Good states for college admission

Parents Forum
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<p>Does anyone have how the following states rank in terms of college admissions? New Jersey (the worst I'm sure), Florida, Ohio(probably the best) or North Carolina. Let's say for elite private schools. I posted this somewhere else and got responses about Alaska and Wyoming but those aren't really feasible for us. Would Florida or North Carolina be significantly better than New Jersey? We lived in Ohio and our kids were under a lot less pressure and the kids did much better than where we are now in a very good school in New Jersey.</p>

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<p>I doubt there are any “good” states for college admission. An excellent student might get a “tip” if s/he lived in a low population state like Wyoming or the Dakotas … elite colleges like to have students from everywhere. But Harvard isn’t going to pass over an New Jersey Intel Prize winner for a student with 1760 SATs and 4H/FFA as ECs.</p>

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<p>If there is a disadvantage to being from New Jersey, it probably reflects the fact that New Jersey “exports” students – that is, there are more students from New Jersey going to out-of-state colleges than there are students from out-of-state going to colleges in New Jersey.</p>

<p>In any case, a willingness to travel may help you if you’re seeking admission to elite universities. For example, every year on this board you will hear about kids from the Washington, DC area who were disappointed that they didn’t get into Georgetown or Johns Hopkins and kids from the Chicago area who were similarly disappointed at Northwestern or the University of Chicago. They might have had better luck if the midwesterners had applied to Georgetown and the DC-area people had applied to Northwestern.</p>

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<p>I lived in Ohio and New Jersey. The same kid would work much, much harder in New Jersey and definitely have a much harder time getting into a top college. This is probably not the official view but I know it’s true. In Ohio, you go where you “deserve” to go. In Jersey, everyone knows many kids who are perfect and don’t get in where they want to go. I wanted to know if anyone knows anything about Florida or North Carolina.</p>

<p>Just as an example, I know a girl from Ohio who was really an underachiever. A very bright girl with pretty mediocre extracurriculars who didn’t take a lot of honors, etc. She had a good GPA and decent SAT’s. She got into the same college as the valedictorian from my niece’s school in Westchester, New York. The valedictorian also was head of all kinds of organizations and fought cancer in high school.</p>

<p>Geographic diversity is important to elite colleges and there are a lot more kids from the Northeast applying to everywhere. This has a lot to do with money.</p>

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<p>I don’t know. Maybe Chicago doesn’t count as the midwest, because I think a lot of the top kids from D’s north suburban Chicago high school feel like they must be from New Jersey, judging from college admissions this past year. The valedictorian, with a perfect GPA, all honors/AP courses, near-perfect scores (NMF) and impressive ECs, was rejected at all but one Ivy. No HPY admissions for the class of 2009. Surprisingly few top-20 admissions for some very impressive students. It was a tough year. I saw articles about how it was good to be a rich white kid this year, but I didn’t see it play out here. My D’s are not among the top students and won’t be aiming for the top schools, and I’m not unhappy to be avoiding that pressure cooker.</p>

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<p>Think about this:</p>

<p>The reason kids from Ohio seem to do better is because they are willing to go to colleges that are “less prestigious” that also happen to be closer to home. Consider a kid from Cleveland: He has good choices near home in CMU, Oberlin, Case, Rochester and a few good state U all within a 5 hour drive from home. These are all great schools, and the best in the area, but ones that would be considered safety schools for the kid from Northern NJ. </p>

<p>Having lived in both the midwest and northeast, I can tell you the big difference is that parental outlook is different. Many parents outside the northeast recognize the value of their great state universities, all local. The northeast does not have this tradition. No one calls U Mass, UConn or URI “great”, and this attitude affects college admissions in a big way.</p>

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<p>I really don’t think that the kid from northern NJ views Rochester, Oberlin, or CMU a safety school. That is ridiculous, IMO. Strong students attend those schools. Additionally, OH kids have wonderful schools like U of Miami, Ohio U., Ohio State, and just bunches of wonderful small LACs. I don’t think that they have a need to leave their state if they don’t want to go far from home. </p>

<p>NJ’s public instate school costs are so high that it is ridiculous. Many leave because they don’t want to pay 22-25k to sit in classrooms with over 300 students and wait in the cold and rain/snow to be packed like a sardine on a bus to shuttle from one part of campus to another. The smaller public Us in the state have little name recognition. JMO.</p>

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<p>northeastmom:</p>

<p>Whether Oberlin, Rochester et al are safety schools or not depends on the kid. For my D, they were. For yours, maybe not. </p>

<p>You seem to like the term “ridiculous”. I’m a bit less eager to throw insults at other posters, but I’ll be happy to watch for threads with your handle in them and stay away in the future. :)</p>

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<p>I was not attacking you, or your child ,newsmassdad. I never go on the attack, so sorry you feel offended enough not to read my posts. We were NOT talking about YOUR daughter. You made the statement:</p>

