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

Parents Forum
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<p>@‌ green678
"@Much2learn‌ said: “For example, U of C faculty members have won a huge number of Nobel Prizes. I don’t think that a member of the WUSTL faculty has ever won a single Nobel Prize.”</p>

<p>Not true. There have been 3 faculty in Chemistry, 1 in Physics, 1 in Economics and 17 in Physiology or Medicine. And, 1 of this year’s Chemistry winners did his undergraduate degree at WashU."</p>

<p>I chose my words poorly. I should have said a member of the academic staff. Someone who actually teaches there. I believe that all affiliated winners on faculty have been purely researchers and not actually teaching. In any case, it is still a great school, but has not achieved to the level of U of C. That was the main point. </p>

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<p>We will have to speculate about WHY Princeton reached out to Whitney Young High School in Chicago, but we do not have to speculate about the why Michele Robinson at Princeton. Or we could read about Goheen and Rudenstine. </p>

<p>She FOLLOWED her brother Craig at Princeton who went at the insistence of his father who preferred P over schools that offered basketball scholarships. </p>

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<p>Didn’t I just ask everyone to think about this conceptually and not about the specific person? </p>

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<p>“Yet 30 years ago, Princeton engaged in efforts to “find her and lift her out.” Presumably they thought it was worth it to find and extract diamonds in the rough. So why wouldn’t we think that that’s a similar institutional priority today?”</p>

<p>It is. Princeton has a healthy regional distribution. Do you disagree?</p>

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<p>Did you really ask THIS forum to think conceptually about the issue of “seeking” diamonds in the rough among minorities? This concept is a known grenade on College Confifential and never ends very well as it digs rapidly in issues of racial preferences and discriminations. Just google/search Espenshade for occurences on CC, and you will understand what I mean.</p>

<p>On the issues of Princeton in the eighties, this is a nice summary. Searching for Hargadon’s contributions is equally revealing.</p>

<p><a href=“'Kaleidoscope' conference remarks by President Emeritus William G. Bowen”>http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/31/90A28/index.xml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>In terms of responding to your chosen example of Mrs. Obama, it can indeed be done “conceptually” and the answer is not too different. The student ended up at Princeton because the parents looked beyond their own community for their children and the first one happened to marry academics and sports. The second one followed in the steps paved and benefitted from additional preparation and guidance. </p>

<p>If you are interested in the issue of how low SES and minorities end up in elite schools, you might try to dissociate what schools do and what is needed and done by the students and the adults around them as it is grossly different. Schools end up making the decisions in terms of admissions and might extend the reach and scope of their “recruiting” but the real driver and life changer is the … early preparation of the students in anticipation of the process. Simply stated, it is NOT what schools do but what people in the life of those students do. And that is a HUGE difference. Schools tend to get credit where none is due.** A proof of this is this is how schools HAVE responded to the racial inequalities much better than they have to SES inequalities. Our racial distribution is adequate (with a just a bit of over representation from one particular group) but the SES is grossly inadequate at the top 300 schools. Check Carnevale and Rose for details.</p>

<p>And it is not hard to understand. Connections, legacies and friends of legacies and connections come in all races and locations. Your example, perhaps unwilling, is just a testament to the power of connections. </p>

<p>**that applies to criticisms as well. Cut both ways!</p>

<p>PS Interested parties to read more about this concept might find it interesting to follow the history of Questbridge or Posse. As well as reading the research of Avery and perhaps Hoxby. </p>

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<p>For reference, Princeton’s distribution of students indexes as follows:
NE 227, MW 52, S 46, W 95.</p>

<p>I don’t know if “healthy” is the right word to describe it. It follows the same pattern as 5 other Ivies, Stanford and Northwestern – over indexed at home, average in one other region, below average in the remaining 2.</p>

<p>What would a distribution have to look like, IYO, to look “unhealthy”?</p>

<p>I don’t know whether this pattern reflects the applicant pool, or whether my applicant pool is even more northeast skewed, or maybe my yield differs for different regions.
If I were Princeton, I <em>might</em> say - hmmm, there are probably still some areas of the midwest / south where I might want to do some outreach. Of course, I’m not Princeton administration and they may have all kinds of different institutional objectives trumping this, including but not limited to attracting certain racial / ethnic groups, admitting legacies to keep alumni happy, keeping Princeton High School happy, maintaining historic ties with elite boarding schools, trying to recruit for certain talents or majors that they’d like to boost themselves in, and a dozen other things. </p>

