<p>Hello everyone :)
I was reading the threads for the classes of 2017 for MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Caltech and Columbia. I noticed something "weird". People that were rejected at either MIT, Harvard, Yale, Caltech or Columbia, often managed to get in either Stanford or Princeton and vice versa. Is it only a coincidence?</p>
<p>All schools have different admissions approaches but they may not differ too greatly. Also you’re looking at sample sizes of…maybe 10? What is the point of this thread?</p>
<p>I heard this quote once (unsure whom its from): “the plural of anecdote does not equal data”. </p>
<p>As BiologyMaster64 said, schools have different admissions procedures (e.g. one may be more lenient with an applicant having a lack of ECs opposed to another that may be more lenient with the SATs).</p>
<p>Think for a moment. Any two of these colleges may have 15,000 cross-applicants. (Well, not if one of them is Caltech or MIT, because Caltech doesn’t have 15,000 applicants, and MIT barely does.) For 98% of those applicants, the two colleges will make the same decision: 95% (or so) will be rejected both places, and 3% will be accepted both places. They will only differ on 5% of the applicants, and I promise you that you would never be able to tell that 5% from half of the 95% rejected by looking at their stats. </p>
<p>The colleges have different needs at different times, and there’s some pure luck involved, too. They may rate a candidate exactly the same – which is to say, good enough to admit, but not a lock, like many, many rejected candidates. But maybe he’s a trumpet player, and College A wants to admit a couple of trumpet players this year, while College B admitted trumpet players last year and is looking out for a harpist now. Or the applicant is the 100th most interesting computer science jock applying to Stanford, which means sorry, he won’t likely be admitted, but at Yale he’s the 50th most interesting computer science jock applicant, and Yale has to admit more computer science jocks to fill its slots, so he’s in there. </p>
<p>Or maybe the regional admissions officer at College A really got the applicant’s essay, and the one at College B had a cold when she read it and didn’t pay enough attention to realize how good it was. The colleges try to have excellent admissions processes, and generally they do, but no one pretends they are perfect. And given how strong most of the candidates are, the colleges don’t need to worry about making their processes perfect, because a class in which some people are rejected by “error” will be pretty much indistinguishable from a class selected by perfect methods.</p>
<p>The people affected by this are a very small percentage of the applicant pool, but not necessarily a small percentage of the people who actually enroll in any particular college. So if you look at the people in a class, you will see that lots of them were rejected by peer colleges and accepted at the one they are attending. You are not really seeing evidence of different admissions policies or standards; it’s more like evidence of a Poisson distribution.</p>