<p>im not a big fan of USNEWS, mostly because my parents think that i should use the rankings to make my decission of where i want to go to school. I believe more in fit, but if higher USNEWS rankings gets them off my back about making Brown my 1st choice (just because it was the lowest ranked ivy) then I’m fine with that. I just hope i get in. lol.</p>
<p>anybody have thoughts on this. Are you friends and family also USNEWS driven? Is that all they see…rankings?</p>
<p>Where I’m from people seem to be indifferent to the. They don’t really pay attention. I can’t think of a single person I go to school with this year who has mentioned anything about USNWR rankings</p>
<p>my dad is an actuary and my mom is an accountant. All they see is stats and rankings. I’d agree with you though about my friends. I got to a big school, about 780 in our class alone, and ive only heard USNWR rankings a few times. I guess other people’s parents don’t force rankings on their kids like mine do.</p>
<p>i don’t think most parents are terribly aggressive about college.
but i know many people (college counselors, relatives) who are generally stats + rankings-driven.</p>
<p>My parents are letting me handle this whole college search thing by myself. It’s nice to have freedom like this.</p>
<p>Unless I’m totally wrong about the skills of actuaries, someone with that much analytical math should have serious doubts about USNews. To answer your question, Brown is on the edge of 10% and I would say there is a greater than 90% chance we’ll break that barrier this year.</p>
<p>I think lots of int’l students like me pay attention to USNEWS rankings. This is usually the first way I get to know about a school. When I know more about the college application process, however, I don’t care about it any more. Anyone who’s not super familiar with colleges in U.S cares A LOT about rankings though. If I say Penn’s ranked 4th, and Brown’s ranked 16th, they’d probably think Penn’s much better than Brown. duh.</p>
<p>modestmelody, my dad is great at what he does. As an actuary he sees data as cold hard facts. Going along with sid518’s example, he sees Penn as better than Brown. He thinks that they are both good schools, but rankings seem to be his deciding factor on which are better. I guess that’s why he got angry that I didn’t apply to UPenn and Cornell. I just didn’t see myself going to these schools. There is no concept of fit to my dad. He got angry when I told him that I would prefer to go to Brown over Harvard if I ever had to make the choice.</p>
<p>my parents just want me to go any college and became a doctor, ahh and keep me closer to them, BAD for them, I live in Fl. hahahaha</p>
<p>I’m interested to see if Brown can perhaps pass Princeton in admissions percentage. It’s not out of the question considering Princeton’s admissions rate has hovered at around 9.7% for the past two years (actually going UP last year), and Brown, which was close behind at 10.8% last year, saw a significant increase in applications.</p>
<p>I’m sure the Princeton administration is wringing it’s hands in anxiety. Considering Princeton is traditionally viewed as selectivity/prestige peers with only HYSM, I can imagine they are not happy to have a higher admissions rate than some of the “lesser” ivies.</p>
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Brown can brag about passing Princeton only after it drops early decision. </p>
<p>Princeton stomps Brown when you compare RD yields. If it had ED, its admit rate would drop well below that of Brown’s.</p>
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He should concern himself with the quality of data and the quality of the “theory of action” which suggests he’s using the right data to measure an outcome. USNews is largely a pool of either data for which there is weak or no support to desired outcomes or a poor proxy for more precise data that would have strong support.</p>
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<p>Wouldn’t the presence of an Early Decision program contribute to Brown’s lower regular-decision yield? All the applicants who were dedicated to Brown from the beginning are not included, while all the applicants who were dedicated to Princeton from the beginning are.</p>
<p>How can you be sure Princeton would still “stomp” Brown?</p>
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Filling over a third of its class through early decision allows Brown to be hyper selective in regular admissions, driving down its overall acceptance rate. </p>
<p>ED applied: 2348
ED admitted: 550 (23.4%)
RD applied: 22640
RD admitted: 2158 (9.53%)</p>
<p>Numbers aside, Princeton has always trumped Brown in cross-admit battles, and it will continue to do so as long as its academics and financial aid trump Brown’s. </p>
<p>Brown’s popularity has admittedly soared, but Princeton still has a higher yield and receives more applications per spot, which is really all that matters for acceptance rate.</p>
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In a word, no. Princeton’s yield is higher than Brown’s even when you compare the total 2013 yields of both universities (i.e. including ED).</p>
<p>I wasn’t really insinuating anything about yeild rates or student quality, I was just making an observation. Regardless of the fact that the raw admissions rate is unreliable and misleading, I still feel like that’s the number that most people care about, and just the very fact that Brown might be below Princeton is sure to raise some eyebrows.</p>