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<p>There was a local Questbridge kid who got into Columbia couple of years ago with a full ride. Many of the classmates who were applying to top schools were aghast when the parents made her pull out of the binding commitment (the excuse given was they were not aware she was applying and they did not want her to go that far). </p>

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<p>"But no one ever asserted “WashU is the equal of the Ivies.” We asserted “based in these data, imperfect as they are, WashU and U Of Chicago attract a more nationally rep student body than either their Midwestern private brethren (NU and ND) and the Ivies.” That seemed to tick a lot of people off.</p>

<p>I think what really happened is that people projected. The moment that WashU did something, it automatically became unimportant. Everyone completely skipped over the fact that U of Chicago did the same thing and we were off to the races.</p>

<p>If the data had shown Ivies had a national student body and WashU and U of Chicsgo highly regional one, it would have been framed as even more evidence that WashU was some kind of undeserving parvenu – look, it can only attract Midwesterners! Please! – and some tortured explanation would have been found for U of Chicago."</p>

<p>Personally, I never heard of WashU before this thread, and geographical distribution was always unimportant to me. As it is the elite colleges are almost uniformly high SES (Harvard, for example, has only 20% of kids coming from families with income less than $60k). Whether a upper middle class kid comes from Wichita or Warwick makes no difference to me.</p>

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<p>“I chose my words poorly. I should have said a member of the academic staff. Someone who actually teaches there. I believe that all affiliated winners on faculty have been purely researchers and not actually teaching. In any case, it is still a great school, but has not achieved to the level of U of C. That was the main point.”</p>

<p>And yet both U of Chicago (the school whose feet we’re all supposed to worship at, on CC) and Wash U (the third rail, at which we’re all supposed to sneer) manage to get student bodies that are far closer to national representation than any other elite school. And it’s NOT due to “proximity to Laclede County, Missouri” as shown by Northwestern (and Notre Dame, which is the proverbial forgotten-elite on CC). Why is that? </p>

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<p>"For reference, Princeton’s distribution of students indexes as follows:
NE 227, MW 52, S 46, W 95.</p>

<p>I don’t know if “healthy” is the right word to describe it. It follows the same pattern as 5 other Ivies, Stanford and Northwestern – over indexed at home, average in one other region, below average in the remaining 2.</p>

<p>What would a distribution have to look like, IYO, to look “unhealthy”?"</p>

<p>Since geography is unimportant to me, any distribution is healthy to me as long as the kids are top notch. Where they come from is irrelevant. I am not a big fan of good neighbor policies either. If the whole student body is from out of state, that’s fine too. </p>

<p>That said, statistically speaking, this is roughly what I would expect the distribution of an Ivy to me.</p>

<p>In South and Midwest, the Ivy will be competing with the local state universities (which are quite good, and offer a huge tuition and distane advantage on top of quality of education). Hence I would expect the Ivy to get no more than 33% of the top kids from the South and Midwest.</p>

<p>In the West, the Ivy will not only be competing with the local state universities, it would also be competing with Stanford and Caltech. The distance advantage of the local state universities would be even more extreme than the schools in the S and MW. So I would expect the yield to be about 25%.</p>

<p>The rest, of course, will have to come from the North East, putting that yield to about 300.</p>

<p>So, statistically speaking, I would have expected at or around 300, 33, 33, 25 for the Ivies. That the Ivies attract significantly more kids from S, MW, and W speak to their drawing power, and also the effort they make to avoid being a NE centered school. Which, by the way, is an useless exercie as far as I am concerned, but if the quality of the kids is still the same, then it can’t hurt. So I am ambivalent about it.</p>

<p>Now that I have presented my perspective, what’s your position on a healthy distribution?</p>

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<p><a href=“the%20excuse%20given%20was%20they%20were%20not%20aware%20she%20was%20applying%20and%20they%20did%20not%20want%20her%20to%20go%20that%20far”>quote</a>.

