<p><deleted, double="" post=""></deleted,></p>
<p>Thanks for the input, vicarious.</p>
<p>In this vein, here is a state-by-state list of SAT scores for 2006. (There's probably a more recent one out there, too)</p>
<p>But this should be viewed with some caution. We all know that the SAT is less popular in central states. SAT takers in these states tend to be seeking admission to competitive schools and, thus, trend toward higher scores. Thus, MN has but 10% participation (since increased, I believe) but the highest average scores in the country.</p>
<p>For comparison to ACT, see this:</p>
<p>ACT</a> participation reaches record - USATODAY.com</p>
<p>Note the total number of takers of each test is roughly the same.</p>
<p>And, I might add, the apparent geo-bias probably has to do with increased percentages of applicants as well as yield (percentage of admits who matriculate). Here in the midwest the interest in going to an Ivy, even among very high achieving students, just is not as intense as it is in the northeast.</p>
<p>^Wow thanks for posting that! Really interesting!</p>
<p>Didn't know that Arkansas only had a 5% participation in the SATs...</p>
<p>So how do admissions ppl look at your SAT then? They can't really look at it relative to your state if its participation rate is, like, 5%! And there are more high scorers in states with more participants, but since more ppl take the test in these states their avg is lower. In general less participation=higher avg so is your score more impressive in a state with a lower avg or lower participation?</p>
<p>^ Yeahhhh I don't really know how that works! </p>
<p>Because my SAT score percentile for my state is lower than the national percentile. And my percentile for my school is even lower than the state one! Only because my school probably has a 2 or 3% participation rate..</p>
<p>^^ The SAT is a <em>standardized</em> test, which means it is the one thing they can use to compare students directly regardless of time and space considerations. The score means the same thing, regardless of whether you took it in December or January, in Idaho, Iowa, Indiana - or India.</p>
<p>They don't look at percentiles?</p>
<p>When private colleges look at admissions, they do not generally care about geographical location in terms of proportionality or quotas.</p>
<p>What IS important, however, is the applicant's accomplishments in context with geographical location... culture, opportunities available to you, etc. So someone from a prep high school on the east coast is not going to be compared apples to apples as someone from a public school in the midwest. The same is true for (merit) scholarships.</p>
<p>Public colleges on the other hand, do look closely at geographic (well in-state versus out-of-state really) because want to find the right balance between serving their constituents (i.e. the tax payers of that state) and getting the highest amount of revenue via out-of-state tuition.</p>
<p>My previous post on this topic referred to intentional geographical consideration in the admission process. This post looks at statistical geographical influence in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Methodology
[ul]
[<em>]I used the more recent four years of data (2005-2008) provided</a> by Yale
[li]I averaged the number of admits for the four years (2005-2008) for each state.[/li][</em>]I divided the average admits per state by the average total U.S. admits to find the proportionality of admits per state (U.S. territories excluded, except D.C.).
[<em>]I took the proportionality of U.S. states (+ D.C.) populations from the 2000 census (% population of a state compared with total U.S. population).
[</em>]I divided the proportionality of admits to the proportionality of the population for each state to yield the admit ratio. High ratios are better (more admits per unit of the population).
[/ul]</p>
<p>Rankings
1. District of Columbia - 5.69
2. Connecticut - 5.66
3. Massachusetts - 2.9
4. New York - 2.39
5. New Jersey - 2.22
6. Maryland - 1.83
7. Vermont - 1.7
8. Hawaii - 1.46
9. Maine - 1.43
10. New Hampshire - 1.38
11. California - 1.29
12. Illinois - 1.2
13. Alaska - 1.16
14. Rhode Island - 1.03
15. North Dakota - 1.01
16. Pennsylvania - 1
17. Delaware - 0.91
18. Virginia - 0.84
19. Washington - 0.83
20. Minnesota - 0.8
21. Colorado - 0.76
22. Georgia - 0.69
23. Tennessee - 0.64
24. Florida - 0.64
25. New Mexico - 0.63
26. Ohio - 0.63
27. Missouri - 0.62
28. Texas - 0.6
29. Michigan - 0.55
30. Montana - 0.55
31. Oregon - 0.52
32. Wisconsin - 0.51
33. Idaho - 0.48
34. North Carolina - 0.47
35. West Virginia - 0.47
36. Kentucky - 0.44
37. Nevada - 0.43
38. Arizona - 0.42
39. Kansas - 0.42
40. Oklahoma - 0.41
41. Wyoming - 0.37
42. South Dakota - 0.33
43. Indiana - 0.32
44. Alabama - 0.31
45. Arkansas - 0.3
46. South Carolina - 0.29
47. Iowa - 0.28
48. Louisiana - 0.27
49. Nebraska - 0.26
50. Utah - 0.24
51. Mississippi - 0.16</p>
<p>Data
</a>
NOTE: The POP% does not add up to 100% (it adds up to 98.7%) because U.S. territories are not considered.</p>
<p>Conclusion
Because data regarding the number of applicants per state is not available, we cannot compute the percentage of applicant success (admittance) per state. So for example, Connecticut's ratio could be higher because Yale has a bias of accepting people from Connecticut (Yale's home state) OR Connecticut's ratio could be higher because more people from Connecticut apply to Yale.</p>
<p>If one is to take these rankings as the relative probability of being admitted to Yale based on geography, you are assuming that number of applicants per sate is directly proportional to the state's population. Wile this is likely true to a certain extent, other factors, such as culture, can impact this.</p>
<p>What this data does tell us is the geographical distribution of Yale's population when compared with the geographical distribution of the U.S. population.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Observations
[ul]
[<em>]Affirmative action in action: one possible cause for D.C. having the highest ratio is affirmative action.
