<p>I also took a look at the Princeton results threads to see what I could see about legacies there. Interestingly, they were all accepted, except for one waitlistee whose parents just went there for grad school. Perhaps rejected Princeton legacies are even less willing to share that info.
But among the 8 acceptees, they all got into other highly selective schools. 5 got into other Ivies or Stanford. One got into Pomona and Swarthmore. One got into Northwestern (but was waitlisted a bunch of places, including Lehigh). One got into Amherst and Carleton. One got into Berkeley (no info on where else that one applied.)</p>
<p>The waitlisted person got into Chicago and Northwestern.</p>
<p>One of the accepted kids was a URM who also got into Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and MIT–but was waitlisted at Tufts, where she was also a legacy.</p>
<p>It hurts my head too much to try to do this for schools with both early and regular admissions.</p>
<p>Well, then, he’ll go on to be at the top 5% of admitted students at number 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10. And? The world goes on. The faculties at all these places are all top notch. The facilities are top notch. The classmates are top notch. I cannot seriously comprehend that there would be some marked difference at this level. It’s not as though at school #3 this student is going to cure cancer, whereas at school #7 he might just figure out how to engineer a better Silly Putty or something.</p>
<p>Agree with ellemenope…not everyone who is admitted to HYP and other elite schools get in because they are more qualified than all the rejected students. SOME of the rejected students were JUST as qualified as accepted students. Once you make the “most qualified” pile, it is other things that can tip you in…be it a hook, or fulfilling an institutional need. And as she says, some rejected students at H or Y or P get into some of these and not the other and so obviously were qualified enough for schools of a similar level of selectivity. Not every rejected kid at an Ivy is “not qualified enough” or not as much as those who were accepted. Odds as they are, you can be one of the tippy top kids in the nation and still be rejected at some elite schools and accepted at others. </p>
<p>I also agree with Pizzagirl and fireandrain that it is unbelievable to read some kids (or parents) on CC who feel outraged that they didn’t get into an Ivy and have to go to some other truly top highly selective college! As if they won’t get as good of an education or have just as great a chance of future success!! Oh the shame! :rolleyes: Not until I joined CC did I ever come across the “Ivy or bust” mentality. Thankfully, many here do not have it. But many do.</p>
<p>Somewhere else, I mentioned that the professor in the math class I took my first year remarked that at our level of mathematics, it didn’t make a difference whether the class was taught by John von Neumann or John von Brand X. (And actually, John von Brand X was an excellent mathematician, as it happens.) However, there are students who’ve reached a level where it would make a difference.</p>
<p>Math 18.100 is apparently the most-dropped course at MIT (maybe it’s the 18.100B variant). This seems to me to indicate a mismatch between some of the students and the course offerings. It’s an advanced course, and not the first-year offering, so it’s not a question of incomplete adjustment of students fresh out of high school.</p>
<p>Does it matter in the long run? I know some really outstanding researchers who are not on either coast, and students at good public universities can generally take graduate courses whenever they are ready for them. So there are compensations. </p>
<p>While #3 vs. #7 doesn’t matter much in general, I do think that the level of physics research at Harvard is quite different from the level of physics research at Dartmouth, and I would have to give Harvard a slight edge still over Northwestern and Chicago, despite the true excellence of the latter schools.</p>
<p>Exactly. And you know what sucks? My S, matriculating at Northwestern, is going to have to live with some of these insufferable kinds of people, who instead of going out and celebrating and burning the house down over their incredible fortune at getting into one of the finest educational opportunities in the country, are going to see where they are at with a (heavy sigh) I suppose it’s better than Random State U, but I didn’t really win any jackpot.</p>
<p>I counseled my kids – and they have fully internalized it – that when they (magically, amazingly, thank-you-god) got into schools of that caliber that they hit the jackpot. Absolutely hit the jackpot. Life is great, this is fabulous, wow, we are truly blessed. And indeed they still feel that way on cloud nine even though it’s been 5 months since their acceptances. It’s too bad that some families / students have no such perspective on life. Ah well. Such poor attitudes and such thin-slicing-of-the-bologna will not serve them well in life, no matter what the name on the diploma.</p>
