<p>As a person who sometimes despises Major League sports (when my teams lose), Broadway shows (when my favorite stars turn up sick), world class museums (when the lines are too long), five star restaurants( when I can't get a reservation), world class shopping (because the prices are too high), and unique and one of a kind architecture and monuments(when they get too dusty) in New York City, I agree with you that New York truly does pale in comparison to New Haven Connecticut. Sometimes the atmosphere can truly become second rate in Manhattan. I am glad that there is a place like New Haven, Ct only an hour and a half away for first rate culture.</p>
<p>Actually, you are pretty observant, vienna man. According to the last issue of Urban Land magazine, which analyzed urban growth between 2000 and 2005, New York City is now one of the slowest-growing cities in the country. The fastest growing are smaller or medium sized cities (Albany NY, Sacramento CA and New Haven CT are named in particular). </p>
<p>Apparently a lot of people like you are fed up with the high prices, grime, rat-infested subway lines, roach-infested apartments, mediocre restaurants on average (yes there are good ones, but most are subpar) and lack of space in places like New York. They would prefer to live in a place with just as much or more culture per capita, closer proximity to beaches and expansive parkland, better restaurants on average, and easy access to larger cities during those times (once a month or two) when they want to visit some particular museum or sports event. </p>
<p>I'm not saying they want to live in, say, Princeton, where there are only a couple dozen restaurants, no nightlife, and one or two theaters to choose from, but a medium sized city like New Haven with hundreds of fancy restaurants, block after block of bars and nightclubs, and dozens of theaters fits the bill quite well.</p>
<p>I don't hear about many college students preferring New Haven, CT to Cambridge, MN on grounds of city characteristics alone. </p>
<p>Oh, and P.S., PosterX, why don't you show your steps for reaching the implausible conclusion of the thread title?</p>
<p>1) I hate New York. Sure, it has a lot of stuff to do. I just hate its personality. And the air reeks. Note that this is a personal opinion. And note that this is not in any way an attack on Boston or Harvard. If there's a knock on Boston, it's that the Red Sox are the most overhyped "underdogs" in the history of baseball.</p>
<p>2) posterX's inital post is more accurate than the rest of his ludicrous and pointless arguments.</p>
<p>3) Simply being anti-Harvard does not make one a troll. It's not as if, say, Byerly is exactly fair and balanced in every assessment. School pride is nothing to hide or to be ashamed of.</p>
<p>This thread is pretty entertaining so far...</p>
<p>I see I mistyped "Cambridge, MN" for "Cambridge, MA." But, yeah, there are a lot of cities that young people prefer to live in during their college years to New Haven, CT. </p>
<p>Yale is a fine school, and it may be on the application list for one or more of my own children. It's a good enough school to motivate many young people to put up with the grottiness of the surrounding town. </p>
<p>But it is simply not plausible that Yale is "more selective" than Harvard, because Harvard gets its pick of most of the most amazing high school graduates in the United States and around the world, whatever the raw admittance rate at any school. The point is that different kinds of applicants apply to each school, and although every school gets a few "lottery ticket" applicants, most of the really amazingly desirable college applicants do apply to Harvard. You can look at any list of amazing high school students you care to specify (e.g., Davidson Fellows, RSI alumni, national debate champions, Ivy-qualified star football players, etc.) and find that Harvard gets more applicants from those groups, and matriculates more from those groups, than does Yale.</p>
<p>Yale has many more applicants per spot than Harvard, and a lower acceptance rate, indicating it is more desirable. In terms of the eliteness of the accepted class, NMSC-sponsored National Merit Scholars is the traditional standard measure used to identify elite applicants and has been for many years. NMSC-sponsored Scholars are an elite group of about 2500 students nationwide. Harvard used to have a small lead in this category, but in recent years Yale and Harvard have had identical fractions of these students among their entering classes (placing Harvard and Yale far and away above any other college or university in the country). Also, Yale had 3 Rhodes and 4 Marshall Scholars last year - more than all of the other Ivies, combined. Regardless of partisan opinions, there's a reason why Yale is now the gold standard.</p>
<p>Also, New Haven is a far better college town, and that has something to do with this change. Downtown New Haven is thronged with college students 24 hours a day, and on weekends the streets in the city's entertainment districts are so crowded you can't drive down them. Packed buses, coming from other local colleges (Yale isn't even the largest university in New Haven, after all) drop off thousands of local students in the area around Yale. There are hundreds of restaurants packed with people, on streets that a few years ago were mostly empty. Sure, it isn't suburban Princeton, it's more like a microcosm of Manhattan but with many more trees - and most people identify that as a big positive.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
But it is simply not plausible that Yale is "more selective" than Harvard, because Harvard gets its pick of most of the most amazing high school graduates in the United States and around the world, whatever the raw admittance rate at any school. The point is that different kinds of applicants apply to each school, and although every school gets a few "lottery ticket" applicants, most of the really amazingly desirable college applicants do apply to Harvard. You can look at any list of amazing high school students you care to specify (e.g., Davidson Fellows, RSI alumni, national debate champions, Ivy-qualified star football players, etc.) and find that Harvard gets more applicants from those groups, and matriculates more from those groups, than does Yale.
