But I thought HYP were national universities! Why are ALL schools so regional??

Parents Forum
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<p>"Thus the idea needs to relate more to broad name recognition and academic reputation such that a critical mass of people from across the country and yes, internationally too, WILL actually apply and attend. "</p>

<p>Let’s suppose that my indexes just reflect the applicant pool - that is, Harvard gets twice as many applicants from the northeast and half as many applicants from the southeast as one would expect based on size of the population - let’s assume qualifications are distributed evenly and acceptance rates are fairly even across regions, so the resulting incoming-freshman indexes are just a function of those things. </p>

<p>If you’re Harvard, don’t you kind of want everyone around the country (or at least the smart kids) to desire you equally, regardless of where they live? </p>

<p>I’m thinking maybe I can redo this to exclude home region and say … Of the “non-region” kids a school attracts, where are those regions. (Though I already know what the answer is … It will simply be the region that has the second-highest index in my numbers. The index itself will change.
That in and of itself is interesting, though, because it’s NOT necessarily “geographically next-closest.” </p>

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<p>If you live in the Northeast, you have many good to great universities within driving distance. There is no need to travel further. </p>

<p>I don’t think this is a Northeast issue. As I searched for maps of “great US universities,” I came across a similar pattern, over many fields. I could present that pattern as the distribution of major research universities falling mainly on the coasts and the Great Lakes. </p>

<p>US News map of top 50 universities: <a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2013/09/10/infographic-top-50-national-universities-2014[/url]”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2013/09/10/infographic-top-50-national-universities-2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Interactive Grants map, US DOE Office of Science: <a href=“Universities | Department of Energy”>Universities | Department of Energy; Note the distribution of grants. </p>

<p>If you live near LA, Chicago, or the East Coast, you have many major universities nearby. </p>

<p>During the college search, we visited one LAC which pointed out they have more international students enrolled than students from their state. I did not find that a plus; one tends to wonder, what do the locals know that the out-of-towners do not? If you add in the various tuition plans colleges have in place for faculty, it becomes even more puzzling.</p>

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<p>I agree that the degree of out-of-region draw may be less than with top universities here, but it is not the case that the quality of all Canadian provincial institutions is perceived to be equivalent. Canada has a handful of universities that are basically world-class – Toronto, McGill, Waterloo in tech areas, maybe UBC – and those draw the lion’s share of smart, ambitious, sophisticated students. And I think it’s very common for the type of kid who goes out of state here – high-achieving, affluent, sophisticated – to go out of province there. McGill is very popular for the children of Toronto’s elite, and quite a few of Montreal’s Anglophone professional class send their kids to Toronto. The four colleges I mentioned also draw significant international (i.e., us) students; I don’t think there are nearly as many at the Universities of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or New Brunswick.</p>

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<p>“And I think it’s very common for the type of kid who goes out of state here – high-achieving, affluent, sophisticated”</p>

<p>I think it’s easy to forget that for most people, the idea of a college experience that needs to be “sought” isn’t on their radar screen. There are plenty of families with smart kids whose reaction to elite schools isn’t “gosh, I really would love to go, but they are so far away / the cost / the inconvenience / junior’s safety so I will just settle for my state flagship, regretfully.” There are a lot of people who simply don’t see what the benefit of those elite schools are in the first place because they see people doing well without them. So their reaction is “huh, interesting” and then “whatever.” I think understanding that mindset is a little harder in the NE where elite credentials appear a little more “necessary” for an upper middle class lifestyle. I found it a little mystifying when I moved to the Midwest, myself. </p>

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<p>I’ll agree that it is strange when there are a lot of international undergrads at a school. I think in the case of colleges I know of like that, the international students are all full-pay, have wishy-washy TOEFL scores, and are completely unaware of issues like public transportation and an urban environment.</p>

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<p>"One of the two base assumptions is wrong. The NE over-samples in three of the four regions and outperforms in the West compared to the Midwest and South. "</p>

<p>No! The basis of analysis is at the individual college level, not the geographic level of college-bound students. If College A is 200, 50, 50, 75 and College B is 75, 200, 50, 50 that says nothing about the propensity of each region’s students to go elsewhere. It just says that College A and B each skew strongly to a home region and under skew to all others.</p>

<p>YES! Your index shows the northeast >100 in the midwest and south. It just does. Look at the numbers. More kids from the Northeast are going to the schools you identified in total than is justified by the census numbers. One of your two base assumptions is wrong. That doesn’t mean the overall conclusion is wrong, that all universities to some extent are regional. Just not to the extent your numbers portray. The index is flawed.</p>

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<p>Well, I don’t think the index itself is “flawed.” It’s simply that the index is about privates. But it’s not flawed in what it is that it measures. It just only measures what it says it does.</p>

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<p>But the schools aren’t of equal size / representing equal numbers of students. Not do all the students represented here make up the entire universe of students in a region or even the entire universe of elite-school-“worthy” students in a region. </p>

