<p>I do not think this show regional bias on <em>admissions</em>. It shows that the people who <em>accept</em> admissions offers end up being from the region.</p>
<p>I would be dollars to donuts that the colleges do the math and predict how many kids from each region will accept. Thus, you could argue the converse - if the yield from Northeast region admitted students is high, then you would admit FEWER to get the same “bang for your buck” as from West region students, far less likely to accept because of geography.</p>
<p>I’d like to see % admitted from each region, and yield for each region (just a though not giving you more work :)</p>
<p>Grudemonk - good catch; Harvard and Yale are pretty much neck and neck with the same pattern of home-region advantage, average west, below avg midwest / southeast.
(Northeast - 208/214, Midwest - 58/60, Southeast - 54/54, West - 96 / 89) </p>
<p>"Living in NC, I see a significant percentage of kids, even at the private high school my kids go to, who have no desire to go out of state for school. NC has a great public system and even families that could afford to go elsewhere don’t. There are several other southern states that have similarly strong and affordable public systems. "</p>
<p>No argument here.</p>
<p>So why is it that a lot of CC folks seem to believe that the Ivies have this magical brand power that attracts everyone, everywhere, that everyone is dying to go to these schools, and that other top schools are the “sloppy seconds / also-rans”? It’s very clear that the entire landscape is heavily regional in nature. Can someone from the northeast explain where this myth originated and why it’s perpetuated? </p>
<p>In California it’s also extremely hard to reach many of the Northeastern LACs. To get to Colgate from my house I would have to drive to LA, fly from LAX to Boston and then to Syracuse and finally drive a rental car 48 miles to Colgate. I’d imagine that anyone not living within driving distance of a major international airport would have an even more difficult time reaching the school.</p>
<p>Here’s another aspect to consider. More Northeastern students attend the Ivies because the publics in the Northeast are not that highly rated. Using US N &WR (I know, I know) but absent another easy measure. the top public universities are:
UC Berkeley
UCLA and UVa (tied)
U. Michigan
U North Carolina
College of William & Mary
Georgia Institute of Technology
UCSD
UC Davis
9.UCSB</p>
<p>You have to go all the way down to #19 to find the University of Connecticut and then to #26 Rutgers. </p>
<p>Note that Wellesley is like MIT in that it is tops in a niche. Just as MIT is generally regarded as the best STEM-focused university (with some competition from tiny CalTech), Wellesley is probably regarded as the top-ranked female-only LAC (with competition from the other Seven Sisters).</p>
<p>So, for instance, while a kid in the Midwest may well choose Chicago/Northwestern over HYP or Carleton/Oberlin over WAS, they’re quite unlikely to choose Case Western/Rose-Hulman over MIT or Ursuline over Wellesley.</p>
<p>^^ I actually think that has much to do with it TatinG. There’s really no reason for a student to travel far away if there is a regional option that is just as viable. We don’t have a “national” university system or even any “national universities.” We have very, very good universities but they are spread across the country. It wasn’t that long ago - maybe even just one generation that the only reason kids went far, far away to a college or uni was if they were a legacy or had relatives in the area. When I was in high school most people knew about MIT…and if you were a total brilliant dork, you might consider applying, but the only other reason to go to Boston was if your family went to college there. It’s the colleges that decided diversity including regional diversity was a mission.</p>
<p>Yes, and I forgot to mention Cal Tech. My point was that without knowing the number of applications from the Northeast it’s difficult to say that the Ivies are favoring Northeastern students. The top Northeastern students are naturally going to apply to the Ivies since they don’t have a Berkeley equivalent there. On the other hand, why would a California student pass up a Berkeley acceptance to go to the Northeast spending way more in tuition and travel costs.</p>
<p>That’s why you see middling hockey players from Framingham Massachusetts at Harvard and, by really any measure, far better kids from the South being denied. The Northeastern schools really have a home bias, and it may be because their application volumes and alumni are biased North. I think your research hits a kind of top layer of bias, but to say that there is deliberate, conscious bias you need to see the underlying numbers of the regional applicant pools. To give an obvious example, Texas has a multiple of the population of Rhode Island, but Brown takes a healthy slug of kids from Rhode Island far more than would be represented by population alone, vs. Texas. But one might expect that Texans – with UT as an obvious, inexpensive, well-known alternative – just don’t care to apply to Brown in the right “relative” numbers according to Texas’ population. Thus, the relative under-repreentation, and seemingly relative bias perhaps becomes far less so if you drop one level down into the application numbers themselves. </p>
<p>Sports have something to do with it as well. Sports like crew, fencing, field & ice hockey, sailing, rowing, squash, lacrosse, and water polo just aren’t that popular in certain parts of the country, but many of the Ivies and NESCAC LACs sponsor those sports.</p>
<p>I wonder how much of this is due to the fact certain parts of Cornell do provide cheaper in-state tuition for NY students attending certain parts of the institution like the Ag school because it was founded on a land-grant basis?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That has long been the case judging by what I’ve heard from Oberlin alums and Profs going back several decades at least. </p>
<p>A part of it might be due to Oberlin’s reputation for being much more lefty politically than the US mainstream whereas Ohio struck me as a more conservative leaning state when I attended and visited. This also factored into poor town-gown relations when I attended. </p>
