<p>Well, you know ... I think he did.</p>
<p>No... think a bit, Bulldog: </p>
<p>According to you, Harvard gets a huge pile of lower-end SAT applicants (1200 and under) - far bigger than Yale, you allege. </p>
<p>And yet ... and yet ... the median SAT score at Harvard is higher!!!</p>
<p>How can this possible be, if one accepts your thesis?</p>
<p>Why .... Harvard must get a <em>few</em> more high-end apps to offset that <em>huge</em> pile of low-end apps they receive, (far bigger than Yale's, I understand you to say) .... musn't they??</p>
<p>Are we missing something?</p>
<p>Ok ok ok look.. </p>
<p>this is where you go back to his actual post and link to the hard numbers, then it'll be like BOOM! Take it to the face kid! And I'll feel utterly humiliated and you will have, once more, risen triumphant in another pointless argument.</p>
<p>Edit: Again, my hypothesis is highly speculative and it's meant to be in opposition to "tokenadult's", which is even more so. In terms of SAT medians scores, the difference is not really significant and can partly be explained by % of athletes in the composition of each class.</p>
<p>Are you suggesting that recruited athletes constitute a higher percentage of each class at Yale, thus explaining its lower SAT median? Do you have any statistics - or a link - to support this thesis?</p>
<p>Bulldog, the reason I don't buy your whole line of argument here is that BOTH schools in question select from the top end of their applicant pools. Students who submit "lottery ticket" applications get rejected by any Ivy League school to which they apply, and don't have anything to do with how "selective" a school is in admitting the class of admittees that it actually admits. </p>
<p>I do appreciate, by the way, your rejection of the idea that the aggregate size of the applicant pool alone tells us anything useful, which is the main issue I was disagreeing with in the post by the other participant. Now that we have reached agreement on that point, suppose we go to this year's RSI thread and ask how many RSI alumni applied to Harvard and how many to Yale? (You are welcome to visit that thread, posted in the High School Life Forum, if you are genuinely curious about this issue. My informed guess is that MIT rather than Yale is Harvard's rival school among that group of outstanding high school students.)</p>
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<p>It is a known fact that each year there are dozens (hundreds?) of cross-admits to Harvard and Yale, who must necessarily have applied to both schools. It is also a known fact that both Harvard and Yale are SCEA ("single-choice early action") schools, so in the early round of admission decisions, if the applicants are following the rules, the applicants are self-selecting as either Yale aspirants or Harvard aspirants. It would be very interesting indeed to get detailed information about the characteristics of students in those two NON-overlapping pools of early action applicants.</p>
<p>Thinking ahead a bit, no?</p>
<p>The early pools may overlap to a greater extent than you initially suspect, since 9-10% of the Harvard SCEA admits and 11-12% of the Yale and Stanford admits end up jumping ship - upwards of 80-90 in each case out of 724 - 853 in each case. </p>
<p>And bear in mind that the cross admit POOL size for those admitted SCEA to one school or the other must be even larger, since not all common admits jump ship by a long shot.</p>
<p>I confess I'm an applicant that jumped ship to Harvard :) (Stanford SCEA).</p>
<p>californiakid, it's good to hear I'm not the only one who was lured to Harvard. I was a Yale SCEA admit...</p>
<p>With respect to SCEA applicants who switch, it sometimes means that the original early application was of the "strategic" variety, and didn't really represent the applicant's "dream school" - all things being equal.</p>
<p>Then too, I suspect a fair fraction of the switchers do so in response to a more attractive financial aid offer.</p>
<p>Hi, Byerly, you are referring to the phenomenon of an ADMITTED early applicant to either Yale or Harvard then applying RD to the rival school, right? (Of course, the RD application may have been submitted before the applicant knew the result of the early round decisions.) I agree that that phenomenon exists, because we hear about it every year on CC. And of course early round rejects and even deferees would be well advised to apply somewhere else besides their favorite school after the early round is over. </p>
<p>But I still wonder, among the applicants who decide to apply to ONE school with an SCEA admissions policy, whether there might be some systematic difference between the Harvard SCEA pool and the Yale SCEA pool. I think that would be an interesting issue to find out more about. </p>
<p>Best wishes to all the students still trying to make up their minds.</p>
<p>Byerly is correct, at least for my situation. Harvard offerred me a larger financial aid package. californiakid, why did you decide to pick Harvard over Stanford?</p>
<p>I visited all my schools, and really tried to see where I would fit in best. My decision was based mostly on environment...I've lived most of my life in California, so Stanford would be more of a "been there, done that" thing. I needed more of a change :).</p>
<p>I think geography is a big factor. Stanford benefits tremendously from the attraction of a West Coast school to Californians over all the elite options, which are thousands of miles away. (40% + of its matriculants are Californians.)</p>
<p>The opposite effect benefits some of the East Coast schools vs Stanford of course, but then they still have to compete head-to-head against each
other without a big location advantage.</p>
<p>Despite all the talk we hear from the West Coasters, I think its simply geography and not "weather" that aids Stanford primarily in this respect.</p>
<p>Offset against this is evidence that Harvard's setting in Cambridge/Boston gives it a huge - often underestimated - edge in recruiting, with cross-admits as well as with applicants generally.</p>
<p>Yale has worked hard in recent years to play down New Haven's lingering unsavory reputation, since I'm sure they have studies and surveys showing that this factor killed them with cross-admits.</p>
<p>Princeton, of course (though not an SCEA school) has a smaller though still notable problem with cross-admits: rightly or wrongly, fairly or unfairly, the "eating club" scene is off-putting for a persistent fraction of applicants. Princeton is working to minimize this problem by marginalizing the "eating clubs" with new housing arrangements.</p>
<p>True, Harvard and Yale are the most selective schools probably, in the end, because of their urban locations. Million dollar apartments and condos are being built in the areas around Yale and Harvard, as these universities are at the center of their host cities.</p>
<p>Other prominent urban schools, such as NYU, have recently become very selective as well, and at the current rate will pass Princeton in selectivity within a few years. Columbia has not seen quite the same benefit, because it is located in a marginal neighborhood of New York, rather than at the center of it like NYU.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, rural schools like Dartmouth and Cornell have languished in popularity, relatively speaking.</p>
<p>Stanford's apparent admission selectivity quotient is inflated because Yale and Harvard look like a single star from a distant west coast vantage. From there, it's not Stanford vs. Yale or Stanford vs. Harvard, but Stanford vs. the Yale-Harvard, the Oxbridge of American education. If Stanford relocated in say, Hartford, it would be a distant 3rd, and possibly 4th, behind Princeton in selectivity.</p>
<p>I'm not sure that's entirely true. </p>
<p>While Harvard kills Stanford with cross-admits generally, beating it even among West Coast applicants, Stanford more than holds its own vs Yale and Princeton.</p>