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

Parents Forum
721

<p>The overwhelming majority of kids attend college within a 5 hour drive of home. Convenience, cost, familiarity and lots of other reasons for that. So it is pretty DUH obvious that Stanford will have more western kids and Harvard more northeast kids. </p>

<p>The correct way to look at this would be to compare Harvard’s geographic distribution to that of other colleges located in the NE region. From this perspective, Harvard would look massively more national and less parochial as compared to, say, UMass or Northeastern.</p>

<p>It would be highly unusual for any school to not have some amount of over-representation from its home region. To get an even spread, the school would need a few characterisitcs. First, it has to be private to avoid the in-state tuition effect. Second, it needs to have a brand and other features (reputation, specific academic programs, price/value proposition, etc.) that makes it worthwhile for remote kids to apply and enroll. Why go 1,000 miles away when you can get the same thing at the same price 100 miles away? Third, the school has to be located in a region that does not produce a high volume of kids that match the demographics of the school’s enrolled population.</p>

<p>From that list, I’d guess schools like the following would have less regional enrollment than most: Duke, Vandy, Tulane, West Point, Annapolis.</p>

722

<p>I remember someone around here stating that their kid’s school gets kids into every school other than Harvard and it was one of the State run residential high schools in Illinois.</p>

723

<p>“There are magnet schools in the midwest with better measurables than Boston Latin that send zero to two to Harvard per year. From these schools, it’s easier to get on the faculty at Harvard than to get admitted as an undergrad.”</p>

<p>College admissions is a holistic process. Measurables are not everything. This is where local schools have an advantage. They know what local colleges look for more intimately, and can prepare the kids’ application profiles accordingly.</p>

<p>“Because they don’t get in… I had one person PM me saying that their high school went through a 10-year drought with nobody getting into Harvard. Meanwhile, they sent boatloads to MIT.”</p>

<p>Perhaps the school fits the STEM profile more?</p>

724

<p>Pizzagirl, I may have missed it, and apologies if I have, but did you get a chance to post what you believe would be a healthy distribution by region for Ivies and other elite schools? I am curious about your opinion on this, and the rationale as to why. Thank you very much in advance.</p>

725

<p>We forget about fit also. I asked my #2 what happened to a friend of his from high school who headed to Harvard. He told me she did not like Harvard and transferred (back to our state) to UofM after freshman year and graduated this year from UofM (my son graduated from his college this year also). </p>

726

<p>I don’t know, Catalan. </p>

727

<p>M3B, is the student from Maryland? That would again reinforce that home bias is paramount.</p>

728

<p>“I don’t know, Catalan.”</p>

<p>If you don’t, then why do you keep repeating that the geogrpahical distribution at the Ivies surprised you, or that you are not sure that the distribution is healthy? That would mean that you expected something different, which is why I asked - what exactly did you expect, and what’s healthy from your perspective? What’s the point of raw data if you do not have a benchmark or target to interpret it?</p>

729

<p>Because some good points have been made and I’m absorbing them. </p>

730

<p>OK, I will wait then, and ask in a few days.</p>

731

<p>“Pizzagirl, I may have missed it, and apologies if I have, but did you get a chance to post what you believe would be a healthy distribution by region for Ivies and other elite schools?”</p>

<p>The numbers say that Harvard is, in fact, the most national of all Ivy League schools. </p>

<p>It is a gigantic logic bust to think that any school would have its enrollment mirror the population distribution of the U.S. </p>

<p>I’d guess that West Point would be the one school in the country that would come closest to that. A unique school where admission spots flow through members of Congress who are apportioned by population per the U.S. Constitution. That’s a pretty strained concept of what a “national” school means.</p>

<p>In other breaking news, surfers are over-represented at the University of Hawaii, skiers are over-represented at the University of Colorado, African Americans are over-represented at Howard, and girls are over-represented at Bryn Mawr.</p>

732

<p>“The numbers say that Harvard is, in fact, the most national of all Ivy League schools.”</p>

<p>Yale’s distribution is very close.</p>

<p>All of the Ivies overindex at the 200 - 300 level in the NE.<br>
They range from 48% (Harvard) - 69% (Cornell) of their student body coming from the NE. </p>

733

<p>Tulane’s a school that, for a variety of reasons, has a pretty non-regional enrollment. 12.5% of students are from LA, which is only 1.4% of the U.S. population. Sounds pretty parochial --9 times as many LA students as it should have pro rata.</p>

<p>But then look at its top sending states in order: NY, LA, CA, NJ, IL, TX, MA, MD, FL, PA. That actually tracks national population distribution pretty well.</p>

<p>It would be wrong to say that Tulane is national but Harvard is regional. Also would be wrong to say Tulane is regional because of so many LA students. They’re both national obviously. </p>

734

<p>Actually, catalan, I’ve thought about it. </p>

<p>For the sake of this, pretend I’m running the Very Highly Elite PG-U.
I’d put this as a parameter I’d want to keep an eye on. To feel that I was a truly national school, it’s about evenness of regions. Even the “more national” MIT/U of Chicago/WashU student bodies still aren’t “national” - they are just more so than the uber-skewed ones.</p>

