<p>Um, vengasso, who appointed you commander in chief of “those in the know”?</p>
<p>I agree with a poster above… just go down the USNWR list until you reach #12, 13, 14, wherever you want to make an artificial cutoff. Then add the first 3 or 4 LACs.</p>
<p>^But people (or at least my friends who mostly all rank in the top 5 with me) refuse to believe WUSTL should be higher than Brown and Cornell. What’s your take on that?</p>
<p>Funny someone mentioned I-Banking. Interestingly, at some firms, Princeton is actually a non-target school (prime example of a prestigious firm that has Princeton as a non-target is Credit Suisse).</p>
<p>I think that there are a lot of schools that are like HYPMS in some respects, but none really match their strength across the board. For example, Penn’s Wharton is a top target for finance, but outside of there Penn isn’t a top school. If you look at elite medical school admissions, Hopkins, Yale, and Harvard come out on top. However, we don’t usually consider Hopkins to be a peer of HYPMS because there are other areas where it lags. </p>
<p>Most of the other elite schools that aren’t HYPMS have more narrow “prestige” and “cachet”. Not nessecarily weaker, just more narrow.</p>
<p>I see that no Catholic universities are among the so-called elites. I suppose that if one believes in God then one is ipso facto of lesser intellect…or possibly even mentally ill…ROFL!</p>
<p>
If that’s actually what you’re wondering, then that is a rather useless question to ask simply because there is no huge drop in selectivity between those five schools and several similar universities. </p>
<p>Admissions is a complex process, and things like early action and early decision only serve to muddy the water. For example, Brown and Columbia (College) had lower RD admit rates than Princeton for the class of 2014 thanks to their use of ED and had only slightly higher admit rates overall; both schools had lower overall admit rates than MIT. As another example, Caltech has among the highest test scores in the nation - arguably the highest.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/11362870-post31.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/11362870-post31.html</a></p>
<p>Of course, the adoption of SCEA at Harvard and Princeton may well change things again. When you get to a certain level of selectivity - say, 15% admitted or below - it is quite possible to get in at Harvard but not at Dartmouth, or in at Stanford but not at Cornell. Admissions is unpredictable given the importance of factors often out of the control of applicants. It’s therefore difficult to suggest universities that are very strong but admit a fair amount of applicants. That description would’ve fit Chicago perfectly up to about two years ago (the admit rate was ~45% when I applied), but it too has become quite selective. </p>
<p>As a few posters have mentioned, the top LACs are well worth a look. Many of them provide top notch educations and are more reasonably selective (even Williams admits about 1/5 of its applicants).</p>