<p>One of the threads in the College Admissions Forum is titled "Ivy/selective school RD Results 2014 Comparison Summary." The posts on it are relevant to several discussions on the Parents Forum.</p>
<p>The usual caveats apply:
1) This is a small sample.
2) Students who were admitted to some selective schools, but not to others are probably more likely to post than those accepted or rejected across the board.
3) Some posts may be fictitious and/or troll-like.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I think that the outcomes posted are likely to be of interest/guidance for next years' applicants, and they definitely give a somewhat different picture of admissions at HYPSM+C than I had going into the game. In fact, I think it would have been really valuable if I had this picture at the outset.</p>
<p>Quick summary:
From the thread in the College Admissions Forum, I took the group of students who were waitlisted or accepted by at least one of HYPSM+C. By my count (quick, may be slightly off) of the students who posted, the numbers with 0-6 acceptances in this set are listed below. NA is the number of acceptances at HYPSM+C and NS the number of students with that outcome (who were waitlisted or better somewhere in the HYPSM+C group).</p>
<p>The next posts list the “raw” statements from the posts on the thread in the College Admissions Forum (can’t call them “data”, read them as you will).</p>
<p>The outcomes for each poster are listed in the order HYPSMC. The number of the post (as of late afternoon April 7) is given, in case you’d like to look at the post in more detail, or track down the poster’s other entries on CC. The outcomes are listed as
A = accepted
W = waitlisted
R = rejected
N = did not apply (or possibly did not post outcome)</p>
<p>I only claim that these are “superficially accurate”–that is, I only ran through the posts once, and I wasn’t hyper-careful–so they are probably more or less right, but corrections are welcome.</p>
<p>I didn’t set out to prove anything with the compilation of the posts–in advance, I did not know how they would look collectively.</p>
<p>But I’d offer the following observations:
I was surprised at the number of posters who had very “mixed bag” of outcomes. I know that some posters on the Parents Forum have been stating the equivalent for years. Still, I was surprised.
Sometimes, a student’s sole acceptance in this group was at Harvard, though the student applied elsewhere. Conventional wisdom probably wouldn’t suggest this. I don’t think all of these students play the oboe.
“Tufts Syndrome” might be alive and well–poster #35, with 4 acceptances and 2 “did not apply,” was waitlisted at Tufts; poster #107, with 3 acceptances, a waitlist, and 2 “did not apply,” was rejected at Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>great post, It will great to do some correlation analysis between the schools, i.e. if a person gets accepted at Harvard, what does it predict about acceptance at other schools etc.</p>
<p>I don’t think I’ve posted in the stats section for either kid. For oldest: accepted at H, rejected by MIT, Stanford and Caltech. H acceptance almost certainly helped by the legacy boost, though he was no slouch. No one gets accepted from our school to Stanford without being a legacy or athlete. Not ever. MIT and Caltech? I think he was in the running as he was deferred to regular admissions at both schools, just didn’t make the ultimate cut. The results were fairly predictable.</p>
<p>Younger son was accepted at Tufts but not at Harvard. No surprise there - he didn’t have stats for H. (We were humoring Dad.) Tufts was by no means in the bag, but I think their supplement gave him a chance to shine. He wrote an excellent “Why Tufts” essay and shot it out of the ballpark with his optional essay.</p>
<p>It’s fun to crunch numbers, but the story behind those numbers can be complicated.</p>
<p>At our school Val got into H but not Y. Sal got waitlisted at H and Y. Number 4 got into both H and Y - he’s the most well rounded and interesting of the three.</p>
<p>This is a fascinating thread. I was wondering what you had expected to see, since it all looked pretty standard to me, when you posted:</p>
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<p>There is one thing I wonder about. It seems to me that HYPS are pretty much taking the same types of students. M and C may be a little different? Some humanities students will be very desirable to HYPS but may not have a chance at M and C, or the least bit of interest in those schools. I guess these are the ones not applying to M and C but they may be competition with the math/science applicants at the other schools? I guess the superstars in one area of interest may not be in direct competition with superstars in another area of interest for multiple admittances. If it were possible to separate out the lopsided applicants and look at what happens with just the well-rounded applicants that would really be interesting to me.</p>
<p>Going into the process for the first time, in the early years of CC, I would have expected fewer instances where a single poster had more than one A and more than one R. I know the actual outcomes correspond to a pretty standard expectation on CC now.</p>
<p>For anyone who is new to the game, the outcomes might be a little surprising, though. (Admittedly, the total number of students who posted cross-admit results is still quite low, out of 20,000+ applicants to these schools.) </p>
<p>At first, some of us at least are probably thinking, "Yeah, but my kid . . . " </p>
<p>Good point, alh. Actually, I think the Caltech crowd is under-represented among the posters on the thread in the College Admissions Forum. In a way, that’s not too surprising. My rough impression of the group is that most of the students are well-rounded. Students who weren’t interested in science/math/engineering are most likely the ones with N,N (did not apply or did not post) for MIT, Caltech.</p>