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>Well, until you can produce something measurable (ie: something besides "OH EM GEE look at the ppl!"), I think we could go by the numbers.... which say they're roughly equal, with Yale having the slight edge for <em>this</em> year.</p>
<p>Besides which, two of the best LD debaters in the nation are coming to Yale this year.</p>
<p>tokenadult, your point definitely holds true for math/science candidates (Harvard gets more Intel STSers, RSI alums, science Davidson Fellows, etc.) than Yale, and that's very understandable, I'd like to see statistics for...well, everyone else (e.g., debaters, like Mr. Pink mentioned). I've never seen anything one way or the other but I would doubt that there is that wide a discrepancy in those areas. Hmm, would be interesting to analyze if anyone had the numbers :)</p>
<p>Check the latest USNews rankings for "most selective". By "the latest" I mean either the 2006 or 2007 USNews.</p>
<p>yale's SAT range pulled even (I think) with Harvard this year according to USNEWS as well as students from the to 10% of their class (again, I think but the resolution is poor on the scan). What was the difference in acceptance rate that gave harvard the #1 spot? 0.5%?</p>
<p>(looks like your donations and freshman retention rate fell behind)</p>
<p>Please, Byerly, USNews does not really measure "selectivity."</p>
<p>
[quote]
Here are a few potential reasons:
[/quote]
Yale has a much smaller class to fill
Yale over admitted last year and has no more beds</p>
<p>The so-called "latest" US News - even the one that's not been officially released yet - uses old data (not to mention incorrect and/or invalid in some cases).</p>
<p>sigh, so many mistruths again, misterX. to take just one:</p>
<br>
<p>The fastest growing are smaller or medium sized cities (Albany NY, Sacramento CA and New Haven CT are named in particular). </p>
<br>
<p>new haven <em>lost</em> 6,000 residents between 1990 and 2002, just part of the more than 40,000 (a full quarter of its total) it has hemorrhaged since 1950, when its factories were still operational.</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven</a></p>
<p>Let me start out by saying that Yale is a fine Ivy League research university with many strong undergraduate and graduate programs, a university that one or more of my children may apply to someday. What I am disagreeing with in this thread is not that Yale is a good school--it is a fine school--but that Yale is more selective than Harvard, the assertion in the thread title. I am amazed that young people these days can't recognize the easily recognized fallacy in an argument that compares base acceptance rate between two schools and concludes that the school with the lower acceptance rate is in all cases more selective. That would be true ONLY if both schools had exactly the same list of applicants at the top end of applicant qualifications, for the same size of entering class. </p>
<p>But it is clear that there are some top-end students who apply only to the set {Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley} or some subset of that set, especially among young people who are very well prepared in math. In particular, there is NO overlap initially between the early round SCEA applicant group to Yale and the early round applicant groups to Harvard and to Stanford. Some very highly desirable college applicants apply only to schools other than Yale, as GuitarManARS (congratulations, by the way, on the Davidson Fellowship) pointed out. Some very strong math and science students DO apply to Yale, so many that Yale can be quite selective, but so many more of so many categories of strong students apply to Harvard that the group of students who apply to Harvard is a DISTINCT, stronger group than the group of students who apply to Yale. Of that I am 100 percent sure, and no one has provided any evidence to the contrary in this thread. (Here's a specific request for information: find any large, publicly described group of outstanding young people, such as the U.S.A. Today academic first team, or the Intel winners, or the National Forensics League champions, or the National Latin Competition winners, or whatever, and LINK TO THE LIST, and show here in a post to this thread, name by name, where those outstanding students matriculated for college class of 2010. Show me the data.) </p>
