deleted duplicate info
The document doesnât have any of the information that you claim.
Claim = âYou can view the number of applicants and admit rate for ratings in different categoriesâ
Example unformated tabled from document:
Extracurricular Rating Expanded Sample
year Admit number_of_5 number_of_4 number_of_3 number_of_2 number_of_1
2014 0 70 1092 14189 3994 39
2015 0 164 939 16776 5095 38
2016 0 198 808 16755 4332 41
2017 0 147 659 16814 4454 34
2018 0 137 510 16545 4966 31
2019 0 184 444 17748 5050 27
2014 1 3 56 679 1077 39
2015 1 8 48 653 1083 41
2016 1 14 27 703 996 32
2017 1 8 18 647 1006 45
2018 1 7 25 666 974 24
2019 1 12 13 609 1011 34
Wait, are you actually saying that there were 19384 people that applied to Harvard in 2014?
You realize that this is a sample, right?
You realize the first column only shows rejected applicants, not total applicants for the year? And this is for the class of 2014, not students who started as freshmen in fall 2014? Right? That said, while the sample includes the majority of applicants, it does not include all applicants. A key group that was excluded is international applicants. You can read more about which groups were excluded and why in the longer document.
I actually realize what the first column says. And I realize that there are two values in the first column: 0 and 1. Are you saying that only 19384 people were rejected?
So is this a sub-sample created to help with the simulations, or is it all the data?
The sample includes 19,384 rejected applicants in the class of 2014. A quote explaining more about how the sample was selected is below:
To start, I limited the focus to domestic, non-transfer applications. Harvardâs
internal tracking of applicant race treats International applicants as their own
category, so I likewise excluded them in my analysis. And because Harvard receives
few transfer applications and accepts fewer transfer applicants each year, I focused
on the vast majority of applicants who apply for the first-year class. I also
eliminated those whose applications were incomplete and those who withdrew their
applications during that process. Over the course of the six admissions cycles, this
left a population of 166,727 applications.
That quote is not from the document that you gave a link to. Neither it defines what number_of_5, etc. mean.
To keep things simple, I listed the document showing the applicants and admit rate. The full 168 page document with more detailed stats including the quote listed in my earlier post and regression analysis numbers I listed several posts back is at http://samv91khoyt2i553a2t1s05i-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Doc-415-1-Arcidiacono-Expert-Report.pdf . Scroll up a few pages to see a definition of what EC ratings mean.
The pages are numbered. On which page is the definition?
Post 181 â See below:
@skieurope Can we move the math contest argument to itâs own thread?
2 Likes
Because itâs off-topic? No.
AFAIK, absolutely nobody, other than the OP, has said that the low acceptance rate is unsustainable. And the OP has posted that theyâre checking out. So since the vast majority of the remaining respondents are parents who, as a group, said that moderators should not be so heavy-handed with keeping threads on topic, Iâm letting you all ramble here. Itâs a nice break from the UChicago forums where pretty much every post since #10 on this thread has been a rehash from various threads there. 
But I will âsuggestâ that the 2 users who are parsing and questioning each otherâs analysis of the Harvard data take it to PM, if it needs to continue at all.
And I will also remind users of the forum rules: "College Confidential ⊠is not a place for contentious debate. If you find yourself repeating talking points, it might be time to step away and do something else. "
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/guidelines
7 Likes
I know some of these kids, they donât apply to Yale and Princeton at the same rate as the other three, in fact they would probably apply more to Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd on the west coast, maybe CMU out east, in addition to their public flagship. The do well in admission, but 80% seems a little high, especially with the unpredictability of Stanford and Harvard.
âas a counterpoint, when the Level 9 award came out, most of the kids who had applied to Yale got likely letters within two weeks and were invited to Yale Engineering and Science Weekend. And every one who had applied to Columbia (>7 if I recall) got likely letters very soon as well.â
Again, these kids are being courted by Yale and Columbia, because they donât typically go there, maybe apply but donât choose them over Stanford, Harvard, MIT or Cal Tech, which is pretty much where these kids want to go.
âHe believes that 270 kids from this competition are at Level 8 on the âprestigious awardsâ scale, meaning âAmazing accomplishment; Large boost.â And there are dozens of contests at this level or higherâ
There are not dozens of stem contests at that level, maybe a handful. Basically, if you can prove youâre one of the best say biology students in the country, which is typically done through these awards and research, youâll get in to one of the colleges, especially if you replace Yale with Cal Tech. If there are 200 biology slots at these schools and youâre in the top 25, guess what, youâll get in.
âIf that is what theyâre dedicating their HS years to then I would say they have the wrong priorities and are short sighted.â
Well, theyâre teenagers so they donât have the maturity and judgement to think that way. That doesnât usually happen till mid-20s, according to all the research on adolescent thinking. If students see the acceptance rate at 4 or 5%, theyâll think theyâll be one of those 4, and not other 95.
For sure! The point though is that you can get a little peak inside if you know where to look. Itâs not much help, but it isnât completely opaque at some schools, even if they intend it to be so.
I agree such comparison isnât valid. However, thatâs not the way to think about it. We need to think in terms of distributions. An academically âbetterâ school is likely to have higher concentration of academically âbetterâ students than a âlesserâ school but their distributions likely overlap each other (sometimes significantly). The shapes of their distributions are also very important. The distribution is more spread out (with longer tails) at some colleges than at others. Public universities tend to have more spread-out distributions with longer tails than private elites, for example. Even among the private elites, the shapes of their distributions are sometimes very different. As an example, Caltech is likely to have a narrower distribution than MIT, whose distribution is likely to be much narrower than Stanfordâs.
1 Like
The more I read this topic the more I understand why top schools want athletes on campus.
9 Likes
I am not sure the colleges are more competitive now than when we applied. I think that today the top schools definitely encourage EVERYONE to send in an application, for reasons others have given in this thread. The schools want more applications, and the Common App makes it easier to apply. Why do you think all these âeliteâ colleges use the Common App? Do you think kids would be applying to 15 colleges, including wild reaches, if they had to fill out each collegeâs application individually like we did back in the day? I applied to 4 colleges when I was in high school because who wanted to fill out all those unique applications? Colleges expected us to load the application into a typewriter and type it into the 90âs!! Each application took hours, sometimes days, before even getting to the essays. I also had college alumni interviewers tell me to not bother applying, and they were right. I wasnât going to get in, so why was I applying? That has changed in the last 25+ years. I think these factors make admission rates seem artificially low.
I also think parents and kids go a little overboard about school reputation. I have talked to a lot of employers in tech, and the reputation of the school matters a lot less than what a kid learned since most tech interviews areâŠtechnical. School reputation may matter more if your child wants to go straight to grad school or go into a big company management training program after college, but for most kids, there are a lot of very good colleges that will set the kids up for tremendous success in their future. If a kid really wants an elite school on their resume, there is always grad school.
4 Likes
I applied to 13 - all by hand. I needed full financial aid. Things havenât changed that much. Just more kids playing the game.
3 Likes
Ohh . . . I guess I am doing it wrong then . . . thanks for HYSPlaining how I need to think about the issue. 
Seriously, though, I am not talking about (or interested in) how one might determine âan academically âbetterâ school.â Any such inquiry is fraught with subjectivity as to the variables considered and even to the ideal shape of the distribution. And, to my mind, any such inquiry cannot be divorced from the subjective circumstances of each potential applicant.
And, as distributions go, the overlap of excellent, high achieving, qualified applicants is such that, IMO, it makes little sense to posit that an admitted student to a particular institution is any more âexcellentâ or deserving than a similarly qualified yet rejected student who ends up somewhere else.
2 Likes