Columbia will have a lower RD admit rate than Harvard & Princeton

Colleges and Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>Hi all. I compiled the admission data for all of the Ivies + Stanford/MIT. Based on last year's admit numbers and this year's application pool, Columbia will have the second lowest RD admit rate out of all Ivies (5.5%). Yale is projected to have the lowest ever RD admit rate: 5.0%. In contrast, Harvard's will be 6.3%, Princeton at 8.4%, and Stanford at 5.5%.</p>

<p>If you would like to see the data for the remaining schools (total admits, defer rate, etc.), see the spreadsheet I made here:</p>

<p><a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17525393/Admission%20Data.xls%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17525393/Admission%20Data.xls&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Hopefully this can keep everyone distracted while we all anxiously wait for results.</p>

<p>Disclaimer: I made this out of boredom. This is just a projection, and is by no means an exact representation of what will happen come April. There are also many lurking variables affecting the numbers (e.g. ED/EA/neither).</p>

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<p>lol nice, made at 2 in the morning?</p>

<p>Although I don’t understand why Yale would have the lowest…since they’re surge in the number of application wasn’t that great, their acceptance rate should be around last years right, which was 7 percent?</p>

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<p>^ OP is talking about RD admit rates, not cumulative admit rates. Cumulatively, Yale will probably be around ~7.5% as it was last year (also keep in mind that the sheer increase in applicants probably also means more cross-admits and a slightly more conservative calculation of yield rates, meaning schools might admit a few more kids than they did last year. This applies to all schools of course, and going by that logic I would not predict quite as low admissions rates as those suggested).</p>

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<p>@collegeftw: Yale accepted a lot of applicants early. Therefore they can only take ~1180 students in regular decision, hence lowering the RD admit rate. And it was actually 12am… I’m out on the West Coast.</p>

<p>@monstor344: But even if each school decide to take 30 more applicants, the admit rate will only go up by less than 0.1%. So for the most part, I think this is a good projection.</p>

<p>I also added UChicago, Caltech and UC Berkeley, if anyone’s interested.</p>

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<p>^hm, I think ur projections look pretty legit. I"m sort of doubtful of the yield rate tho; Stanford’s 72% seems a bit high, but its plausible. What caught my eye was ur projection of Upenn’s 63 percent, more than Columbia’s by 8 percent…cuz to my knowlege, upenn (aside from Wharton) was a relatively weak ivy with pretty high acceptance rate, didn’t exact that many ppl to matriculate.</p>

<p>otherwise, good job lol. and yeah its kinda annoying that uchicago didnt release their ea acceptance rate…</p>

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<p>^ The yields are based off of the last admissions cycle and are probably pretty accurate. Columbia and Penn (as well as every ED option school) accepts a significant percentage of their students ED and thus their yields are inflated. In other words, ED-offering schools’ yield rates should not be compared to non-ED ones. </p>

<p>But as Monstor already noted, the surge in applications at most schools is not a reflection of an increased applicant pool, but of the increasing trend of increased applications per applicant. And so, yield rates at most schools will probably be a bit lower, with HYPS most likely the least affected.</p>

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<p>Holy crap…
WHY does Yale defer so many students??!! o____O What is the point? Can’t they narrow it down a /little/ more? </p>

<p>Meh, I’m one of the 696 deferred students to Columbia. -___-</p>

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<p>

</p>

<p>I guess you need some more knowledge then, huh</p>

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<p>^ lol broumad? Upenn’s a great school, but aside from wharton, the rest of the school is not comparable to the other ivies. The early acceptance rate for college of arts and sciences, for example, is well over 30%…and its research is relatively weak. I’m not bashing on Upenn here, but since you nitpicked on my post, im going to put it in specific context: upenn (exluding wharton) is a weak ivy (but still a great school…). And I originally got the “upenn is a weak ivy” sentiment from reading “a is for admissions” but other research says pretty much same thing.</p>

<p>and sicne i need mroe knowlege, please enlighten me</p>

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<p>why upenn’s yield is higher -</p>