<p>I agree it is quite plausible that NE students are more likely to go out of region than students elsewhere. They’re probably more likely to go out state - well duh, their states are small. (A kid going from NH to Harvard is out of state, a kid going from San Diego to Stanford isn’t, though he traveled a far greater distance).</p>

<p>To prove that, though, requires an entirely different data set than what I have. My analysis sheds no light on that either way. It is about COLLEGES, not students. They ARE regional. It is possible both that all major colleges are regional AND that residents of different regions vary in willingness to leave their home region. I only have data to prove the first, not the second. </p>

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<p>Pizzagirl, kids from Chicagoland may be underrepresented at HYP (maybe), but you could have fooled me. My friends at college included quite a number of them – several from the Lab School, a number from brand-name suburban public high schools, and one who came from Lake Forest but was educated at Milton. I knew several kids from Minneapolis, too, including the child of the head of a chi-chi private school there. People who I roomed with included one of the Chicagoans, someone from Missouri, and someone from Montana. </p>

<p>I grew up in one of those border areas between East and Midwest, too. And sure, there were lots of people – most people – whose reaction to Harvard or Yale, assuming they heard about them at all, was the 20th Century version of “whatever.” But that was a class marker. The kids at my school – mainly rich or upper middle class, but including a substantial number of scholarship kids, too – were completely oriented towards what we would consider brand-name colleges, wherever located. Out of about 90 boys in my class, only one went to the state flagship. Six went to Williams, four to Yale, two each to Brown, Penn, Amherst, Harvard, Wesleyan. Some went west, too, to Northwestern, Michigan, Wisconsin, Lake Forest, Drake, Kenyon, Oberlin. My high school girlfriend went to Smith, and her best friend was my classmate at Yale – and they were public school kids. Local cousins near me in age went to Harvard, Swarthmore, Wisconsin, Smith, Colby, Dartmouth, Vermont, and Kent State, too. Private Catholic schools sent kids to Ivy League universities and similar LACs.</p>

<p>My point being that there have long been elite-college cultures in the middle of the prairies, or similar places far from oceans and Wall St. It wasn’t everybody, or even close; it was much smaller than now. But I am pretty confident that if you were walking the hallways of the Lab School or New Trier in the mid-70s, you weren’t seeing a lot of people whose reaction to elite colleges was “whatever”.</p>

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<p>Your interpretation only works if you pretend the many NE students who go to their state flagships don’t exist. </p>

<p>Even if we pretend they didn’t, and we pretended all the schools listed are the same size, there are still far more schools in the NE with NE-draws over 200 than there are non-NE schools with strong NE draws. </p>

<p>If someone gave me the numbers for undergrad pop at each school, I could probably calculate this out, though this still ignores both elite-“worthy” kids who attended schools other than those listed, as well as the great mass of “regular” kids. If I have time, I may calculate it assuming each school has 10,000 students (just to make my math easy). </p>

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<p>TPG, in answer to “do the best students go or do not go” I’d say that it all depends of your definition of “best students” As I wrote a small number of students did go the private route and their best students are doing extremely well in the OOS race. Yet, we are talking about two dozens students. There is a same number at the local public schools, but they come from a massive pool of students. As I indidated, a small percentage of those students decide to attend UT despite having an auto-admission. The rest of the public school kids end up attending the mediocre local colleges, or drop out. </p>

<p>Please remember that this happens in a community that is around 80 percent hispanic and shows no signs of improving. The families simply do not know how bad their education systems are, and they think they are doing well. As a reference, a few years ago, the local version of the UT system rejected 1 student from its many thousands applications. And that is a school that is lauded for its social mobility by the new asinine ranking outfits. </p>

<p>As Mini loved to write, the education system works as intended as our Walmart society needs lowly educated people to man the stores. </p>

<p>OK, back to the relevance of determining if Duke is more national than Stanford or others! </p>

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<p>Duke is more national because the south has fewer elite students capable of attending schools of the calibre of Duke and Stanford. </p>

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<p>If you accept an assumption that the top students almost everywhere are <em>more likely</em> to take the PSAT than anything else, even in states where ACT reigns, because of the potential for $$, then you could look at the comparative score required to become a Semifinalist or Commended in order to compare the levels of <em>highly prepared</em> students in each state. (As opposed to the <em>smartest.</em> ) This has obvious limitations, but it may be better than anything else available.</p>

<p>I’m only on page 14 of this thread, so perhaps someone else has suggested it.</p>

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<p>I would point out that YOU were the person who denigrated that LAC by saying you had never heard of any of its graduates. You were corrected. More becoming to acknowledge it than lash out.</p>

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<p>I cannot begin to count the number of times I have seen posts on CC claiming that no one outside of the NE has ever heard of any elite NE LAC or any elite NE U except H and just <em>maybe</em> Y and P and that therefore going to them is worthless and stupid. Except MIT, of course. Going to an engineering school is NEVER criticized. 8-> </p>

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<p>Yep, that must be it! /sarcasm</p>

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<p>" Duke is more national because the south has fewer elite students capable of attending schools of the calibre of Duke and Stanford. "</p>

