<p>An acceptance at Harvard would be an amazing honor but my son would not hesitate to choose his dream MIT/CalTech first. This would be a choice of “fit”.</p>
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Apparently, most of them are legacies but not all. I’m positive this one I was talking about was neither a donor nor a legacy of Harvard. I read an Crimson article from some time ago (can’t find the source right now) about H z-list. The H Admissions noted that while the yield for z-lists is about the same as that for other admits and the need-blind policies do apply to z-list, some did turn down a z-list offer because of the additional cost for a gap year.</p>
<p>There it is: [Z-Listed</a> Students Experience Year Off | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/30/students-year-harvard-zlist/]Z-Listed”>Z-Listed Students Experience Year Off | News | The Harvard Crimson)
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<p>I am willing to go so far out on a limb as to state my belief a particular department that happens to exist at HY or P is, in fact, actually a better fit for a particular student than the same department at other elite colleges. I am not willing to name departments. I really liked your example of nanotechnology at NU and was sorry no one followed it up.</p>
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I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here. My son picked Carnegie Mellon over Harvard because he’s a computer science nerd and has been 100% sure of his career since he was in elementary school. At Carnegie Mellon he hung with friends in the Linux cluster, shared a house with kids who had Magic cards and Games Workshop figurines scattered over the dining room table, and had cables running all over the house so everyone had ideal conditions for their computers. He was not the sort of kid who was actually going to enjoy talking about the latest play that some student had produced, the latest lecture in Ec 10, or taking one more general education courses outside his areas of interest (math, comp sci, physics) than necessary. (The only thing CMU made him take was a general writing course, a technical writing course and one semester of world history.) He enjoyed his accepted students weekend at Harvard, and found that there was a critical mass of kids who also read sci fi and played board and video games, but ultimately having close to 500 students in the major (plus all those engineers and science majors!) was more attractive to him. If his choice had been one of his safety colleges vs. Harvard I’m pretty sure he’d have chosen Harvard based on prestige alone, but while it was a difficult decision to turn down Harvard, once he made it he never looked back.</p>
<p>^^I think that’s very legitmate reasons to choose CMU over Harvard. CMU’s computer science is really top notch!</p>
<p>I know more than one who chose Y over H because of Y’s residential college system and the perceived better experience as an undergraduate student. I know even more kids who chose H over Y or P, which I guess is not surprising as H does have significantly higher yield. I should’ve asked why but somehow it felt like a silly question to ask then. Maybe I was afraid the answer would be “why not”.</p>
<p>Your son’s choice makes complete sense to me, mathmom, and would make sense to anyone in computer since, I would imagine.</p>
<p>It’s sort of obvious, but if living in a city is going to freak you out and make you anxious, Princeton would be a better fit than Harvard or Yale.</p>
<p>I think Princeton and Harvard have better communities of kids who are really into pure math than Yale has. It’s not that Yale has inadequate math, especially if what you want out of math is to be a good economist or a bond trader. But I don’t think you could find enough kids to stock a Math 55 at Yale – kids who have essentially placed out of college math, but want to do math 40-50 hours/week more than they want to do anything else. Princeton engineering seems better, and better-integrated into the college as a whole, than engineering at Harvard or Yale.</p>
<p>There are wonderful arts stuff happening at Princeton and Harvard, but if you are really into fine/performing arts, Yale has a lot more of that, and more student engagement in it.</p>
<p>In the end, lots of kids with a choice choose Yale because it is a nice place with a wonderful social structure, and lots of kids with a choice – more of them – choose Harvard because it is the most prestigious and the quickest route to the top. I think those choices color the respective colleges, even if it’s only a modest percentage of the students who chose on that basis. There are plenty of kids at either college (or Princeton) who are exactly like the kids at the other, but to the extent there are differences, I think at Yale it shifts towards artiness and sociability, and at Harvard it shifts to ambition, drive, and a certain conventionality.</p>
<p>It was the right choice for my son, but a computer science nerd with more wide-ranging interests, and perhaps with more entrepreneurial ambitions, would probably do very well at Harvard. Harvard comp sci majors do fine with job placement. But I don’t think my kid would have been as happy there - or at least he would have missed out on all the parts of Harvard that it really excels at.</p>
<p>It always makes me sad when students choose Y over H for the residential college system. H invented the residential college system! There are differences between the way they run it of course and there are both pluses and minuses to H’s decision to create a cohesive freshman class by essentially making the Yard a first year residential college. Since I attended H at a time when freshman could choose to live in a Radcliffe House or live in the Yard, I’m pretty aware of what those differences are.</p>
<p>Ahem–the residential college system existed in Oxford and Cambridge before Harvard was founded. :)</p>
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<p>I don’t get why this is “going out on a limb.” </p>
<p>How is the decision between H vs Y any different from the decision between any of these schools vs other elite LAC’s/universities? Assuming finances are comparable, you look at whether you prefer urban / rural settings as JHS mentioned, the social life offerings (residential colleges, fraternities, eating clubs, etc.), presence of sports if that’s important to you, presence of an arts scene if that’s important to you, whether you like the look and feel of red brick vs collegiate Gothic or whatever … Those criteria come into play whether you’re looking at H vs Y, H vs Amherst, or H vs Columbia, or Amherst vs Columbia. I don’t know why everyone’s treating a decision that includes H, Y, or P with such breathlessness. The fundamentals of the decision aren’t any different.</p>