<p>a) wharton by itself is probably one of if not the highest yielding single ‘undergraduate school’ if you consider harvard college a school in the same sense. pulls up the yield of the school overall.</p>

<p>b) other penn ugrad schools benefit from the larger size of the class. it is well known that the larger the class size the higher the yield. harvard is helped in many ways because of this. it is because it allows you consider students that your peers would otherwise not consider because of their size constraints, and also consider them without significantly hurting your applicant statistics. that one kid with ok grades, but is bleeding penn can be admitted, whereas columbia wouldn’t look twice at that same student because they need to fill students interested in as many majors as penn has but with fewer students.</p>

<p>c) compared to columbia it has a higher percentage of its class admitted ED (approximately 48%) </p>

<p>d) it has a larger legacy percentage than columbia 14% to 9%.</p>

<p>e) it has more intercollegiate athletics and in some sports stronger athletic teams. it also has a lot of unique dual degree programs that draw interest.</p>

<p>f) there is a kind of student that enjoys penn and would enjoy penn, and stereotypes do work here to an extent. and penn is good at nurturing those ties and developing them in a way that makes students desire penn uniquely irrespective of other ivy schools.</p>

<hr>

<p>but ultimately this is why yield isn’t the only or best indicator of prestige or even student preference. also penn has a 4-5% yield headstart on columbia from ed, which kind of attributes to the 5-8% difference in yields between the two schools. but as noted above there are a lot of reasons (and good reasons) why penn has a very good yield.</p>

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<p>

Even Cornell? And do you really think Penn’s research is relatively weak compared to undergrad focused schools like Dartmouth and Brown?</p>

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<p>penn med is easily considered one of the best in the country. seas is pretty great and influential. and many of their interdisciplinary programs show that penn is the kind of place that likes to be a step ahead of the pack.</p>

<p>–</p>

<p>but i understand the perception. when you think traditional barometers of excellence in the humanities or the natural sciences, penn doesn’t LEAP to mind, if even it is very very solid. i mean i am having trouble naming someone in fields i am interested in that teaches at penn that is considered a rockstar in the field. that could be i didn’t know the person was at penn, or something else. but perception is sometimes key.</p>

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<p>hume, for undergrad, yes, upenn - wharton and cornell are two weakest. It is part of the reason why Upenn has stronger athletics, it can admit students with lower “academic index” (ivies have this thing where athletes can’t be 1d away from the average or something…)</p>

<p>that said, like admssiongeek noted earlier, a lot of its GRADUATE programs are astonishingly good, such as Upenn med.</p>

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<p>This type of anti-Penn sentiment often crops up on websites and message boards like this one, presumably out of jealousy for nouveau prestige and selectivity. Let me dredge your BS with a few facts.</p>

<p>Here are the SAT averages for the class of 2014 at Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, and Columbia, as listed by the schools’s respective dailies. Where I could not find data, I used the common data set provided by the university.</p>

<p>Dartmouth:
SAT: 2174
ACT Composite: 32</p>

<p>Penn:
SAT: 2178
ACT Composite: 32</p>

<p>Brown:
SAT: 2150
ACT Composite: 31</p>

<p>Columbia:
SAT: 2185
ACT Composite: 32</p>

<p>These schools are basically equivalent (if anything, Brown appears to lag significantly – but Penn is definitely parable). I can think of a few common arguments against this conclusion, which I’ll present and address factually:</p>

<p>1) Penn’s acceptance rate is dragged down by Wharton.
This is not true. Penn’s overall acceptance rate is almost directly equivalent to the individual acceptance rate for CAS; Wharton’s purported magnifying effect is balanced out by engineering and nursing, which constitute the same proportion of the class (20%). This is corroborated often by various media blitzes from the admissions office.</p>

<p>2) Penn’s SAT average is dragged up by Wharton.
Another myth. While Wharton is definitely marginally more selective than the College, the difference in SAT average only varies by 10-14 points every year (for more information see this book, The Running of the Bulls: From Wharton to Wall Street). 14 points is the same ballpark lead that Princeton enjoys over Harvard. Huge difference in selectivity, right… ? If anything, both the College AND Wharton are boosted by SEAS (the same phenomenon predominates at Columbia – engineering admissions are significantly more test-based).</p>