<p>^I’d give Harvard the edge over NW and Chicago in lots of things, but not necessarily every major. And of course sometimes a kid will for one reason or another probably end up with a better experience at one of those “lesser” schools because they are the type to go out and make the connections that take them places.</p>
<p>I do get what you are saying QuantMech. After years and years of being bored in school, the one thing I wanted for my oldest was for him to be surrounded by kids who were as bright or brighter than he was. He got that in spades at Carnegie Mellon. He’d have gotten it at Harvard too. He’d probably have ended up with the same job offer either way - though of course there’s no way of knowing that!</p>
<p>PG luckily, I think most of the disappointed kids get over it pretty quickly. I think 90% of the CMU SCS class had MIT as their first choice!</p>
<p>Northwestern is a truly excellent university, and I think it’s also on an upward trajectory, even from its current spot. Some of my favorite colleagues are there–not being ironic.</p>
<p>Among the students I was mentioning, the ones who were going to Northwestern were pumped up about the opportunities there, not “insufferable,” and not acting disappointed. I was commenting about the illogicality of some of the admissions decisions, as an outside observer.</p>
<p>Furthermore, QMP was quite prepared to be very happy about Wisconsin, if that wound up being the best option (at least, pre-Governor Walker). Go Badgers! Etc. Years ago, I elected to attend a university that was nowhere near the top of the prestige list, among the places I was admitted. On purpose!</p>
<p>But Pizzagirl and I are just not going to agree. Would a really excellent student be just a well served by attending my lectures and doing undergrad research in my lab as by attending lectures at HYPSM and doing undergrad research there? It would be foolish to think so. Although to borrow Pizzagirl’s metaphor, that would be a whole different bologna, and not just a slice of the same one. </p>
<p>When it comes to much more nearly equivalent options: Since no one can run two parallel lives, one doesn’t know what differences will make a difference.</p>
<p>Okay, and I mean this with all due respect, but the fact that UChicago or NU can be called “lesser” schools by any stretch of the imagination is completely insane.</p>
<p>We don’t help with this attitutde. </p>
<p>There was a poster on here a week or so ago with a really long thread, “To Ivy or not to Ivy,” and I was incredulous reading this thread and listening to this mother and how she was planning her son’s future all the way up to getting his MBA while all the while thinking her kid was a shoo in for an Ivy, and very few people on that thread managed to mention the fact, straight up fact, that her unhooked kid had about as much of a chance of getting into those schools as I have of winning the lottery next. Well, maybe a little more since I don’t actually play the lottery.</p>
<p>The only place in the world it might matter that a kid went to Harvard instead of UChicago would be if they were going to be an academic and try to become a professor. And, even then, a recent nobel winner was a UCSD grad. Go figure. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>mathmom’s use of “lesser” was a joke, poetgrl.</p>
<p>And thanks for the support, mathmom. In SCS, CMU is absolutely top-level. And it is definitely correct that there are differences among universities, by major.</p>
<p>mathmom’s son was one of the students affected by the illogicality of MIT admissions under Marilee Jones. I think it has improved somewhat since her departure, but her influence was quite pervasive. She was pro-popcorn-eating-movie-watching students (for spare time activities) and against those who claimed to do anything vaguely scientific or intellectual for relaxation. </p>
<p>I know that molliebatmit is a staunch defender of Marilee. I respect mollie and don’t actually know Marilee, so she probably has some admirable traits. But faking a resume? As an admissions director? And not just once, but adding qualifications over the years?</p>
<p>First off, I should admit I don’t care who Harvard picks; and even if I did I do not expect them to play by any rules other than their own. Faux-angst is not my problem.</p>
<p>Yet Harvard admissions is a puzzle, and I love puzzles
