Is Harvard a lot harder to get into than SYPM? The acceptance rates seem more or less the same, but I’m wondering if Harvard’s applicant pool is more competitive due to its brand name.
First off, students should NOT be selecting a college based upon their acceptance rate – that’s especially true for any college with a single digit acceptance rate as so much of the admissions process comes down to non-quantifiable soft factors. If you don’t believe me, please listen to a Stanford Admissions Director talk about who ultimately gets accepted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UYhTylqC9o.
That said, looking over the stats for the Class of 2020, Stanford and MIT had lower acceptance rates in the early round than HYP, so they seem to be “choosier” in the early round – whether that means the caliber of students applying in the early round is higher than those at HYP is debatable. The general wisdom is that MORE “Peter Perfect” students apply to top colleges in the early round, which makes the early applicant pool MORE self-selective no matter where you apply. Consequently, students who don’t have perfect (or near perfect) GPA’s and test scores tend to get buried by those that do in the early round.
In the RD round, Harvard and Stanford had lower acceptance rates, so they seem to be “choosier” in the RD round. However, that may be partially due to some student’s throwing in an application to Harvard and Stanford just for the hell of it. FWIW: When my kids applied to college, their high school tried to encourage students to be realistic with their choices, but many students with unweighted averages between 72 and 92 applied to HYPSM because of parent pressure or just to see what happens because of the brand name. I’m sure that kind of thing lowers the acceptance rates at all top colleges, but probably more so because Harvard and Stanford are globally much more “known” brands.
@ibanker38 Harvard and Stanford are the hardest to get into from the bunch. These to have a similar level of selectivity. Yale, MIT, Princeton are a notch below but still almost as hard to get in.
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Last year Stanford got about 10% more applications overall than Harvard, and it had an even larger advantage in early applications. So if the number of people applying for approximately the same number of spots is an indication of competitiveness, Stanford wins.
However, the sheer number of applications really doesn’t tell you much about competitiveness. Think about the 100-meter sprint in the Olympics. There are eight spots in the final, and those eight are likely to come from a list of not more than 20-25 people who have enough ability to make the final if they have appropriate luck. The Olympics are insanely competitive because all but one or two of those 20-25 people will be there and competing. They don’t get more competitive if 150 vs. 100 runners participate in the preliminary rounds.
Same with all these schools. Drawing more marginal applications doesn’t make them more competitive. Frankly, anyone who applies to Harvard (or any school) just because it has a general reputation as “the best” is likely to be a marginal applicant.
Engineering is super-popular these days, and Stanford, MIT, and Princeton all have better reputations in engineering than Harvard. Only Princeton admits engineering students on a separate basis (and even at Princeton, it’s not really separate), but I wouldn’t be surprised if any or all of those three colleges are more competitive for applicants interested in engineering than Harvard.