<p>monydad, Cornell with the one or two suicides - applications become stagnant, Yale with the one or two murders - applications become stagnant, and then there is Columbia where a student-run drug distribution ring gets uncovered and the applications go up by 35%…Go figure.</p>
<p>^hell yeah.</p>
<p>onecircuit - news broke after most kids would’ve begun their applications, plus columbia isn’t the first school with a drug bust, and the drug bust at cornell a few days after columbia was far bigger ([Cornell</a> Student Keri Blakinger Arrested After Drug Bust Yields $150K In Heroin](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Cornell Student Keri Blakinger Arrested After Drug Bust Yields $150K In Heroin | HuffPost College)). </p>
<p>beyond this - i have never seen a study that has measured attitudes of applicants after murders/suicides, etc. so i think we shouldn’t yet make the claim that it is a reason for rise or fall. i am not saying it is not a possible reason, just that i think we need actual research and not speculation on the issue.</p>
<p>you may feel you need it, but you won’t get it. There were no surveys conducted, studies, etc. of why someone did or did not apply, at least that have been, or will be, made public. So all there’s left to do is speculate.</p>
<p>Personally I think it’s a more reasonable explanation than the previously-advanced substitute of Columbia as Princeton’s b**ch,
but if you have more affinity for the prior explanation the two of you are free to hold that viewpoint. Since there is, actually, no research available on the topic.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek, personally I find it hard to believe that applications would drop at a school because of a kid jumping into the Cayuga Waters or a lab assistant getting murdered in the school labs. But parents are strange in this way.</p>
<p>I can tell you that significant levels of concern were raised, at the time, on the CC Cornell sub-forum and also elsewhere on CC, FWIW.</p>
<p>nanaba, where did you get the numbers on how many students from CC/SEAS attend graduate schools at Columbia or other institutions and could you post the link? Thanks, I’ve been looking for information on what the graduating class does.</p>
<p>What about Columbia’s MBA?</p>
<p>Nanaba’s numbers seem totally off to me. Princeton does exceptionally well at graduate placement. Choosing Columbia over Princeton because you think its going to get you into a better grad school is probably the most ridiculous argument I’ve seen on CC. If anything its the other way around.</p>
<p>the pton numbers are from that page for sure, but that is also from a self-reported survey, so that is far from everyone. and then the issue of class size, where columbia is slightly bigger. and just going to grad school doesn’t say which grad school you go to.</p>
<p>i’d agree, at present, princeton has better g-school placement. but things can change.</p>
<p>here you go</p>
<p>this might give you some idea of Princeton v. Columbia in terms of getting into top Business, Medical and Law graduate schools:</p>
<p><a href=“WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights”>WSJ in Higher Education | Trusted News & Real-World Insights;
<p>onecircuit, that is fair, i will say however that the schools they have chosen are slightly suspect.</p>
<p>“So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth’s Tuck School; Harvard; MIT’s Sloan School; and Penn’s Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.”</p>
<p>why not sbs or sls? reasonable questions to ask. for law, why not nyu (which i know at least something like 30 kids from my class have attended) instead of mich or even columbia. so the selection would change things - for all the schools.</p>
<p>also of note “Our team of reporters fanned out to these schools to find the alma maters for every student starting this fall, more than 5,100 in all. Nine of the schools gave us their own lists, but for the rest we relied mainly on “face book” directories schools give incoming students.”</p>
<p>so let’s not make a jump to conclusions mat. the biggest problem i have with the data is that what if you take 2 years off from school, does wsj (which i doubt) take that into effect, are they just referring to those who graduate (which would matter). you might find some schools more than others lead students to take time off or not. then there is the overall problem of who attends graduate schools, or who feels they need to attend graduate school. </p>
<p>but overall, as i’ve said before, i think you’d be hard pressed to say that the pton student doesn’t, at present, do better than columbia when applying to graduate school, the wsj’s bad survey or a more comprehensive or real one would affirm. it is just that it is not a) the whole story, b) doesn’t mean it will always be the case.</p>
<p>and, not to belabor this point too much. it includes cc/seas/gs. gs students of course go to top grad programs, but a) it is not necessarily allowing one to compare apples to apples, b) many gs students i knew of were not necessarily hunting to go to pay more in debt again by going to grad school.</p>
<p>admissionsgeek, thanks for the info</p>
<p>@one circuit</p>
<p>[Columbia</a> College admit rate drops to 6.4 percent](<a href=“http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/03/30/cc-admit-rate-drops-64-percent]Columbia”>http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2011/03/30/cc-admit-rate-drops-64-percent)</p>