[</em>]Yale's home state, Connecticut, is strongly preferred
[<em>]New England has a proportionally high share of Yale's admittance
[</em>]The population of a state does not seem to be as strongly correlated as other factors such as the geographical location or demographic makeup.
[/ul]</p>
<p>Hey…sorry to bump this older post up. However, if you read the post above, you will note that Nebraska has a lower # of admits/total population than most other states. Will this be a bane or boon for me (a Nebraskan) during this admission season?</p>
<p>I don’t think this directly corresponds with Arkansas’s low acceptance rate, BUT according to ranking of U.S. states by per capita and median income, it’s the 48/49th poorest state. Granted, this is from Wikipedia, but it’s interesting to look at the other states, too: [States</a> of the United States of America by income - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest-income_states_in_the_United_States]States”>List of U.S. states and territories by income - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>What about specific areas in a state? I, for example, live in upstate NY and even though NY is pretty high on the list I recieved three different invitations for a Yale info session. I went to the one in Ithaca and apparently Yale says that they haven’t really recieved any applicants from this area in a while so they’re hoping to get people interested again. </p>
<p><sorry if=“” they’re=“” typos.=“” i’m=“” on=“” my=“” phone=“” lol=“”></sorry></p>
<p>I don’t understand those numbers, is it additional percent chance to get accepted?</p>
<p>No, it’s simply the relationship of enrolled Yale students (NOT admitted Yale students, although given Yale’s high yield the numbers won’t be totally different) to general population. Yale students from DC represent over 5 x higher percentage of Yale students than the percentage of US population who are DC residents, and Yale students from Mississippi are only 1/6th the percentage of Yale students that Mississippi residents represent as a percentage of US population.</p>
<p>All of which tells you pretty much nothing. </p>
<p>You don’t know whether the difference between admitted and enrolled Yale students varies regionally. I bet it does. I bet California students turn Yale down at a higher rate than New York students, for example, which may explain part of the difference between California and New York in the table. </p>
<p>More importantly, you don’t know what the regional differences are in how many students apply to Yale. DC has the highest proportionate representation at Yale, but if students from DC submit applications at a rate of 10 x the national average, the figures may mean that DC students are rejected disproportionately, not accepted disproportionally. And Mississippi’s ultra-low representation may be a product of favorable admissions, if applications from Mississippi are ultra-lower. You can be certain that differing application rates explain a lot of the state-by-state differences in the chart. In fact, I would guess that the chart is probably a better guide to the rate at which students in each state apply to Yale than it is to which states Yale favors, except for some tantalizing clues furnished by the over-proportional representation of some surprising states like Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota. (But, remember, if you are going to go out of state from Alaska or Hawaii, the difference between going to Yale and going to Stanford may not matter as much as it does to California kids.)</p>
<p>Wouldn’t a better method be to compare the number of applications per state to the number admitted per state? Wouldn’t that tell us if there was an advantage given to certain geographical area?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If you could find this data it would be nearer the truth, but still not conclusive. You would need to see an envelope of admissions-relevant aggregate data about each state’s application population in order to determine this with certainty. Just because state X and state Y have equal numbers of applicants and unequal numbers of admits does not mean geographic preference is playing out. X might simply have more qualified applicants than Y.</p>
<p>Moreover, if a geographic preference were discovered, does it necessarily follow that it is an unfair bias? Can’t Yale, having determined that state X admits are more likely to matriculate than state Y admits, reasonably prefer to admit state X applicants?</p>
<p>oh ok. thanks.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That would be the case if Yale cared more about admissions yield than it did about geographic diversity on campus. If they cared more about geographic diversity they might do the opposite.</p>
<p>This is flawed logic. The variety of your statistics does not account for a state’s students’ propensity toward applying to Yale. Students from a state like Mississippi simply do not apply out of state, much less to a place like Yale. </p>
<p>I am a student from Mississippi who will be a freshman (class of 2014) at Yale this year after being admitted to all the Ivies to which I applied. I was told Mississippi actually has the highest admit rate because so few students from Mississippi apply that the students who do are self-selected already. </p>
<p>Just to give you an idea of what I mean, I went to arguably the best public high school int he state, which is one of the largest high schools in Mississippi in one of the upper middle class suburbs. Nevertheless, I was the only student who applied to any selective northern schools. The only other student who applied to selective schools is going to GA Tech. The vast majority of students at my school (students who are Nat’l Merit and ACT above 30 and top ten in my class and awesome ECs) only applied to one school–Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) or Mississippi State. Applying to a place like Yale just doesn’t occur to most Southern students, adn that’s why they’re so underrepresented at Yale.</p>