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<p>That excuse was a very poor one. While many might not know the details of the QB application, an excuse that intimates they were not aware is not plausible. There are several forms that need to be signed by the student, the GC, and the parents that confirm the “awareness” of the application. And this is on top of the tax returns, the FAFSA and Profile forms. </p>

<p>But as we know, people say all kinds of things about applications and admissions that are not really true. At least, this one was not one of 'em “He got into Harvard, but we prefer the vibe of Alabama!”</p>

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<p>“And yet both U of Chicago (the school whose feet we’re all supposed to worship at, on CC) and Wash U (the third rail, at which we’re all supposed to sneer) manage to get student bodies that are far closer to national representation than any other elite school. And it’s NOT due to “proximity to Laclede County, Missouri” as shown by Northwestern (and Notre Dame, which is the proverbial forgotten-elite on CC). Why is that?”</p>

<p>Likely because they made it a priority to do so while others haven’t. </p>

<p>Why is that important?</p>

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<p>To interject a bit of humor in this thread (yes, it is necessary to signal such things nowadays to please a certain crowd) I would assume that you did not have a working email or checked your mailbox often. </p>

<p>It is a rare feat to escape the reach and wrath of WashU/WUSTL adcoms. I swear I believe they might have a Craig computer hidden in a St Louis basement that is munching on all the PSAT scores of this century to ensure no stone is left unturned with a possible candidate. </p>

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<p>I should add another point to my earlir post on what I would expect the ditribution of an Ivy to be, which I put at 300, 33, 33, 25.</p>

<p>The above would assume that the distribution of quality students is uniform across the states. I do not believe that to be the case. In greater New York City or Washington DC or Boston, for example, or in the Bay area, college admissions is a blood sport among people who qualify in the top 1% in terms of income across the country, and there are a LOT of such families in these areas. I doubt it is the same in the rest of the country, and in any case SES is far lower on average in the S and MW. Hence, I believe the quality of top students is more skewed towards the NE and the W. Hence, I would tend to think that if adjusted for that, the distribution may look more like 250, 25, 25, 75, which is where the Ivies closely land at.</p>

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<p>Maybe U. of Chicago didn’t make it a priority to have national representation, but rather Harvard et al. made it a priority to have regional (Northeast) representation. Or perhaps they have a hidden (or not so hidden) Midwest bias. It’s clear that it’s not uncommon for Northeasterners to look down on Midwesterners, and it is most likely people from the Northeast who are making decisions at Northeast schools. </p>

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<p>To repeat parts of a previous post, take a look at the Stanford minutes and the presentation by Dean Shaw that shows the yield battles against other highly selective schools. Fwiw, there are reasons to not look at the Ivy League as an homogeneous group in terms of revealed preferences. Inasmuch as some hate the term “lower Ivies” the drawing power of each school is variable. </p>

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<p>“I do not believe that to be the case. In greater New York City or Washington DC or Boston, for example, or in the Bay area, college admissions is a blood sport among people who qualify in the top 1% in terms of income across the country, and there are a LOT of such families in these areas. I doubt it is the same in the rest of the country, and in any case SES is far lower on average in the S and MW.”</p>

<p>You’re not aware of affluent upper-middle-class enclaves in Minneapolis and Chicago and Cleveland and Kansas City and Charlotte and Atlanta and Denver that are every bit as upscale and educated and well-traveled as their counterparts in Boston, NY or DC? </p>

<p>Also, is it your contention that Ivies / elite schools look mostly for high SES kids? If so, I wonder why they keep touting all their financial aid policies and how their educations are now affordable for many in the working / middle class. Do you think that is just for show, or do you think that’s a real institutional priority of theirs? </p>

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<p>Thanks for your explanation; I need to ponder it a bit. A few things that come to mind …</p>

<p>1) Would you then expect Stanford to look like 75, 25, 25, 250 (in other words, same pattern as the Ivies, just flipped towards the west)? </p>

<p>2) What about the midwestern and southern privates - what would you expect them to look like?</p>

<p>3) Would you expect / anticipate MIT to be any different from the Ivies, and if so, why / why not? </p>

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<p>"1) Would you then expect Stanford to look like 75, 25, 25, 250 (in other words, same pattern as the Ivies, just flipped towards the west)?</p>

<p>2) What about the midwestern and southern privates - what would you expect them to look like?</p>

<p>3) Would you expect / anticipate MIT to be any different from the Ivies, and if so, why / why not?"</p>

<p>1) I don’t know what Stanford should look like. I am not familiar with Stanford and never gave it much thought.</p>

<p>2) Same as #1</p>

<p>3) I would expect MIT to be within the statistical range (+/- 2 sigma, say) of the mean of the Ivies.</p>