<p>Just to clarify what I meant:</p>
<p>Yes, Penn is by far the most popular choice here, although there are some students who will take an “anywhere but Penn” attitude. So it’s really hard to compare Penn to any other college here. Lots of people apply to Penn ED and are thrilled if they get in, and never apply anywhere else. Others, for whom Penn would be a logical top choice if they lived 50 miles away, refuse to apply there at all. That second group is a much smaller one, but it tends to include a bunch of top students.</p>
<p>Penn’s Philadelphia preference has a long and complicated history. Its charter obligates it to provide free education for a certain number of Philadelphia students. That provision has been reinterpreted judicially to mean that it must award an equivalent amount of financial aid to students from the area (not just within the city limits). But there’s no question that good students at the city’s academic magnet public schools and high-quality private schools have an easier time getting accepted at Penn than students from New York or Chicago. Some of that may be due to their ties to the university – research projects, dual enrollment classes, faculty brats, admin brats, double- triple- quadruple-legacies, names on buildings, all of which are found much more frequently here than elsewhere – rather than to any regionalism on the university’s part.</p>