The sniff test says legacy helps a student; I accept that as a fact. How <em>much</em> it helps is murkier. I was amused to read the Harvard president spin the data to avoid an apples to apples comparison of incoming SAT scores, since the legacy group has less URM and athletes (as pointed out in an earlier post.) Also amusing that the president was quoted comparing legacy <em>acceptances</em> to student <em>admits.</em> Intended faux-pas or not, H should present itself a bit better.</p>
<p>Anyway, I can think of a couple ways to statistically parse the legacy weight question. The best (again, as posted earlier) is to compare acceptance rates of H legacies to other Ivys compared to non-URM-non-athlete-non-legacies. Another approach is to tease out the difference between the average and the mean in SAT scores. As a start, it is easy to see that the SAT at Harvard has considerably less weight than e.g Caltech: Harvard 25th percentile is (690-700) for math or verbal, while Caltech’s math 25th percentile is 770. That is about 0.7 SD difference – huge if we start from the assumption that distributions are normal and standardized metrics decide admission.</p>
<p>Starting from an assumption that legacy shifts the curve 0.7 SD, we can calculate expected legacy enrichment and see how that compares with the reported data if the top 99.5% of the applicant pool after weighting is accepted:
Generic applicant: 1/200 (2.57 SD)
Legacy applicant: 1/32 (1.86 SD)
Implying a 6x acceptance enrichment, higher than the 4-5x reported. But not by much ;)</p>
<p>Bottom line: an applicant with a 1400-1450/1600 SAT <em>may</em> be accepted to H although unlikely as a generic candidate, while chances are quite nice if legacy is part of the resume.</p>
<p>I believe educationwise (I dont believe USNWR knows what they are doing when they rate undergrad departments), Chicago beats Harvard and any other school for most of their equivalent departments. So if someone needs only a great education and want work with great minds and don’t care about anything else (should I say fun?), Chicago is the place.</p>
<p>The yields at HYPSM and other Ivies this year will have a major trickle down effect in 2012 for other top 20 schools. A lot of people had to settle for (the horror) other top 20 schools which means they probably ended up with much higher yields than they expected. Next year they will admit fewer students and put more people on waitlist just in case. So the trickle down effect will be more pronounced at schools like Chicago, NU, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame etc. where they will reduce the number of admitted students by a few percentage points with a pronounced effect. All Northwestern has to do is cut the admitted by 5% due to higher yield and 260 students are now out of consideration.</p>
<p>There is also a major difference in reading 17000 applications to choose 2100 people vs reading 28-35k applications to do the same. It should get much harder to define who is better among a pool of almost equal applicants (once you have selected the world class juggler, tap dancer, skeet shooter, trapeze artist etc who seem to be no brainers -right?). Sometimes I think it works like Oscars where someone gets nominated twice and loses both and same way, top 50 people in a school all apply with close academic attributes (GPA 4.5 - 4.3, SAT 2400 -2100) and are shocked when only number 25 gets in without knowing number 25 said he/she worked at an AIDS orphanage in South Africa for a couple of summers in the application and no one knows about it.</p>
<p>Either Harvard knew this kid is a true star or because he got into Harvard, he also got this scholarship? Either way they are able to assess the truly exceptional candidates?</p>
<p>Of course no student should EXPECT admission to a top-25 college, and I have little sympathy for those who get multiple top-25 acceptances but continue to whine about their HYPSM rejections. </p>
<p>Yet there are those students who seem to have a portfolio of stats and achievements that will land them on 4 or 6 or 8 waitlists, including HYP, yet not get an outright acceptance anywhere, except to their safety schools. These are clearly exceptional candidates who, for whatever reason, didn’t have traits unique enough to attract an advocate. I suspect it is due to such cases that many people become cynical about the fairness of the current system – and it also fuels huge increases in the numbers of applications each student completes, just to play it safe.</p>
<p>It would be nice to have some sort of unified admission system where a top student would be placed in the highest-ranked school (from that student’s list) that would accept him. Questbridge actually does something like this during its first match round – the student lists up to 8 schools and the highest one on that list which accepts him gets the student.</p>
<p>LoremIpsum - Did nt the Ivies had some admission sharing infopact in the past (10-15 years ago) that broke the law and they had to stop doing it?</p>