<p>3) But Columbia accepts, like, HALF the kids that Dartmouth and Penn do!
That is PURELY a function of applicant pool, class size, and the drawing power of NYC. For instance, Columbia has a significantly lower acceptance rate than MIT and Caltech, and soon Princeton – but it certainly isn’t more prestigious, selective, or even desirable than those schools.</p>

<p>In fact, at the website ratem ychances.com, you can compare these schools head-to-head, using data yielded from past and present applicants. It’s pretty clear that, if anything, Penn has a massive lead in the cross-acceptance pool. Indeed, this is borne out by their preference ranking, which shows Penn leading 5th, ahead of all three of its peer schools (Dartmouth, Brown, and Columbia).</p>

<p>As for Hernandez’s nonsense in “A is for Admission”: that is VERY dated application advice. Dartmouth hasn’t been more selective than Penn since 2001 at the latest (around the time she stopped working there…). When I applied to college 4 years ago, Penn was already considered harder to get into - I can’t imagine who would take her advice seriously now.</p>

<p>Finally, I’d like to appeal to your personal experience a college applicant and 17 year old. Perhaps it’s the geographical bias of my secondary education (I hail from the Northeast), but the conventional wisdom in my high school was that Penn and Columbia were peers to every extent, perhaps even more so than Dartmouth and Brown. Is this sentiment local to the Boston area, or is it just blissfully extinguished once we all get our acceptance packages? Among the students in my year accepted to Columbia, Penn and Brown, (and Harvard and Princeton and MIT!) there was almost no meaningful difference in SAT, class rank, or accomplishment. The Princeton kid had won some math competitions, and the MIT kid liked to build models and do machine work, but that was about it. The potential seemed pretty equivalent. Is this not your experience?</p>

<p>I welcome your anecdotes, both supporting and critical – perhaps my egalitarian understanding of elite admissions is fundamentally flawed.</p>

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<p>to your 3) yes i’ve said this for some time. it used to lose almost all cross admits to the above schools, but it doesn’t anymore, so it is certainly is changing and improving.</p>

<p>i have always conceded that columbia’s selectivity is bloated by its smaller size (though after looking at stats again, columbia is about as large as yale and princeton, though smaller than brown and penn). smaller in the sense that each year it is putting out fewer graduates than harvard for sure, but also smaller relative to the size of its overall student population, which means things such as faculty to student ratio and other measures appear stronger than it otherwise might be. but columbia is in the process of expanding its class over the next few years. so we shall see.</p>

<hr>

<p>i think a lot of what i say about penn having a higher yield is relevant to understanding why it is also a different institution, and in many ways supports the conclusion it is not as selective as columbia (i have always thought it was more so than brown, you brought the other schools into this conversation). i think we ought to consider that at 10k+ ugrad students, it is quite a large school, with many different kinds of students attracted, which is great, but a larger sample size allows you to have more deviations form the mean without destroying the mean. for example you show us avg. sat scores, but what is the sd? i recall looking at 25-75 levels of SAT and Columbia had the smallest gap, probably because of its smaller student body, whereas cornell, harvard and penn had the largest gaps…it would lend credence to this, if even the mean is relatively strong.</p>

<p>as for cross admits, i’d like to see more data about this that is more current. there once was an academic article going back to the early 2000s that was out and interesting. i’d be curious how things are now. brown back then was beating columbia in cross admits, and i feel that is less likely the case, and columbia v. penn were pretty close. things probably have shifted. this article, moreover, was more reliable than your ratemychances sample.</p>

<p>as for my experience - my school most often had kids going to dartmouth, penn and cornell, with only one per year max getting into other schools. i was the only one who got into columbia within a 5 year+/- gap (in part because of who applies, but of those who did a lot of folks had good boards). i remember a kid a year later i was trying to convince to apply to columbia, he said he wouldn’t dare (even with his 1500 boards) because it was by his interpretation too hard to get into. he went to penn nursing. a kid who got into penn cas, was a double leg at dartmouth, and was born at dartmouth hospital, applied ed, and was denied at dartmouth. it is to say my experience was that the perception from my high school was that cornell and then penn were the easiest ivies to get into (if you wanted to go ivy).</p>