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<p>I am happy that your D did so well that all of these schools were safeties for her, but you said that they would be considered safeties for the kid from northern NJ. Most students from any part of NJ would not consider these schools as safeties, and if they were, they would be wrong to do so.</p>

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<p>I live in a low-population area of Oregon (that is to say, not Portland ;)), and it does seem that the high-achieving kids in this area do pretty well with admission to elite schools in the NE. I mean, the kids that do are really strong candidates with the great stats and activities, etc. – no slouches among them – but I see how often similarly strong students from the NE get different results at elite NE colleges.</p>

<p>It’s hard to quantify objectively though. Would be interesting…</p>

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<p>amazon, it is an interesting question. FLA and NC have have some wonderful state publics at more affordable instate costs than NJ. For example, some NC public instate COAs are in the 12-15k range, vs. low 20k range in NJ. FLA also has some wonderful options but they are not for everyone (many large Us) and the B student apparently has trouble accessing them and ends up going OOS (someone at a private U that recruits heavily from FLA explained this to me when I asked why they go to this OOS private instead of attending an instate public within FLA).</p>

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<p>Our family moved (for employment reasons) from NJ to a state in ‘flyover territory’ that sometimes gets mentioned as one of the ‘good states to be from’. Before the move I looked into this question of geographic diversity in some detail, and after the move I have observed the college acceptance results at my D’s old school and her new school. </p>

<p>My unscientific inference: Geographic diversity may be somewhat helpful in the “just-below-tippy-top” tier of Northeastern colleges (esp LACs) that are popular among students in the Northeast but not necessarily so well known elsewhere. </p>

<p>For the tippy top tier it does not help, and may even hurt, depending on how familiar the colleges are with the schools in your new location. There are more ‘feeder’ high schools in the Northeast than elsewhere in the country. Too bad my D is looking at a lot of such colleges.</p>

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<p>We are in NC. Our kids went to a pretty diverse large suburban h.s (2600+). The vast majority of the kids attend an NC public university or small instate privates. It was the same way where I grew up in another area of the state. The fraction of grads leaving the state for college doesn’t seem a large number when you read all the college destinations in the local newspaper. Sure there are always some headed far away but not most. So maybe getting an app. from an NC kid to a distant sch. is more unusual (making them a desirable prospect?) than the one from a state where most kids leave to go elsewhere. Who knows?</p>

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<p>It is interesting to note that, according to Karabel’s book “The Chosen”, geographic diversity efforts actually started at HYP as a way to minimize the number of students of Jewish descent. Same for legacy preference and holistic admissions that emphasize “character”. </p>

<p>What I also find fascinating is that his description of the admissions practices at HYP during their “quota” years sounds exactly like what they still do. </p>

<p>Mind you, I am not implying in the slightest that colleges use their admissions criteria to discriminate against any group any more. But I find it curious that they’ve kept approaches that started out that way.</p>

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<p>Packmom, that makes sense to me. Your state has some wonderful schools and the public Us are so reasonable in cost compared with some other states.</p>

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<p>I would say that if a kid has really good SATs and is going to a good high school with the full complement of APs, etc. that the tippy-top schools would also be much more inclined to take someone from a flyover state. Our piano teacher in Ohio had 2 students who went to Harvard, one in NYU. 2 kids got into Brown in one year. The school work load was also much, much lighter there.</p>

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<p>I know it’s conventional wisdom on CC and elsewhere that applicants from certain states are disadvantaged in admissions to Ivies and other elite colleges due to the sheer numbers in which they apply. I’ve propagated this view myself. But I’m not sure conventional wisdom is right in this case.</p>

<p>We can get at this to some extent. Princeton conveniently provides data on the numbers of enrolled freshmen in its class of 2012 from each state:</p>

<p>[Number</a> of Students in the Class of 2012 by Geographic Region](<a href=“http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/map.htm]Number”>http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/map.htm)</p>

<p>Meanwhile, the College Board publishes statistics on how many 2008 graduating HS seniors from each state sent SAT I and/or SAT II scores to the 45 most popular colleges for that state ( look under “state reports”—you need to look up each state individually):</p>

<p>[College-Bound</a> Seniors 2008](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2008]College-Bound”>Higher Education Professionals | College Board)</p>

<p>Now, conveniently enough, Princeton shows up in the College Board’s 45 most popular colleges for most states. And Princeton requires all applicants to submit 3 SAT Subject Tests–so presumably, every applicant to Princeton sends SAT scores. Thus the number of students from each state sending SAT I and/or SAT II scores to Princeton ought to approximate the number of applicants for that state; why bother to send the scores if you’re not going to apply? So let’s call those sending SAT scores “presumptive applicants.” </p>

<p>The number of enrolled freshman from each state won’t give us precise information on the number admitted, since Princeton’s yield is closer to 70% than 100%. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument (and advancing the ball) that the yield is pretty constant across states and geographic regions. Then we get the following relationships:</p>

<p>STATE / # enrolled freshmen / # presumptive applicants / enrolled as % of applicants</p>

