K- well none of that is particularly relevant so I’m about done here. I’ll finish by saying I don’t know if its likely that Penn students didn’t have HYPS as an option since I don’t have access to double-secret-probation-style cross admit data. I know a bunch of kids who turned down HYPS in some combination, myself included, to attend Penn and I know it turned out to be a great choice. I also know that in 2012 Penn wasn’t trying to build its undergraduate education to stand among the top 10 in the nation since it had already been there for over a decade… but every university has its own priorities:
Hopkins’ 10 by 2020 plan to make JHU a top ten undergraduate university: http://president.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/TenbyTwenty.pdf
but yeah… i bet JHU (unlike HYPS, Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT) doesn’t have to work to lure cross admits from Brown, Penn, and Columbia… 8-|