<p>It's definitely Tufts syndrome. They want to preserve their yield.</p>
<p>my columbia interviewer asked me where i applied.... and asked me if columbia was my #1 choice. I was truthful.</p>
<p>Columbia with Tuft's syndrome? Are you kidding or just wildly arrogant?</p>
<p>I know several students Columbia accepted who were waitlisted at Harvard, just as there are some students in the reverse situation. Does that mean Harvard was just trying to maintain its yield?</p>
<p>Yes, in a sense. Both schools look for "fit" in addition to everything else, which is why they don't always have cross-admits despite roughly the same selectivity.</p>
<p>Roughly the same selectivity? Nah. HYP are on a different level, really.</p>
<p>Even Princeton has been known to exhibit Tufts Syndrome (admitted by the adcoms themselves), so it's not surprising to see it from Columbia.</p>
<p>For Princeton:
[quote]
Rapelye said the decline is merely a consequence of a renewed focus in Princeton admissions: competing more directly with Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT for the best applicants.
[/quote]
<p>irock1ce: did you get on the waitlist at Columbia? I'm sure you were one of their top choices, and would have taken you off it immediately after May 1.</p>
<p>well columbia took 20 kids from my school and me also, and i had 1590(800v) 800x4, and i didnt say columbia was my first choice, so...
and we had 25 into brown, 24 penn, 15 yale, 15 harvard, 7 princeton, 12 stanford, 11 MIT, 30something cornell, 30something georgetown, 30something for tufts, on and on and on...PM me if you care enough. let me remind you that our class size is 300 and a lot of these schools know that they'll get bad yield from us. for instance, georgetown, tufts, BC, and BU, and especially Stanford get destroyed every single year in yield from my school. let me also say that this was a bit of an off-yr at many of the schools due the increasing size of the applicant pools.</p>
<p>schools really dont do this as much as you think. coming from the high school that i do, i think i have a better perspective than you guys.</p>
<p>it's pretty ridiculous when you start talking about schools with 10% admit rates worrying about yield. there aren't that many spaces to begin with. columbia's RD yield is only 3% off of princeton's (47 v. 50). just cuz you have two friends who got waitlisted and there are two strong applicants on here who didn't get in doesn't imply any macro admissions strategy. </p>
<p>while we're in the habit of wild speculation, maybe its because columbia asks for the photo and they only take attractive people. if you didn't attach one, they automatically assumed you're ugly and rejected you. maybe/yes/no?</p>
<p>
[quote]
it's pretty ridiculous when you start talking about schools with 10% admit rates worrying about yield.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Considering the admissions office at Princeton admits that the practice was standard at Princeton in the past, I don't find my claim so outrageous.</p>
<p>fair enough, but we all know that pton has changed and that columbia has never had a history of the "syndrome."</p>
<p>how about you respond to what happens at my school and numerous elite NE boarding schools every year? why does stanford keep taking 15 people when only 3 go? why does tufts (the namesake of the so-called syndrome) take close to 40 when 5 will go? why does BC take 35/40 when maybe 3 will go? and finally, why does columbia take 20 from my school when they know that they'll get around 10?</p>
<p>
[quote]
fair enough, but we all know that pton has changed and that columbia has never had a history of the "syndrome."
[/quote]
We don't really know that for sure.</p>
<p>
[quote]
how about you respond to what happens at my school and numerous elite NE boarding schools every year? why does stanford keep taking 15 people when only 3 go? why does tufts (the namesake of the so-called syndrome) take close to 40 when 5 will go? why does BC take 35/40 when maybe 3 will go? and finally, why does columbia take 20 from my school when they know that they'll get around 10?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>For Stanford: perhaps they want more top NE kids, and are willing to take more risks for them.</p>
<p>Columbia: 10 out of 20 seems pretty good to me... that's their target yield, isn't it?</p>
<p>Tufts Syndrome isn't when a school predicts for each applicant where he/she will end up getting in at and where he/she will matriculate. It really only happens to tip top applicants about whom the school is confident that they will have other (presumably more desirable choices).</p>
<p>10/20 factors in the ED admits too, so its much lower than what they get from the rest of the country. there is no school that gets good yield from us because so many students have top-heavy lists.</p>
<p>btw, ive had the same discussion with my counselor before, and he is often quoted by college newspapers and guides and probably knows more about the admissions process than you can ever dream of, been working at my school for 20+ years, and he says that there are actually far fewer schools that do this than people think. the main example that he cited was WUSTL and certain LACs that are heavily interest-oriented because of their inherent nature. he says that the more likely reasons are niche-related and interview-related, and those who put together a bad application that misrepresents them.</p>
<p>take 1rock1ice, who got a stanford rejection despite applying early and showing obvious interest. are you going to say that stanford is playing yield games??? times have changed--there is no such thing as an unhooked universal lock candidate. it's quite possible that there were 3 other stanford EA applicants who filled his niche and thereby made stanford have no need for him. </p>
<p>look, i've never heard of any ivies with the exception of Hardagon-Princeton doing this and neither has anyone else around here. feel free to wallow in ignorance.</p>
<p>Luckily for me, my ignorance of college admissions won't be bothering me much. It's good that you're so knowlegeable though; you'll get far in life.</p>
<p>"It's definitely Tufts syndrome. They want to preserve their yield."</p>
<p>honorable..making very false and incendiary remarks and then finally owning up to them by claiming that you dont care anyway. why dont you just go away then instead of waving your ignorance around like you're proud of it? why do you bother spitting out BS when you admit that you don't know what you're talking about? </p>
