<p>lol…</p>
<p>The numbers don’t lie. Well maybe they do. Are Duke’s SAT numbers for matriculated students or accepted students? </p>
<p>I’m shocked at Duke’s yield numbers. Just shocked.</p>
<p>I’m so glad they were posted.</p>
<p>
On the contrary, you are foolishly side-stepping the real issue. </p>
<p>Duke gave out [url=<a href=“http://www.aas.duke.edu/ousf/programs/2013_duke_scholarship_recipients.pdf]60[/url”>http://www.aas.duke.edu/ousf/programs/2013_duke_scholarship_recipients.pdf]60[/url</a>] scholarships this year. Duke admitted 3,517 applicants through regular decision. In other words, scholarships were offered to a whopping 1.70% of the applicant pool. Even if ALL of the scholarship recipients accepted the offer, they would make up only 3.50% of the freshman class.</p>
<p>In comparison, look at the percentages of students receiving financial aid:</p>
<p>Harvard 52%
Princeton 52%
Dartmouth 50%
Columbia 45%
Duke 43%
Brown 42%
Yale 42%
Cornell 38%
Penn 38%</p>
<p>Which do you think is more important to yield – the 1.70% scholarship recipients or the 40-50% who need great financial aid? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>IB,</p>
<p>The numbers you present only show the percentage of students who receive FA. It says nothing about how much they get. For all we know Duke’s FA is the best there is.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Duke is one of those schools which still feels the need to hide its Common Data Set, so without searching around, I can’t directly compare, say, the average debt of an Duke undergrad with some of those other institutions.</p>
<p>As a gratuitous aside, I knew that Colgate recently added its last 3 CDS’s to its website, and I also knew that it’s “class profile,” like that of Duke’s, shows the mid-50 percentile’s of the ACCEPTED students’ SAT’s. I compared the accepted students’ numbers to those of the CDS, which shows the stats of ENROLLED freshmen.</p>
<p>The difference was roughly 30 points, top and bottom. So, Duke’s class profile of 680-770 CR and 690-780 M, is likely around 650-740 CR and 660-750 M. Still great, but not comparable to the “middle Ivies,” like Dartmouth (660-770 CR & 670-780 M). 30 points is huge.</p>
<p>"For that great universe of students out there who will apply to both schools (anybody???), that is probably a decent way to distinguish between the student bodies of Duke and Harvey Mudd. </p>
<p>Both schools will enroll excellent and deep student bodies with a large number of high achievers in all of the testing areas. However, given Mudd’s heavy curricular focus on engineering, mathematics, and the sciences (representing 97% of their majors), it seems logical that they would outperform Duke (23% in Engineering and Biology) on the Math depth comparison. </p>
<p>As for the modest differences in Critical Reading and Writing, I think that the individual reader would have to judge if this difference is consequential in the same way that the difference is for the Math comparison. I, for one, do not."</p>
<p>"Unfortunately, Duke is one of those schools which still feels the need to hide its Common Data Set, so without searching around, I can’t directly compare, say, the average debt of an Duke undergrad with some of those other institutions.</p>
<p>As a gratuitous aside, I knew that Colgate recently added its last 3 CDS’s to its website, and I also knew that it’s “class profile,” like that of Duke’s, shows the mid-50 percentile’s of the ACCEPTED students’ SAT’s. I compared the accepted students’ numbers to those of the CDS, which shows the stats of ENROLLED freshmen.</p>
<p>The difference was roughly 30 points, top and bottom. So, Duke’s class profile of 680-770 CR and 690-780 M, is likely around 650-740 CR and 660-750 M. Still great, but not comparable to the “middle Ivies,” like Dartmouth (660-770 CR & 670-780 M). 30 points is huge."</p>
<p>So Hawkette, are you comparing accepted students’ numbers with another school’s matriculated students’ numbers?</p>
<p>And are Harvey Mudd students smarter than Duke students when we use the matriculated student numbers for both schools?</p>
<p>^^^^You’re never going to get a satisfactory answer dstark. No matter how many times you ask it.</p>
<p>Since you guys put so much faith on SAT scores, let’s look at it from another angle (data from Petersons):</p>
<p>SAT 25%-75%:
Duke: 1340-1540
HMC: 1420-1570</p>