<p>I would just note that in my unscientific review of the results pages for Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, I found a suprising number of kids who were both legacies and URMs, or both legacies and recruited athletes. Certainly there are some athletes who are URMs, too. You have to take these kinds of overlaps into account when trying to dope out the odds.</p>
<p>“It would be nice to have some sort of unified admission system”</p>
<p>Fair, and the way to insure outstanding mediocrity. Real genius, and more importantly real creative genius cannot be parsed by standardized criteria. Now whether it is important to society for those students to end up at HYPS et al is less obvious.</p>
<p>“The only place in the world it might matter that a kid went to Harvard instead of UChicago would be if they were going to be an academic and try to become a professor.”</p>
<p>I think that that’s going a bit too far, unless you believe that a difference doesn’t “matter” unless it is foreclosed at one of the two schools. To me, it matters if a student’s goal will be somewhat harder to achieve at one school than another. There are a lot of paths that will be at least a little steeper to climb coming from Chicago rather than Harvard. Getting into a top Wall Street firm, or the publishing industry in NYC, or a television writing job, or a top-3 law school, are a few that come to mind. Of course you can do all these things coming from Chicago – but they’re all hard to do no matter who you are, and I think it “matters” if your school raises your odds by 25%, or even 5%.</p>
<p>There is this huge misconception that finance occurs in NYC. Actually, the wall street world of Chicago is huge (see: Jamie Dimon, for one), see most of the best options traders in the world, frankly. New York is about to take a massive hit anyway, since the DOJ just disallowed the sale of the NYSE to NASDAQ, and so the NYSE is going to go to a german firm, now. </p>
<p>You can so easily get into the upper echilons of finace from UChicago, or even Notre Dame, for that matter, that most people here find this fallacy laughable. When the banks were deregulated, the Swiss banks came to chicago to buy up the boutique houses to get their traders, and when BofA needed this, they too came to Chicago. JP Morgan has always been heavy on the traders in Chicago, and if you want hedge funds, one of the biggest ones is in Evanston, home of NU. Unless you think the only thing that matters is Goldman Sachs, or the now defunct Solomon Brothers or LTCM, which went completely broke. </p>
<p>I can promise you that PIMCO will have no problem with you if you come from the midwestern schools. As for a top 3 law school, I have no idea, and if you want a television writing job, you’d be better off at USC or UCLA. </p>
<p>The publishing industry is going the way of the buggy whip, unfortunately, but that’s not news.</p>
<p>In fact, the place where Harvard may have less of an advantage than elsewhere over Chicago is in PhD program admission. As far as I remember, Chicago has more bachelor’s graduates per capita (and maybe even absolutely) go on to earn PhDs than Harvard. Chicago is well configured to get its students into top doctoral programs, much more so than to get them into professional schools, or jobs in Hollywood. There’s no Chicago equivalent to the pipeline from the Lampoon to network TV writing staffs. (If that still exists. Ditto Crimson writers going into mainstream journalism.)</p>
<p>Re cooperation. The Ivy League used to have uniform financial aid standards and a central staff to administer them, so that financial aid offers were all the same for however many Ivy League colleges admitted a student. The Justice Department sued alleging that was an antitrust violation; the colleges settled and signed a consent decree to keep strict separation in admission and financial aid matters from one college to the next.</p>
<p>Any student who has this experience did not apply to the right group of schools, or had something truly glaringly wrong in their application (like an arrogant essay or a bad recommendation). If you apply to HYP and your state public, you are almost begging to be disappointed. On that Asian thread, the good news is that most of those kids did apply to something other than HYP, and got into some excellent schools. The problem is that instead of viewing themselves as incredibly blessed, they believe that Asian males are discriminated against. Even Asian males who got into one Ivy but not the others seem to feel this way.</p>
<p>“Like these kids, in this thread: Asian Admission Results thread??
Cry me a river. These kids are moaning about the fact they didn’t get into HYP, but going to places like University of Chicago. Yup, they are now ruined for life (read with sarcasm, please).”</p>