<p>“Princeton has always trumped Brown in cross-admits”. Source? Barron’s Guide to The Ivy League Schools, copyright 1971 has Princeton’s admit rate at 21% and Brown’s at 19%. Brown’s SATI verbal median was 685 vs. Princeton’s 641. One could infer that Brown was the more selective school for the class that entered in 1970. If you look at attendance in the top law schools, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, the Brown and Princeton attendees are much closer than, say, the Princeton vs. Yale or Harvard attendees. The selectivity differential between Princeton and Brown has never been that disparate anyway. Because Princeton is located between two large metropolitan areas in Philly and New York, and has always been the preferred Ivy for the Southern aristocracy, Princeton has always had more visibility than Brown. However, for those who think of the Ivy League as being primarily a New England concept, Brown holds its own.</p>
<p>This Brown vs. Princeton speculation is just that – speculation – until we see actual numbers. Maybe applications to Princeton soared this year – we have no idea.</p>
<p>Brown’s matriculation rate for RD acceptees is lower than Princeton’s. Financial aid has a lot to do with that.</p>
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<p>That has little to do with cross-admit rates. If two schools have comparable prestige but one is 40 SAT points lower than the other this would tend (all else equal) to raise the cross-admit performance of the “dumber” school, as entering students know it’s easier to attain any given result once they matriculate. This effect is, in 2010, helping grade-inflated Brown against grade-deflated (or at least, inflation-capped) Princeton and is surely raising the cross-admit rates and all other indices of Brown’s desirability.</p>
<p>As another example, Caltech is the most academically selective school in the US, and certainly the one with the highest test scores in its student body, but it loses cross-admits by huge margins to schools with lower SAT averages. This is, again, largely due to the correct perception that Caltech is more difficult. Caltech also has higher admission rate and lower yield, despite its greater selectivity (and this remains true when it is compared to MIT). </p>
<p>The Princeton vs Brown SAT difference in 1970 has more to do with the proportion of jocks (high) and Jews (low) at Princeton 40 years ago. If Brown was admitting an academically stronger group of students at that time, good for them.</p>
<p>Recall also from our earlier discussions, that the statistically strongest finding of the Revealed Preference study from 1999-2000 was a large gap in cross-admit performance between the top 5-6 schools HYPSM(C) and the next tier that includes Brown. Princeton was effectively tied for the 3-4-5 spot (or 3-4-5-6 or 4-5-6 if you include the Caltech fluke). You can search for my more detailed comments and calculations about that in this board.</p>
<p>I never consider Caltech or MIT as being in the same class as the Ivies. They are specialty schools. Interestingly, when MIT was looking to replace its prior president, they chose a woman academic whose stated philosophy was to make MIT a more comprehensive university in the manner of the Ivies. I still don’t believe she has achieved this.</p>
<p>The Revealed Preference Data is now more than 10 admissions cycles old, an eternity in modern college admissions. Although the simulations were close to what was occurring in Brown admissions at the time, Brown has only gotten far more selective since then. Since Brown has gone need blind for undergraduates, and adopted the common application, it is beginning to be clear just how selective the university is, and its selectivity is in the uber range.</p>
<p>One thing about the Princeton/Brown cross comparisons. The two schools have never had much of an overlap in its admissions pools. The one year in the early 2000s where I definitely know the cross-admit numbers, there were 102 cross admits, and 85 chose Princeton. This was, however, surrounding the disasterous reign of Gordon Gee, and the university was slightly adrift.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter that Caltech and MIT are tech schools. They illustrate, both compared to each other and when compared to non-tech schools, that admissions rate and SAT comparisons can run in the opposite direction to cross-admit rates. Stanford is another illustration of how a lower-SAT or less academically competitive school can attract students because of the lower academic standing compared to schools of similar “prestige”. It is interesting that in the New Curriculum salad days Brown may have enjoyed the synergy of two beneficial effects (a stronger student body and an easier academic setup compared to rival schools) but it is clear that only the second effect holds today.</p>
<p>With that said, I notice that you included only the verbal SAT in your comparison of Brown and Princeton in 1970 — what did Barrons say about the math or total SAT medians (or quartiles, averages, etc)?</p>
<p>The Revealed Preference data is unreliable all sorts of reasons (that I have elaborated at length in these threads) but the larger question is “why care about cross-admit rates”? Princeton is famous not for its cross admit rates but for being the US or world leader in several important fields (and being second to none in some fields that don’t have a clear number one but a small top tier that includes Princeton).</p>