<p>Another factor may be that Ohio students who would be the ones desirable for Oberlin or Kenyon have a strong desire to aim for comparable colleges outside their state/region to experience a different part of the country/gain more perceived independence in a new setting. </p>
<p>Incidentally, the relative lack of Ohio residents among admitted students was such a concern the previous president made it a point to encourage admissions to target more Ohio students to encourage them to apply and enroll. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some possibilities:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Student received comparable/better FA package to NE school making it more worthwhile financially.</p></li>
<li><p>Desire for better student:faculty ratio. Included in this is perception of better faculty advising due to lower students/advisor ratio. Granted, this applies much more to LACs and LAC-like universities like Princeton or UChicago. </p></li>
<li><p>Desire to get far from family/home region to gain greater sense of independence.</p></li>
<li><p>Wanting to experience a different part of the country before coming back and settling down in one’s home area.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>@cobrat: Case Western isn’t terribly lefty and while they do have a good number of OH kids, they draw more from PA than from IL, more from NJ than MI, and more from NYS than from any Midwestern state outside OH.</p>
<p>My take is that OH is so close to the Northeast that it’s virtually next door and with declining HS enrollent in OH as well as the rise of tOSU to being a respectable research university, the OH privates have had to increase their recruiting of the Northeast (which traditionally has had the money and desire to send kids to private colleges).</p>
<p>There have been a number of studies showing that Ohio is an aging population with a downward trend in HS population. That is a big issue for the Ohio schools who will need to go outside their backyards for students. </p>
<p>It may not be a good assumption that all regions have the same proportional pool of applicants. </p>
<p>TatinG, this is an interesting point–but it doesn’t explain why kids with solid but not “top”-ranked flagships still don’t obsess over the Ivies. (Think Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Alabama, Texas, Georgia…)</p>
<p>@pizzagirl - How old is this analysis? I am curious if it has changed much since then. </p>
<p>There was a time when Stanford admitted 40% + from California but people have been grumbling that this percentage has been going down. I think there is a similar trend happening at Duke where they were required to admit a certain percentage from NC (also SC?) and that number has started going down over the past few years. As the admit rates have been declining across the spectrum while yields are increasing, some of the patterns might be changing at different schools.</p>
<p>@whenhen - Someone attending Cornell told me they were leaving by a flight from Houston at 8 AM to Newark, connecting flight to another airport 4 or 5 hours later, catching a bus 2 or 3 hours later for a 2 hour ride or something, only to get to Campus at 11 PM or so. </p>
<p>Texaspg - this was done within the past year. It’s very current data. </p>
<p>"Yes, and I forgot to mention Cal Tech. My point was that without knowing the number of applications from the Northeast it’s difficult to say that the Ivies are favoring Northeastern students. The top Northeastern students are naturally going to apply to the Ivies since they don’t have a Berkeley equivalent there. "</p>
<p>Remember what I said - these data neither prove or disprove that Ivies “favor” NE applicants. You simply don’t know. It could be that the applicant pools are even more NE-concentrated and they disfavor them, but they’re still over represented in the acceptance pool. It could be that the applicant pool is less NE-concentrated but they over favor them. Or it could be that acceptance rates in all regions are identical, it’s just that the applicant pool is NE-skewed so the resulting accepted pool is NE-skewed. </p>
<p>It shows that the student bodies they wind up with are NE-skewed. That’s a different conclusion. </p>
<p>GTech is highly-regarded for engineering/CS while business at UT-Austin is highly-regarded as are various engineering/CS disciplines at UT-Austin and A&M.</p>
<p>In any case, yes, virtually all schools are regional to a degree. Many/most of the Ivies have about half or more of their student body from the Northeast while Rice draws roughly half its student body from TX.</p>
<p>The military academies are really the only truly national schools (though you can argue that MIT is close).</p>
<p>BTW, there are differing philosophies within the Ivies as well. I’ve heard that Princeton doesn’t favor NE applicants while other Ivies do.</p>
<p>Thank you Pizzagirl, your stats are really interesting, but I’m pretty sure that the attendees from the western region are dominated by California. Even if, as you all say, there are many great publics in California, there are so many people in California that they leak out into the rest of the country (I can say that since I grew up there and left after college). Also, California really suffered over the past several years and increased in-state tuition a great deal, which may have made many out-of-state schools a comparative bargain for a good student. I’ll bet the numbers of students from California has increased a lot all around the country in the past decade. Here in AZ there are a few people who know about Brown and Swat and Oberlin and all the other schools you mention, but most people know mostly about the in-state schools, the very biggest names, and a few privates in California. They probably know more about San Diego State than Brown. Most people wonder why anyone would want to apply anywhere but ASU, or U of A or NAU if they want to leave town, and most haven’t heard at least some of the college’s on my DS’s list (although everyone on CC has heard of them). </p>
<p>“Even if, as you all say, there are many great publics in California, there are so many people in California that they leak out into the rest of the country (I can say that since I grew up there and left after college)”</p>
<p>This is an INDEX. It’s correcting for absolute size. </p>