<p>im out. go reflect on this. it'll be interesting to see what new defense mechanism you'll have summoned to reconcile this.</p>
<p>Justice -- how do you Andover kids do so well?</p>
<p>You guys are getting over 40 kids into HYP each year, that's incredible.</p>
<p>" You guys are getting over 40 kids into HYP each year, that's incredible."</p>
<p>Not really. The admissions departments know the guidance counselors at prep schools personally, and there's a tradition of Andover, etc. serving as feeder schools to the Ivies. Public school students elsewhere might well argue that the quality of the education and quality of the applicants isn't really better at the elite high schools, but their longstanding reputation is enough to help admissions considerably.</p>
<p>"Roughly the same selectivity? Nah. HYP are on a different level, really."</p>
<p>That's the sort of unfounded elitism that I think caused Justice's reaction, HH. Here's a look at this year's selectivity, from an article in the Columbia Spectator, <a href="http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/05/42523abe2304e%5B/url%5D">http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/04/05/42523abe2304e</a> :</p>
<p>Harvard - 9.1%
Yale - 9.7%
Columbia - 10.4%
Princeton - 10.9%</p>
<p>I don't think that puts "HYP" on a different level. The only "selectivity" trait that those three exceed Columbia in is in test scores, and this is why they are consistently ranked higher. Given the acceptance percentages, that just shows that HYP place higher emphasis on standardized testing than Columbia does, which may also help explain why your HYP-accepted friends were waitlisted there.</p>
<p>"the school is confident that they will have other (presumably more desirable choices)."</p>
<p>This is where you raise hackles when you place other top-tier schools like Columbia on par with a school like Tufts.</p>
<p>I'm not so sure about P, but you can't really compare admit rates and yield rates between ED/EA schools... because ED policies help manipulate these numbers. ED schools know that they can't compete directly with some of the top schools, which is why they have it in the first place. ED allows them to accept less (which lowers the admit rate) and gives them an artifically high yield rate, both at the expense of the applicant's freedom to apply to other schools.</p>
<p>And despite not having ED, HY's yield rate are higher than Columbia's.</p>
<p>When the cross-admits consistently favor Harvard (and Yale, though I'm not as sure about this)... it's hard to accept an applicant that would most likely get into Harvard, since they'll likely go there instead.</p>
<p>Again, my opinion is that Tufts Syndrome really only applies to only the tip top applicants (maybe 80-100 of them).</p>
<p>It seems that Princeton isn't as much competition to HY as they are to each other.</p>
<p>
[quote]
honorable..making very false and incendiary remarks and then finally owning up to them by claiming that you dont care anyway. why dont you just go away then instead of waving your ignorance around like you're proud of it? why do you bother spitting out BS when you admit that you don't know what you're talking about?</p>
<p>im out. go reflect on this. it'll be interesting to see what new defense mechanism you'll have summoned to reconcile this.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh... I'll say whatever the hell I want. It's a messageboard, I don't have to spout all facts and no opinion. My statements were not complete BS--they had some reasonable basis to them. Just because you <em>know</em> a certain GC at a good school that happens to disagree, it doesn't completely discredit my points.</p>
<p>That's fine; if it makes you feel better, go ahead and psychoanalyze me. The fact is I don't really care enough to research and back up every single thing I say, and I won't care too much if I'm wrong.</p>
<p>Seems like you take this board way too seriously, to be talking about honor and whatnot.</p>
<p>i dont like to argue on here but you seriously make no sense and i dont want people to read what you write and let it go unchallenged.</p>
<p>"it's hard to accept an applicant that would most likely get into Harvard, since they'll likely go there instead." that's just not true and i dont know where you keep getting this idea from despite the obvious and easily-understood evidence against you. can you at least explain where you get this notion from and how you manage to sustain it in the face of evidence?</p>
<p>The Revealed Preference Ranking, for one. And the fact that Harvard boasts an extraordinary high yield is another indication of how much its acceptees prefer Harvard.</p>
<p>no one is arguing that Harvard gets the strongest yield. i think we all know that. but you are saying that colleges are scared to go head-to-head against Harvard for the strongest applicants, and that is no light accusation. I ask you, how can you reconcile that theory with the evidence against it--the fact that there are so many cross-admits? i know some people who swept and they got into columbia too in addition to those schools. i know someone who swept the ivies and got likely letters from harvard, yale, dartmouth. ??? how do you defend yourself</p>
<p>Uhm, this is going to sound reallly stupid, but out of curiousity, why is the Tufts' Syndrome known as the Tufts' Syndrome? Why associate it with Tufts? I thought this thing only occured with UPenn...but I guess I just really don't know anything about the college admit game. Lol.</p>
<p>
[quote]
no one is arguing that Harvard gets the strongest yield. i think we all know that. but you are saying that colleges are scared to go head-to-head against Harvard for the strongest applicants, and that is no light accusation. I ask you, how can you reconcile that theory with the evidence against it--the fact that there are so many cross-admits? i know some people who swept and they got into columbia too in addition to those schools. i know someone who swept the ivies and got likely letters from harvard, yale, dartmouth. ??? how do you defend yourself
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Good for them. Maybe Columbia (or whatever other school that yield protects) didn't feel that they were a shoe-in to Harvard or Yale. Simple explanation for that, really. By the way, I thought you said earlier that anecdotal evidence doesn't really mean much.</p>
<p>I never said that Columbia <em>never</em> want to go head to head with H. (if I did, that's not what I meant to say. Probably a mistake from typing so fast). Just that they didn't want to go head to head for the STRONGEST applicants.</p>