<p>New Jersey / 168 / 3,774 / 4.5%
Florida / 49 / 1,325 / 3.7%
Ohio / 16 / 618 / 2.6%
North Carolina / 16 / < 732 / unknown but could be as low as 2.2% </p>

<p>Wyoming / 0 / 9 / 0%
North Dakota / 1 / 13 / 7.7%
South Dakota / 1 / 31 / 3.2%
Montana / 0 / 46 / 0%
Minnesota / 8 / 283 / 2.8%
Illinois / 32 / 759 / 4.2%
Michigan / 15 / 469 / 3.2%
Wisconsin / 9 / 231 / 3.9%</p>

<p>Virginia / 48 / 1,107 / 4.3%
Maryland / 66 / 973 / 6.8%
Pennsylvania / 77 / 1,921 / 4.0% </p>

<p>Of the four states the OP specifically inquired about, New Jersey actually has the highest percentage of presumptive applicants (those sending SAT scores to Princeton) ending up in the freshman class—a paltry 4.5%, but that’s definitely higher than Ohio and Florida. We can’t tell for North Carolina because Princeton doesn’t show up as one of the 45 most popular colleges for North Carolinians—all we know is that the number who sent SAT scores was less than 732, the number for Harvard, the 45th-most-popular college for North Carolinians that year.</p>

<p>What about the supposed “flyover land” advantage? Well, North Dakota looks pretty good at 7.7%, but that’s just one student in the freshman class. Neighboring South Dakota also had 1 enrolled but more presumptive applicants so it ended up at 3.2%, pretty close to Ohio territory. Sparsely populated Wyoming had 9 presumptive applicants, but no one in the entering class. Neighboring Montana had 0 enrolled despite 46 presumptive applicants, bringing the 4-state (ND,SD, MT, WY) total to 2 for 99, or 2.0%. Neighboring Minnesota, a more populous, more affluent, and generally better-educated “flyover” state, had an anemic 2.8%. So much for a “sparsely populated” or “flyover state” advantage. Illinois did a little better than other Midwestern states, but not by much, and not as well as New Jersey</p>

<p>Now admittedly, we don’t know how many actually applied, or how many were actually admitted from each state. We also don’t know how the credentials of those state-by-state applicant pools stack up. But based on this limited data, it’s hard to say New Jersey kids are at a statistical disadvantage when it comes to admission to Princeton, their backyard elite private that presumably is not going to go out of its way to land New Jerseyans since they’re a dime-a-dozen in its applicant pool. True, Princeton rejects far more New Jerseyans than it does applicants from any other state. But at the end of the day, that may be only because so many more New Jerseyans apply; the limited evidence here suggests the rejection RATE may not be any higher for New Jersey applicants than for those from other states. But I’d welcome others to comb further through the Princeton data, or to produce similar data for other colleges if it’s available. </p>

<p>For now, my tentative conclusion is that the idea that certain states are “advantaged” or “disadvantaged” in elite college admissions is probably just an unfounded myth—at least for Princeton, and until proven otherwise.</p>

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<p>We’re from NJ (and coincidentally my son is going to college in Ohio)…</p>

<p>I do think that NJ kids are at a disadvantage. Even after reading the post above with all of the Princeton info. I’d really like to see that stats of the applicants/acceptees from NJ as compared to some other states. I thought (and I could be wrong) that NJ has some of the highest SAT scores in the country. That might mean that even though the percentages from other states are similar (accepted/applied), the applicants themselves might be better qualified from New Jersey. In other words, the kids from NJ who are rejected might have better stats than the kids from another state that were accepted. I thought it was sort of conventional wisdom that NJ has really good school systems (hence our ridiculously high property taxes). I’m definitely not trying to dis any other state. i do think that because NJ does export soooooo many kids, and so many high-achievers, they are at somewhat of a disadvantage at certain very exclusive schools (particularly the ones right here on the East Coast if you know what I mean.)</p>

<p>Heck, even when I went away to college back in the days of the dinosaurs (down to a state school in Virginia), I know that my “stats” (SAT scores, etc.) were much better then lots of kids I met from other states (from the south and the midwest), but many of these kids were either val or sal of their graduating class, while I was no where near that in my class. No matter what things you might want to say about New Jersey (have you seen “The Real Housewives?”), we do have many great public school systems that really prepare our kids for college anywhere in the country…the competition in our state is fierce.</p>

<p>Just my opinion of course!!</p>

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<p>Nice analysis, bclintonk!</p>

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<p>bclintonk: Thank you for that analysis. What amazes me about it is that I had done an almost identical study last year when we were contemplating our move, and reached the same conclusion- but my study was for Yale, using Yale’s numbers.</p>

<p>ETA: Later, someone else had independently done the same analysis and posted it on the Yale message board. I may be mistaken but that person’s username is something like Descartez.</p>

<p>China: Your presumption is not true. College Board publishes the figures on how many students take the SAT from each state and the percentile scores for those states. You can do the analysis yourself and report back.</p>