<p>Ideally, I’d probably want my indexes in all 4 regions to be between the 70 and 130 range (recognizing that I’m always going to have home region advantage). And I think it would be a metric I would still look at and want to understand, and hopefully see positive improvement on. </p>

<p>Having said that, I recognize that unless I were made of tons of cash, it’s difficult to “fight” public flagships in the 3 of the 4 regions where there are many excellent public flagships that attract excellent students; I recognize that there are other institutional goals that might work at cross purposes such as recruiting specific students / specific majors (e.g., I want to improve my engineering school), good-neighbor initiatives, legacy, athletic recruitment and (depending on where I’m located) diversity recruitment. And I also recognize that it is harder to “break in” to other regions (heck, the vitriolic reception WashU gets for basically existing show that).</p>

<p>So in sum, I’d say it would be a metric that I would look at and ideally want to improve at the <em>applicant pool level</em> (and let the admitted chips fall where they may), but I can’t say it would or necessarily should be THE key goal or key metric to measure against. And it might be a goal that to achieve, would require use of organizational resources that might be better placed against other initiatives, whether in admissions or for the organization as a whole. I hope that satisfies.</p>

735

<p>I’m still not sorry that I’ve “shaken up” some conventional wisdom, though, such as the common belief that, well, of course, the Ivies would be more national than other schools. I’m just sorry I happened to call out WashU instead of U of Chicago as my poster child for “look who does it better,” because I suspect the conversation would have gone a different way, and it’s interesting to speculate why that is. </p>

736

<p>Pizzagirl – a reasonable definition of a national school would be based on having significant (but not pro rata) numbers of students coming from outside the home state or region. UVA is of course a national school. While 2/3rds of its students come from VA, 1/3 do not. Which is a very high number for a state school. All the Ivies are, of course, national schools because they massively over-enroll students from all around the U.S. and the globe, AS COMPARED TO MOST SCHOOLS IN THE NORTHEAST.</p>

737

<p>Pizzagirl, It <em>almost</em> satisfies. I would also like to know what you think your final geographic distribution would be given the constraints that you just mentioned. It is quite clear that hypothetically speaking, you would want a proportional representation with some allowance for variance (70-130). (This by the way was clear from your earlier posts, that you want a proportional distribution, but since you kept denying it, I got confused. It’s good that you have now clearly admitted it.) But where do you think you would actually end up?</p>

<p>If I may ask one other question, assume that you are running Super Elite PG-International Univesity, based in the USA. What distribution would you want to have, hypothetically speaking, by country? Still 70-130? </p>

<p>And if there is scope for yet another question, why do you think proportional distribution is something you would want PG-U to aim for? I understand how under representation by minorities or low SES groups hurt the country. However, I am curious how under representation by geographial footprint hurts anything, especially since there are good schools everywhere. </p>

<p>I am not challenging anything here, I am just trying to understand your perspective. Do you think S and MW students are not well served by their state schools and local privates? Why would they need to come to the NE to get educated? Are NE schools better? (I believe you are of the opinion that the NE schools are not better, right?)</p>

<p>“I’m still not sorry that I’ve “shaken up” some conventional wisdom, though, such as the common belief that, well, of course, the Ivies would be more national than other schools.”</p>

<p>Well, once you answer the question that I asked above - what geographical distribution you think you will end up realistically speaking and not hypothetically speaking - I would encourage you to compare that distribution to what the Ivies have. I believe that you will find that Ivies beat that realistic distribution like a drum, especially the top-tier Ivies. </p>

<p>That’s because they are the best schools in the country and have huge national pull. </p>

738

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<p>I know that’s your point of view. I’m just trying to dispel the notion that the under-representation of the midwest at HYP is because of a lack of competitive applicants. </p>

739

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<p>Students at midwest/south public magnet schools generally have similar profiles in terms of ECs as Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia. However, TJ seems to have a lot more success with HYP than schools not on the east coast. </p>

<p>The historic private high schools on the East Coast also have the advantage of having hundreds of years of having a relationship between them and Harvard. </p>

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<p>I wouldn’t expect the ratio of admits over 10 years for MIT and Harvard to be 150 to zero. MIT is about 50% smaller than Harvard, and probably half of Harvard’s majors are in math and science (many premeds.) And these other schools aren’t any more math/sci slanted weren’t than Thomas Jefferson. </p>

740

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<p>At the risk of of reverting to the first pages of this thread, there has been no shaking up of conventional wisdom as such wisdom is still the correct one. The national schools recognized as such are still every bit as national as ever. </p>

<p>As far as relying on Chicago as opposed to WashU, the reactions would have been exactly similar. The basic problem WAS NOT to call WashU a school with national catchment -it IS - but to call it both MORE national than the Ivies or Stanford and … surprisingly so. </p>

<p>The problems were to rely on a flawed thesis from the get go and unclear data. In the end, none of this was really new to people who are familiar with the data available to evaluate schools. No surprise. </p>