<p>what was that you were saying about columbia’s admission rate again??</p>
<p>sucks to look like a ***** when reality hits you square in the chest doesnt it?</p>
<p>i wish columbia ppl would stop toting around that statistic. columbia only had a sharp rise in applicants b/c a) they allowed for the commonapp this year and b) they spent more on advertising than any of the other comparable schools. i mean, i’ve gotten 35 emails in my inbox during the application season from columbia alone. and i hear they keep sending emails to those admitted like every single freaking day. sounds like they’re desperate, really.</p>
<p>a) but princeton already uses the common app and other schools, so how is this relevant. it means columbia is catching up.</p>
<p>b) prove it. seriously prove it. you can’t because admissions office budgets are not publicly available, so stop saying things. columbia like most schools buy student names and they are often not responsible for the direct contact with students, but third parties do it for them. so your many emails may even be your fault for signing up for multiple lists than columbia’s fault. ever thought of that?</p>
<p>anyhow great post!</p>
<p>Yes, I agree that the statistics is rather flawed. First, they based the survey on just one year. Also, the more liberal arts focused colleges (with negligible engineering population) seems in general to situate on the top: this simply means that more liberal arts students are applying to Law Schools, Business Schools, and Medical Schools than engineering students, which is as expected. Therefore, the survey does not speak to the quality of the education. Third, you notice that the numbers for the top dozen schools (with similar student composition with respect to liberal arts vs engineering students) are very closely lumped (ex: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale; the liberal arts sister schools; Duke, Columbia, Dartmouth, MIT), so any statistical fluctuations could have yielded different results for the schools in each of these groups. The ranking also penalizes schools with more international students, because a large sum of these students would probably return to their home countries for Professional Schooling (Especially law schools). The survey also favors smaller schools, because a difference of 1 student (due to statistical fluctuations from year to year) could boost the percentage for the smaller school much more than the larger school; think about this like the game of rolling a dice and predicting its outcome. If you roll the dice fewer times, you get more fluctuations in probability. </p>
<p>This study to me is more like a publicity stunt than a reputable research conclusion.</p>
<p>To be honest, in the end, it doesn’t matter what the acceptance rate is, or even how strong the applicant pool is (assume that Columbia is attracting the same proportion of strong students as HYPSM, and the recent boost in applications isn’t all just weak applicants with no chance). What matters is where the strongest students attend, and the reality is that almost all the students admitted to Columbia and one or more of HYPSM will choose not to attend Columbia (at Stanford <2% of the students who choose not to attend end up at Columbia, and I have a feeling that figure is even smaller for East Coast schools). That’s the functional equivalent of having a lower selectivity. So the admit rate, no matter how artificially low, becomes useless.</p>
<p>I also think that’s why P is the least selective of HYPSM. Princeton’s yield is comparable to Columbia’s because most of the cross-admits that it loses are to HYSM (and it loses to all of them). So that means the pecking order goes something like HYSM (not in order), Princeton, then Columbia. But it’s a big deal for any school to be butting into HYPSM, so Columbia should be proud of that.</p>
<p>I would be more circumspect when making sweeping statements such as “less than 2 % of cross admits choose Columbia”…Making claims such as these without any basis reduces the value of forums such as these. Forums should be used to advise and support high school applicants with life-forming decisions…not table-thumping or wild assertions.</p>
<p>The only statistical way to study cross-admits would be a count of wait-list admissions by these schools. The hypothesis being that a cross-admit choosing between the HCYSP schools (those with less than 9% acceptance rate) would create a vacancy. Ultimately all these decisions would end up with the worst-off school ending up with taking the most students off the wait-list. The school which does the best will end up taking the least off the wait-list.</p>
<p>Instead of making claims out of the blue, I invite someone to post this information for the Ivies and SM. If I am not wrong, Columbia ended up taking no one off its waitlist. Princeton ended up taking 146 off its wait-list.</p>
<p>What this means is that Princeton used up all its ‘excess’, that is candidates in excess of the number of seats who were offered spots and then dipped down into its waitlist to fill the spots that were still available because of candidates who turned it down. If you assume that all these candidates took up an offer from one of the others you can form a better idea of how it did against all the others. By any reckoning, Columbia has fared extremely well in the cross-admit fight.</p>