<p>Melding some of this with your original thread question: if we grasp that another college was a better fit for Mathmom’s son, isn’t it possible an HYP could identify the same? </p>
<p>Not by name. Not, gee, hope she applied to Yale or gosh, he’d shine at CMU. Or she’d get that big city environment she wants at Columbia. Not even: well, sure hope he applied to a school with lots of nano. </p>
<p>But a sense an applicant’s wants, needs, strengths and “rest of the story” don’t quite line up with what H does offer and how they offer it, plus the college’s various other wants and needs. </p>
<p>This is where I slide in. Considering the fierce competition, if you could “fit yourself” to the program at, say, H, could you then identify some of the other variables and show your fit in those, too? </p>
<p>Not that they need more violists. But some of the characteristics they favor. </p>
<p>This isn’t about HYP fever. It’s about those kids who could be a good fit and shouldn’t apply blindly, assuming what made them hot in hs is all a college needs to see.</p>
<p>Re post 269</p>
<p>At H, everyone lives in the Yard first year. Then you enter the lottery for houses. Up to 8 students can enter the lottery together as a group. So, it is common for 8 players from the same team or 8 Crimson staffers or whatever to enter the lottery as a group. So, by the time people are assigned to a house, they are part of a mini-group within the house. If you later have a falling out with the people in the group, it can be extremely hard to convince one of the other groups to accept you as part of their group for the next year’s lottery. Different houses at H used to have very different reps–most government concentrators lived in the same house, for example–but H made a concerted effort to change this and it’s no longer the case. </p>
<p>At Y, you are assigned to a college before you begin.Legacies and sibs can choose to be in the same college as their parents/sibs. Students from 10 of the 12 colleges live on Old Campus first year. On Old Campus, they are grouped by college. TD and Silliman students live in their colleges all 4 years. It is possible to switch colleges, but few people do. It requires the approval of the new college’s master. It’s quite common for two best friends to live in different residential colleges. It’s not possible for ALL of the people in a given year who are on the same team to live in the same college.It’s common for people to live with different people different years. There are several teams which have off-campus housing where all the seniors or all of the juniors and seniors on the same team live together. </p>
<p>I think Y’s system tends to make for more cohesive colleges than H’s does. On the flip side though many people are unhappy that they can’t room with their closest friends because their friends are in a different college. </p>
<p>Princeton’s more complicated because of the bicker system for eating clubs. People who belong to certain ECs tend to both live together and join the same eating clubs. So, you tend to hang out 24/7 with people who share a certain interest with you.</p>
<p>I considered it to be going out on a limb, because any post that wasn’t exclusively factual–e.g., urban vs. suburban vs. rural seemed likely to generate controversy. I am really more curious<br>
about views like JHS’s than simple fact. I’d ask about MIT vs. Olin vs. Caltech, but I can hear the shouts of “Noooo!” from miles away.</p>
<p>My post #274 referred to PG’s #271, and not the intervening posts. Sent from my phone.</p>
<p>Fwiw: this was published in the brown daily herald on nov 2 2012:</p>
<p>“The continuing attractiveness of a Brown education and a need-blind financial aid program for domestic applicants have helped keep the University’s yield rate above the national average, according to Miller. He added that 50 percent of admitted applicants who turn down the University go to one of four schools – Harvard, Princeton, Stanford University and Yale – and that 75 percent matriculate at one of these schools, another Ivy League institute, Duke University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”</p>
<p>2750 students were admitted to brown in 2012, and their yield was about 56%. If you do the math, of these admitted students only about 300 chose to attend schools other than an ivy ( including Brown), Stanford, MIT or Duke.</p>
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<p>Then I’m not sure what you’re asking. Obviously different people are going to prefer different things about each of these colleges (urban, suburban, living arrangements for freshmen, sociability, physical look of the campus, sports, proximity to home, whatever) – just like when making any other set of college decisions. Whether it’s Harvard vs Yale, Harvard vs Amherst, Amherst vs Columbia, Columbia vs Duke, or frankly, Eastern State U versus Western State U, different people will have different preferences for these things and will weight those factors accordingly. I don’t understand what’s so different just because one or both of the colleges in the mix happens to be HYP. And I sure don’t get what’s so “OMG, really? wow!” about mathmom’s son’s decision to go to CMU over Harvard. It’s almost as though some of you can’t envision a world in which HYP aren’t up on pedestals to be revered. Well, like anything – not everyone is going to like the same things. This isn’t news here. Even the mighty Harvard has 1 out of 5 acceptees turning it down to go elsewhere. Well, people have their reasons.</p>
<p>lookingforward, the year my son applied to Harvard, they’d just announced they were adding a real engineering school and planned to have 10x the professors in 10 years. Of course that was 2007 and we all know what happened next. But they do have a real engineering school now, though except for having sessions in the basement of the building at my reunion I don’t know anything more about it. But if a school was trying to beef up their holdings my son was a good catch. He also looked a lot more well-rounded on paper than he is in real life.</p>
<p>QuantMech of course you are right Oxford and Cambridge did it first. I’m not sure why it took H and Y so long to catch on!</p>
<p>My original question was more admissions oriented, in terms of differences in the qualities sought by each college–not to say that they are uniquely excellent. But now I am also wondering about the characteristics of students themselves, that would make them more comfortable at each, taken individually. I don’t ask this about Berkeley, UIUC, UNC, UVa, UMich, or Wisconsin, because I think that they ate large enough that a student could find compatible friends at any of them.</p>
<p>The same question could be asked about LACs or any college with an identifiable, dominant culture: What sort of student would be happy there, and would a non-conforming student be comfortable?</p>