<p>A whooping difference of 80 points from the low end … “selectivity from the bottom up”, another of hawkette’s method.</p>
<p>Dstark,
The data presented came from Petersons. It is not my data. I believe that it is for enrolled students. </p>
<p>Goblue,
For you and your U Michigan friends, here is the 25/75 detail by section for those two schools (which likely share 0 common applicants):</p>
<p>CR
660-760 Duke
670-770 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>MATH
680-780 Duke
750-800 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>As with the other data that we’ve already discussed, this data is what you would expect to see given the nature of these schools and their relative curriculums.</p>
<p>Hawkette, you wrote this.</p>
<p>“You’ll have to decide whether you want to accept standardized test scores as an appropriate proxy for measuring student body strength. You will also have to decide if having a stronger class is of value to you. I personally accept standardized test scores as a reasonable proxy and I definitely prefer the strongest class of peers.”</p>
<p>Then you posted this…</p>
<p>CR
660-760 Duke
670-770 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>MATH
680-780 Duke
750-800 Harvey Mudd</p>
<p>Hawkette, I am basing the following question based on what you wrote and posted. </p>
<p>So Hawkette, are Harvey Mudd’s students smarter than Duke’s students?</p>
<p>To dSTALKER,
As noted in several prior posts, one can make an argument for either Duke or Harvey Mudd depending on their primary curriculum focus. If one wanted to study topics related to math/science and engineering and was looking for a student body with a near total focus in these areas, then I would guess that most would accept Harvey Mudd’s student body as more proficient at Math and deeper overall in this and related subjects. I think that goblue rightly pointed out this material difference in # 77. </p>
<p>For other subjects, I think that most folks would accept the student bodies as equals. </p>
<p>Your harassment with your question, posed in multiple threads, does not change the fact that Duke and Harvey Mudd each have excellent and deep student bodies with each ranking among the very strongest in the USA in their respective class of colleges. </p>
<p>Nor does your harassment change the fact that comparing standardized test scores is an appropriate and widely used broad-brush method for comparing student body strength. Sorry dstalker…you lose.</p>
<p>IB, I can see that you are failing to acknowledge your error, but let’s move on to a new one. Now you are comparing the 60 MERIT scholarships that Duke gave (Ivies give 0 MERIT scholarships, therefore you were wrong) with the percentages of Ivy students that received Financial Aid (which is need based) ? ?</p>
<p>Duke’s 43% is pretty comparable to all of them except Harvard , Princeton and Dartmouth…So what’s your point again? Well, I think DadofB&G put it clear for us.</p>
<p>“If one wanted to study topics related to math/science and engineering and was looking for a student body with a near total focus in these areas, then I would guess that most would accept Harvey Mudds student body as more proficient at Math and deeper overall in this and related subjects. I think that goblue rightly pointed out this material difference in # 77.” </p>
<p>So we can’t just look at average SAT scores of a school, but need to look at SAT scores of particular departments to decide if one student body is better than another?</p>
<p>And if Duke has just as many students as Harvey Mudd that are strong in math or engineering, these Duke students are shortchanged by their education at Duke because of the other students that score a little lower in SAT scores?</p>
<p>And Duke students should be thought of as dumber than Harvey Mudd students because of the lesser SAT scores of some of the Duke students?</p>
<p>So if I was an employer, I should want to hire a Harvey Mudd student over a Duke student?</p>
<p>^^^^All excellent points dstark.</p>
<p>It seems like a lot of Dukies refer to the infamous article quoting its admissions officer that Duke cleans the clock of Cornell, etc. and fares equally with some of the other ivies. I find that hard to believe given Duke’s pretty weak yield numbers. There is something to be said of this and the fact that the admissions office fails to respond to questions asking for substantiation.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Isn’t this a sign of how far this forum has come that one can pose comparative questions about Duke and a LAC that is ranked in the very middle of the top ranked schools? </p>