Even that isn’t that easy to do. My older son was a lopsided candidate disguised as a well-rounded one. Anyone who knew him knew he was an arch-typical comp sci nerd. But he had a higher CR score than math, he got a 5 on the US History AP. He read over 100 books a year outside school. I think H was looking for more engineering types (they’d just announced the expansion of their engineering program, while MIT (according to the infamous Marilee Jones) was looking for kids with interesting ECs.</p>
<p>This is interesting. Thanks for crunching the number, QM. </p>
<p>I think my son was a well-rounded type: outstanding academics/test scores across the board with regional and some national recognition/accomplishments in two disparate areas. An additional off-the-beaten-path interest that was tough to quantify but that was the subject of a main essay. Not an athlete, a legacy, a development case, or a URM. In many respects a very conventional kid. To our surprise, he got into HYP (did not apply to S, M or C). He is a freshman at Yale. I’ll tell you what, though. At Yale, he does <em>not</em> view himself as a superstar. Not a bit. He finds the sheer brilliance of many of his peers awesome (in the old-fashioned sense of that term). </p>
<p>The mixed bag of outcomes speaks to the need for kids to cast a wide net when applying to these schools (and others with acceptance rates under 20% – kids on the various Ivy boards are reporting acceptances to H,Y and/or P along with denials at Dartmouth, Penn, Brown etc.) But the corollary is that if your stats and accomplishments don’t put you in the reasonable ballpark for these schools in the first place, casting a wide net isn’t going to help a bit.</p>
<p>Thanks for doing the work QuantMech. Interesting numbers.
My S was a fairly well-rounded lopsided kid (can that image work?). Adcoms who saw his math-heavy record would be reassured by his SAT-V of 750 and his grades in English and social studies. Got into H and S, the only two places to which he applied.</p>
<p>Something has been bothering me for a couple of days, reading one of the other threads. I am sorry for being off-topic but can’t help myself. Obviously undergrads at HYPSMC are not necessarily “smarter” than the students at the state university. I know students at state universities “smarter” than some I know at HYPSMC. The difference imho at HYPSMC is the unbelievable level of enrichment and opportunities so many of the students have had and how that, imho, really changes the environment in an extremely significant way. The state school environment is a learning experience, too, and perhaps an over all more desirable experience. Each seems to me to have its own positives and negatives and a lot depends on how you define education.</p>
<p>mazewanderer asked about correlations between admissions at Harvard and other schools. The numbers are too small and too self-selected (by choice to post on that particular thread) to draw any conclusions. Still, fwiw, of the students who were accepted by Harvard:</p>
<p>11 of 19 who applied to Yale were accepted
14 of 24 who applied to Princeton were accepted
8 of 15 who applied to Stanford were accepted
5 of 9 who applied to MIT were accepted.</p>
<p>Short version (just based on these small numbers! don’t count on it!): Acceptance at Harvard changes the admissions odds at the other schools from a 20-sided die roll to a coin toss, with the odds of “heads, you’re in” just slightly in the applicant’s favor.</p>
<p>Another way of looking at the correlation:
I took the students who were admitted to Harvard, and then looked at the subset who had applied to Yale (for example). I assigned a value of +1 if the student was admitted by Yale, 0 if waitlisted, and -1 if rejected. Then I found the average over the set of cross-applicants. Perfect correlation in the admissions outcomes would give an average of +1, and perfect anti-correlation would give an average of -1.</p>
<p>For those admitted to Harvard, I found the following averages:
Yale 0.21
Princeton 0.25
Stanford 0.13
MIT 0.22</p>
<p>So the admissions decisions at YPM are more like those at H than the decisions at S are.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I attended a large public university (by choice), where I met a number of extremely smart people. It is now many years later, I’ve had a good bit of experience, and I believe that a strong student can obtain an excellent education at any of a very large number of universities. I definitely do not have an HYPSM(+C)-or-bust point of view! </p>
<p>In my opinion, CC has performed a great benefit for many students (and their parents) who attend public schools in the “middle of nowhere.” I think the information is especially valuable for students who have Ivy-caliber SAT’s and GPA’s, but who attend schools where 0, 1, or 2 students per year are admitted to HYPSM+C, and the guidance counselors have 300+ students to advise. Students at elite private schools or schools that send many (many = 5+) graduates to HYPSM+C probably don’t need the CC information nearly as much.</p>
<p>I do hope that this collection of outcomes is useful to some of those students in the classes of 2015 and beyond. I think it might have been helpful to unimpresseddad (say), going into the process. Not picking on unimpressed dad! Lots of parents have similar thoughts at the outset of the applications season.</p>
</p>
Obviously undergrads at HYPSMC are not necessarily “smarter” than the students at the state university. I know students at state universities “smarter” than some I know at HYPSMC. The difference imho at HYPSMC is the unbelievable level of enrichment and opportunities so many of the students have had and how that, imho, really changes the environment in an extremely significant way. The state school environment is a learning experience, too, and perhaps an over all more desirable experience. Each seems to me to have its own positives and negatives and a lot depends on how you define education.</p>