<p>What goes on in college applications and admission decisions should be considered in light of the well known "stable marriage problem," which can be solved by an algorithm that is actually used for placement in medical residency programs. College admission decisions are somewhat more haphazard, but there are a lot of students who vary in their desirability to various colleges. There are also a lot of colleges that vary in their desirability to various students. Nonetheless there is KNOWN information about which college, year after year, wins the battle of cross-admit preference among students who apply to and who are admitted to more than one college. That college is Harvard. Last year, this year, and next year, Harvard will be in the best position to choose the most desirable students, because more of those students will come forward to apply to Harvard than to any other undergraduate college in the world. </p>
<p>For an interesting computer simulation of the stable marriage algorithm, showing how ties are broken when many suitors desire the same object of affection, see </p>
<p><a href="http://www.cs.columbia.edu/%7Eevs/intro/stable/Stable.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~evs/intro/stable/Stable.html</a> </p>
<p>Once the Java applet has loaded, click "step" repeatedly to show the steps of suitors approaching beaus, and then being either accepted or rejected by them, according to each person's order of preference. </p>
<p>Once again, Yale is a fine school. It is a good enough school to put up with living in New Haven for four years. (I have stayed in New Haven for a business meeting at Yale. I liked my stays in greater Boston for meetings and Harvard and MIT much better.) Yale deserves better than to have arguments made on its behalf that are factually incorrect and logically unsound.</p>
<p>I can't believe someone said "fair and balanced." Damn Fox News propaganda. :(</p>
<p>Tokenadult, </p>
<p>"Last year, this year, and next year, Harvard will be in the best position to choose the most desirable students, because more of those students will come forward to apply to Harvard than to any other undergraduate college in the world."</p>
<p>I think you could make a good argument that from any given institution's perspective, the "most desirable students" are the ones that are admitted early, because they not only are highly qualified but also interested enough in that particular institution to apply early. And if that institution is ED, Harvard never sees their applications. So I think it's a stretch to suggest that Harvard's peer institutions lose too much sleep over the ones that got away. </p>
<p>And if any institution were to truly base its self-esteem on the % of its incoming class that turned down offers of admission at other elite schools, that institution would be Deep Springs, where virtually everyone has turned down HYPSM in order to attend. Doing so would be pretty contrary to the DS ethos, however.</p>
<p>tokenadult</p>
<p>though I think you are generally correct, you cannot really prove what you are saying since you would need to have data on where students applied (not matriculated) and that is not available. Also, I am not quite sure if comparing the matriculation habits of the rather small group of <em>math and science</em> superstars in a single field, as you are supposing to do, really constitutes overall selectivity of an institution. Its a somewhat fickle metric and you could just as well say who gets the best artists, or well-rounded students or the students with the most unrealized potential, or whatever. This year both harvard and yale had the same SAT range as well as the same % of students from the top 10%. So I don't really think you can say with 100% authority that one institution is more selective than another - that is unless you actually have application data for all the intel, siemens, usmao, virtusoso oboists, etc... in the country. But whatever you do, you must think that the best students in the country are a much larger set than the math superstars.</p>
<p>Such statistics as have been gathered (see: "The Early Admissions Game") suggest that the early pool admits are <em>not</em> stronger than the RD admits. The reason for this, in part, is because the early pool consists disproportionately of legacies and so-called "stategic applicants."</p>
<p>Statistically (citing the same source) the strongest applicants are the "cross-admits" who are sufficiently desirable to gain admission to two or more elites.</p>
<p>Harvard has always gained the lion's share of cross-admits vs. any and all of its "competitors."</p>
<p>That Harvard is the most "selective" in that it goes after the top people - and convinces a far higher share of the target group to enroll than does any other college or university in the United States of America - is amply demonstrated by a wide range of data.</p>
<p>Whether it is Seimens winners or football players, the story is the same: as Harvard recruiter Eric Westerfield explained: "If we want 'em, we get 'em. Three out of four admits to Harvard and any of its competitors, including Yale and Princeton, end up in Cambridge."</p>