ED Dartmouth and Cornell

College Search & Selection
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<p>I agree with bluebayou. I don’t understand why Cornellians use their stats to their advantage when they see fit, then when comparing scores and acceptance rates they slice it up. Also my guess is Dartmouth, given its more undergrad focus and lack of in-state offerings, is actually much more self selective. </p>

<p>The percentage of Sals and Vals at Dartmouth is over 40%, at Cornell its less 28%. The stats all point in Dartmouth’s favor, in many cases the difference is large. You can argue that Dartmouth’s SATs are within 20 “meaningless” points of Stanford and all its stats are within the slightest grasp of Stanford. I’m not going to argue that Dartmouth is as selective as Stanford.</p>

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<p>^Cornell separates its stats because CAS and Engineering are very diffferent from the other schools. They are more similar to other Ivies and what other Ivy applicants are going to apply to. I’m not arguing that its as selective as Dartmouth, but the students are probably as intelligent.</p>

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<p>slipper-
it is important for prospective applicants to Cornell to understand the differneces among the colleges. They might think Cornell A&S is a match or safety when actually it is a reach. Separating the colleges at Cornell allows apples-to-apples comparisons between say Cornell Engineering and Caltech or between Cornell A&S and Dartmouth (apples-to-apples). It is the Cornell detractors who object to separating the colleges when it doesn’t suit their interests.</p>

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<p>ch:</p>

<p>EVERY Uni has different colleges, by definition. Penn does engineering and even nursing. Vandy does Eng & Human Development. BC has nursing and education (I bet the latter has way lower stats). Cal-Berkeley has everything that Cornell has but Hotelies. Etc. But on no other cc thread do supporters parse intra-college data – why only Cornellians?</p>

<p>btw: I’m a big supporter of the school, and just love to visit Ithaca. :)</p>

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<p>bluebayou-
Two reasons:
The contract colleges at Cornell are unique among the top 50 unis except maybe architecture.
The SAT scores for individual colleges at other universities are not available. It would be great to compare by college, more useful for prospective students.</p>

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<p>“But on no other cc thread do supporters parse intra-college data – why only Cornellians?”</p>

<p>I can’t speak for people from other schools . I would think people interested in Wharton would be interested in their chances of admission to wharton specifically, not some aggregate of Penn as a whole. And people applying to Penn’s nursing college would like to know about that specifically. If these people are all silent I certainly don’t know why. Maybe they are silent because the data is unavailable.</p>

<p>In the case of Cornell, it comes up often on CC because the majority of applicants on CC and generally are interested in liberal arts colleges/ programs, and in evaluating these they frequently attempt to assess their chances at Cornell CAS by using some university composite numbers, implicitly assuming they are representative of CAS.</p>

<p>The problem with that assumption is, Arts & sciences students represent only 1/3 of the entering class at Cornell. And the stats for the various colleges have some significant variation. Taken together, this makes use of university composite figures a particularly misleading proxy when considering applying to CAS. People who are aware of the degree of this error make this point known so others won’t be misled.</p>

<p>When I was applying to colleges, data for multi-college universities was routinely reported segregated by individual colleges, for all universities basically. Information in this form is much more useful to everybody.</p>

<p>But maybe in some other cases the data is unavailable, or the degree of error in using the aggregate stats as proxy for the Arts & sciences college is not so large. Or maybe the aggregate actually inappropriately flatters the Arts & Sciences college in some cases, so nobody’s talking. I can’t answer for these other people.</p>

<p>But I can state with certainty that it is a material point when considering odds of admission to individual colleges at Cornell. That’s why I mention it, when I see that erroneous conclusions are being drawn about its specific colleges based on use of this inapplicable composite data .</p>

<p>All of these “%” numbers people are bandying about, here and elsewhere, also need to be considered in the context of the fact that it is an amalgam of seven different undergraduate colleges, which are not all the same. The “%” for its Arts & Sciences students alone likely are not the same as the “%” for a university composite. For accuracy sake, prospective applicants to its individual colleges need to keep these differences in mind, and try to focus on the characteristics of the college there that they are actually planning to apply to.</p>

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<p>However, in the current case, in a thread titled “ED Dartmouth and Cornell”, the reporting practices of individual colleges at Johns Hopkins, Penn, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, etc. might not come up equally because for one thing nobody is talking about these schools here.</p>

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<p>I agree with this statement, though I feel like this statement is even moreso applicable to those students that I have met from Penn. They seem to be unimpressive, oppressively pre-professional, and really not all too interesting. Maybe it’s because I have not met many students from Wharton whose students are probably a notch more impressive than those at the rest of Penn. </p>

<p>Most people I met from Dartmouth in real life have been down to Earth, interesting people unlike the Dartmouth alumni on this thread. I got the impression that because Dartmouth isn’t a well known Ivy, these D students that I met in real life tended not to have a self-inflated view of themselves.

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<p>Slipper, no one cares. If you, years after graduating from Dartmouth, still need to use SAT scores to justify why Dartmouth was so great, then frankly the Dartmouth undergraduate experience must be absolutely pathetic.</p>

89

<p>If anything I’d say Dartmouth students tend to be among the most easy-going students who choose their schools based on self-selection and couldn’t imagine themselves anywhere else. However, so many of the benefits of Dartmouth are intangible (spending on advising, teaching, amazing graduate placement, etc) so its worth defending those intangible benefits to students looking at colleges. All the alums just want people to experience what I’m sure we all had, sometimes you find yourself in shouting matches on tangents, but its mostly because you love your school and want it shown in the best light possible.</p>

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<p>lol at Brown.</p>

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<p>It’s the simple human custom of redefining the battle into one you can win, or at least not lose as badly.</p>

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I can’t completely disagree with this. Penn is more selective than Cornell from what I’ve seen (know plenty admitted to both, but a lot more admitted to just Cornell and not Penn), but its still overly preprofessional and most students are focusing on their future job, med school, or law school. Penn SEAS is probably not too difficult to get into if you have the numbers. For Wharton the students probably did the most in terms of ECs and whatnot in high school than other students at Penn. They are the most preprofessional though. However, the smartest people I know are in CAS and SEAS at Penn. Some of my friends just really impress me. I’m sure there are similar people at Cornell too.</p>