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<p>Interesting. At my high school, there was almost no distinction between HYP, MIT, Penn and Columbia. Brown followed, and then Cornell. No one ever expressed interest in Dartmouth, Stanford, or Duke.</p>

<p>I have never seen data about the standard deviation or clumping of SAT scores at elite colleges, although I would be very interested.</p>

<p>admissionsgeek, where are you from and when did you apply? Students are definitely hindered by a poor relationship with a given high school. For example, in my year, 4 students (out of 45) got into Columbia early, while all those who applied to Penn and Harvard were deferred. Ultimately, 2 were accepted to Penn RD (the valedictorian and myself), while the salutatorian got into Harvard (she was rejected from Penn). There was no clear standout.</p>

<p>I do accept the possibility, as I said earlier, of regional differences in opinion. For example, Boston Latin has an excellent relationship with Harvard that yields literally DOZENS of acceptances for every graduating class. Penn has a similar arrangement with Central High School in Philadelphia. Students matriculating from Central are often surprised to hear of other students’s perception of difficulty and selectivity. Alternatively, they consider Columbia to be inordinately difficult to get into… that leads to funny conversations freshman year with students from California, Boston, et al. My roommate and myself were both accepted to Columbia and Dartmouth, which simply astounded a girl from Central. We were from California and MA, respectively; those states place equivalent status on Columbia and Penn, perhaps because of primary exposure to colleges through US News.</p>

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<p>Anyway your chart could be formatted differently–like could you put the info in a googledoc? I don’t have excel on my mac…</p>

<p>I understand if it would be too time-consuming though.</p>

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<p>Finally, I’d like to put to rest the ridiculous notion that Penn is easy, or easier, to get into than what are rightfully considered its peer schools (Columbia, then Dartmouth and Brown). I’ll cite myself as an example: I was top-5, got 780 on chem, math IIC and US history, 1510 on my SATs, had leadership roles in 3 clubs and was involved in several more. I was waitlisted at Harvard, flat out rejected at Yale, and LUCKY (and I do consider myself so) to garner acceptance at Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth. And quite honestly, I consider all of the above to be roughly equivalent in selectivity. As a white male, I wasn’t sufficiently exceptional to get into Harvard (not an international math olympiad winner), although many people with identical resumes to me WERE accepted, by sheer luck. I was one of the “unlucky” ones, and had to go to a “middle Ivy”. I just find it funny that many people in the same boat - people who go to Columbia, for example - think that Penn is significantly less selective, when in reality both are just receptacles for the same type of excellent student.</p>

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<p>@quomodo: If you would like to see the chart without Excel, I took a screenshot of it: <a href=“http://■■■■■■/data2015[/url]”>http://■■■■■■/data2015&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>@IvyLeaguer11: If you look purely at the data, Penn is slightly less selective simply because it admits more applicants. More people accepted to Penn –> less selective. But Penn is a great school nevertheless.</p>

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<p>I completely agree with IvyLeaguer11. I was rejected from Dartmouth, and got into Brown and Columbia. Given Dartmouth was my ED school, my brother attended, and it was my first choice I was a little surprised given my strong desire to attend the school. I guess is Dartmouth perhaps had too many similar apps from Asian students from Mass, whereas Columbia and Brown did not. My best friend at Princeton wondered for a second why he was rejected from Columbia, Penn, and waitlisted at Dartmouth. Schools are just too selective now to use anecdotal evidence, with small sample sets, to assess their selectivity.</p>

<p>I don’t think anyone at any “middle” Ivy (-HYP, Cornell) should think themselves going to a more prestigious school than another. They are all pretty much the same and their placement rates into top grad schools and firms shows this. You have to live with a college for the rest of your life, choose the one that fits you best, particularly when the prestige and reputation difference is practically non-existent.</p>