easy to double major
6) columiba--it's in nyc! and i actually like the idea of having a common core curriculum as well
7) cornell--omg it's absolutely gorgeous! (the natural scenery around it, the campus itself, etc.)
8) dartmouth--seems "exotic" to me as a west-coaster cuz it's all the way up in new hampshire, love the idea of that much snow, plus it's gorgeous as well (a lot of schools in the middle of nowhere tend to be)</p>

<p>i think i'd be happy at any of them!!</p>

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<p>I personlly think its stupid to apply to every ivy. When you do that you just want the name brand of being an ivy-leaguer.</p>

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<p>yeah thats true.</p>

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<p>lol i don't think anybody can genuinely like all 8 ivy leagues.</p>

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<p>While dravndn states that this is a mathematical exercise, let me restate to all readers: it has no basis in reality (the fact of 79% admittance into one of the schools if all are applied) since the events are in NO WAY statistically independent. </p>

<p>This topic comes up a few dozen times EVERY fall. And I'm amazed that supposedly mathematically sound students get enraptured by this spurious exercise.</p>

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<p>I said this before once. Does this help?</p>

<p>
[quote]
If you have a 1% chance of finding a dollar and a 1% chance of getting hit by a baseball and a 1% chance of winning a scratch off lottery ticket and a 1% chance of bird poop landing in your head, the chance of any one of these happening is 4%. These probabilities are additive. (The circumstances that lead to the 1% event rates are independent.)</p>

<p>If you yourself have a 1% chance of getting into Harvard and a 1% chance of getting into Yale and a 1% chance of getting into Stanford and a 1% chance of getting into Princeton, and you apply to all four, the chance of any one of these happening is greater than 1% but definitely not 4%. These probabilities are not additive. (Some of the "circumstances" - your own grades, test scores, essays, and recs - that lead to these 1% event rates are related / not independent)</p>

<p>Applying to more colleges increases your chances somewhat.

[/quote]
</p>

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<p>I would like to offer one caveat to the analysis above, which is that there do seem to be some unknown differences among the schools in terms of who they will admit. There are many examples of people getting into some Ivies but not others, and it's often not possible to understand the reason. So, it probably does increase your odds somewhat of being accepted if you apply to more schools. But this is only significant if you have a reasonable chance of getting into at least one of them. The Ivies and other selective schools do not occasionally capriciously choose to accept a student with subpar qualifications just for the heck of it.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
well mathematically (and PURELY mathematically), you have a little over 79% chance of getting into one of those schools if you apply to all.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>You're forgetting the assumption that probability is based on: random (uncorrelated) events. </p>

<p>Admissions to selective colleges is anything but random as they are all selecting on very similar characteristics (stats, ECs, etc.). </p>

<p>This same proposal was discussed last year to the same end: forgetaboutit</p>