<p>It depends on what criteria you use. I ran a few calculations on PSAT cutoffs for the class of 2015.</p>

<p>If you take a quick look at the 2015 PSAT NMSF cutoffs in each state, you’ll see, by the regions noted in the OP:
NE: average cutoff is 217.6
W: average cutoff is 211.9
MW: average cutoff is 209.6
SE: average cutoff is 209.4</p>

<p>But that is not the weighted average, just divided by number of states. I ran weighted averages too.</p>

<p>Using 2010 census data and populations (overall, not student or youth) rounded to the nearest 100,000, I get this:
NE: average cutoff is 219
W: average cutoff is 218
SE: average cutoff is 212
MW: average cutoff is 212 (slightly lower than SE by a fraction)</p>

<p>W jumps up to be just below NE, since CA is so big and has a high cutoff.
MW and SE are still neck and neck.</p>

<p>One more analysis: % of states below the aggregate weighted average of 215:
NE: 69% of states with a cutoff 215 or higher
W: 23% states with a cutoff 215 or higher
MW: 17% of states with a cutoff 215 or higher
SE: 15% of states with a cutoff 215 or higher</p>

<p>So although you can argue about the NE being unfairly represented at top schools, it looks like most states that are not in the NE have low PSAT NMSF cutoffs. </p>

<p>It may be impressive if you live in WV and your child has an SAT score of 2300, but that student is going to be courted tremendously because the state PSAT NMSF cutoff is 201. Move one state, to Virginia, and 2300 on the SAT is not too far from extrapolating their cutoff of 219.</p>

<p>But is a student with 201 in WV equivalent to a student with 219 in Virginia? Are they equally bright? Are they equally well-qualified for college? (are they equally deserving of a scholarship is another story)</p>

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<p>Re Post #99 (Yes, I’ve been away from my computer that long):</p>

<p>PurpleTitan – I’m not being disingenuous. It’s that you and I are talking about two different things.</p>

<p>You say that NC is “overrepresented” at Duke because the percentage of Duke students who come from NC (+/-15%) is larger than NC’s population as a percentage of the whole United States (around 3%). From that perspective alone, that is certainly true. However, my comments were about why NC students apply to Duke in relatively small numbers, smaller numbers than one would expect given Duke’s academic reputation and location in NC. I was specifically addressing Pizzagirl’s statement in Post #1:</p>

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<p>My Post #77 responded to that by giving reasons as to why it might be true. Moreover, while 15% might seem a lot to some people outside NC, to NC residents that 15% looks very low in a state where public universities have (by law) 82% or more students from NC. It is not uncommon for large public schools with very strong students to have no more than one student, and often no students, apply to Duke.</p>

<p>Reynolds Price, writer and late Professor of English at Duke, addressed the financial component of this situation in a 1992 Founders’ Day Speech. In that speech, which makes for some good and often lively reading, he commented:</p>

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<p><a href=“https://english.duke.edu/uploads/assets/foundersday_92.pdf”>https://english.duke.edu/uploads/assets/foundersday_92.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>This statement says more about you than it says about Duke, Stanford, or the South.</p>

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<p>"My point being that there have long been elite-college cultures in the middle of the prairies, or similar places far from oceans and Wall St. It wasn’t everybody, or even close; it was much smaller than now. But I am pretty confident that if you were walking the hallways of the Lab School or New Trier in the mid-70s, you weren’t seeing a lot of people whose reaction to elite colleges was “whatever”. "</p>

<p>I agree with you (and agreed with you that while the “midwest” may be underrepresented at HYP, I doubt Chicagoland is). I agree it’s a class marker; the affluent suburbs of Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, are pretty similar to the affluent suburbs of NY, Boston, Philly and DC on these dimensions. Indeed, my own hs in suburban St. Louis sent a lot more kids to fancier schools than my kids’ high school in suburban Chicago – because it was more uniformly affluent vs my kids’ school, which was a mix of middle and upper middle income. </p>

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<p>"I cannot begin to count the number of times I have seen posts on CC claiming that no one outside of the NE has ever heard of any elite NE LAC or any elite NE U except H and just <em>maybe</em> Y and P and that therefore going to them is worthless and stupid. "</p>

<p>Whoa, whoa. I’m sorry, outside the upper-middle-class affluent bubbles, people <em>haven’t</em> heard of these little liberal arts colleges, including your favorite and mine. I’m sorry - sitting here in Chicago, if I wanted to impress the neighbors, I’m going to get a <em>heck</em> of a lot more mileage out of S at Northwestern than D at Wellesley. <em>I</em> knew of Wellesley and the other elite NE LAC’s … but that’s me. Only those people who are “in the know” will be equally impressed. This is part of what gets frustrating – you grew up in CT, you went to school at Wellesley, and so because all the people around <em>you</em> know of Wellesley, you project your NE experiences to the rest of the country.</p>

<p>Now, I think Wellesley (and similar) is known among the people who matter to me, and as you know I couldn’t give a whit what the drycleaner thinks, but no, no, not widely known at all. </p>