<p>And as far as having an entire thread comparing yield, I wish members of this community would realize how little there is to learn from analyze this entirely worthless metric for … students and applicants. Yield is an important element for the schools and their enrollment managers. Trying to extract much else from this simple reference point represents a most futile exercise.</p>
<p>Xiggi. I believe that is the point that dstark was making.</p>
<p>
I thought my point was obvious; however, it seems that some need things laid out in a simplistic fashion.</p>
<ol>
<li>40-50% of admitted students need financial aid.</li>
<li>Most of the Ivies have better financial aid than Duke.</li>
<li>Better financial aid packages at the Ivies would lean cross-admits toward Ivies and away from Duke. </li>
</ol>
<p>
According to its CDS for the class of 2012, the University of Miami admitted 8411 applicants and enrolled 2010 students for a yield of 23.4%.</p>
<p>Here are the yield numbers for 2012. The more useful RD yields are in parentheses. Note that Princeton’s yield is far higher than other RD figures. Also note that Cornell’s RD yield is only marginally higher than Duke’s.</p>
<p>Harvard 76.2%
Stanford 71.0%
Yale 67.6%
MIT 66.1%
Penn 62.9% (47.4%)
Columbia 59.1% (44.5%)
Princeton 58.6%
Brown 54.8% (44.2%)
Dartmouth 49.1% (40.6%)
Cornell 45.9% (35.1%)
Duke 40.1% (33.5%)</p>
<p>
Indeed it is. </p>
<p>Berkeley
In-state yield: 37.9% (4262 of 11252)
OOS yield: 19.5% (216 of 1110)</p>
<p>UNC
In-state yield: 61.5% (3201 of 5209)
OOS yield: 31.6% (664 of 2100)</p>
<p>Draw your own conclusions. ;)</p>
<p>IB,</p>
<p>Just so people don’t get the wrong ideas about Ivy financial aid, HYP provide excellent aid, while the others (exclude Columbia for now), lag in that respect. Some may trumpet “loan free” packages, but the average undergraduate indebtedness figures show substantial debt loads for Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth and Brown, in that order, and that doesn’t include parent debt. Anecdotally, I’ve seen offers from Cornell and Dartmouth that were dismal compared to other top LAC’s anyway. I couldn’t find Columbia’s numbers.</p>
<p>But Duke’s aid is definitely worse than any of them, so I can see your argument - why would you go to a Duke and pay more when you could go to an Ivy for less? But that assumes a lot of cross admits.</p>
<p>Finally, I wanted to respond to your comment that “Duke is certainly on par with the others Ivies” (excluding HYP). That may be; I’m not in a position to say. But here in upstate NY, Duke is known as a basketball college, like Connecticut. No one really looks at it in terms of academic excellence. Nobody thinks of applying there and no one would choose it over any of the ivies for that reason. I was shocked when I started looking at school data and saw how competitive it really was. It just doesn’t have the reputation outside of its “sphere of influence.” I’m sure that same phenomenon applies to almost every other school. I just think some school supporters oversell.</p>
<p>Finally, and I mentioned this before - Duke doesn’t give public access to its CDS. I think such schools are snarky and give the impression of hiding stats and playing the system. My D went to a school that only began releasing that data in her senior year, and it always bugged me.</p>
<p>I think Duke unfortunately “suffers” from the fact that its reputation in b-ball eclipses its reputation as a serious school of scholarship, which it definitely is. The stats of its student bodies is definitely competitive with all other top schools but I, agree, I wouldn’t say it is on par with the other ivies in prestige or recognition for academics by most people. I am sure in the NC area, Duke’s prestige is right up there, however.</p>
<p>Duke doesn’t suffer at all. It is a top school, definitely a peer of most of the Ivies. Just as the very top publics are also peers of many Ivy League schools. Some Ivy lovers can’t imagine there are other first rate schools in this country that are not located in the northeast.</p>
<p>
On the plus side for Duke students, at least people have heard of it. At least down in the South, the same can’t be said for most of the Ivies. ;)</p>
<p>Incidentally, I agree that Duke needs to make its CDS available, as do Penn and WUStL.</p>