<p>Student preference has nothing to do with quality of education. Some of the 'favorite' teachers at just about every high school are the worst teachers.</p>
<p>And it amuses me that everyone who isn't ranked number one is constantly finding obscure sources to claim 'See? We're better!' whereas most Princeton/Harvard kids either don't really care or just fight with each other since this year we're tied.</p>
<p>Prettyfish, you were sounding intelligent until you claimed that Princeton/Harvard "are ranked #1" and "are tied". Do you live your life through U.S. News? Why is this the ranking you feel is the best? Because it puts Princeton higher? Just sad.</p>
<p>And you say Princeton doesn't care about Yale, yet you are a Princeton admit coming over here to the Yale board, and Princeton is currently copying Yale's undergraduate experience because they acknowledge it works.</p>
<p>The ONLY thing Princeton has going for it is the current U.S. News ranking. The rowing competition is still Yale vs. Harvard, the biggest Ivy League game of the year is still Yale vs. Harvard. The oldest schools in the Ivy League, by far, will always be Harvard and Yale. Princeton and UPenn and Brown and Dartmouth all came at about the same time, but Harvard and Yale were many decades before any of the others came along. It will always be H vs. Y in the Ivies.</p>
<p>William and Mary is older than Yale, I guess it must be better than yale. Hell, the USnational rowing training center is in princeton - Princeton must be better than Yale. And, the Yale-Princeton football game is older than the Harvard Yale - Princeton is better than Harvard then. Does any of this matter? No. It is about as relevant as school color. And frankly, yale has better school colors. So maybe it is better. But the word princeton sounds so much better than Yale. Hmmm.. all these major factors must weight heavily on the minds of high school seniors. </p>
<p>When I went to Yale, we had the utmost respect for students at Princeton and Harvard. You are sweeping a dirt road in your crusade to "prove" that Yale is better than Princeton, because it is not, nor is Princeton better than Yale. </p>
<p>And its naive to think that Princeton only has USnews going for it.</p>
<p>William & Mary fell into disrepair early on and for the 20th and 21st centuries has been a low-funded public university. Or else, it would have been a lot better. However, I clearly said "oldest in the IVY LEAGUE", which is all well-funded private universities so you can compare them to each other on that basis. I'm surprised you didn't mention the University of Henrico (1618), also in Virginia, which was older than Harvard.</p>
<p>All of the things you mentioned while not relevant, are probably more relevant than "US News rankings". He honestly feels that Princeton is tied for Harvard for #1... he didn't even mention where he saw that or in what rankings... he assumes that those are universal rankings of how good a college actually is.</p>
<p>And I don't think anyone at Yale doesn't have respect for Princeton or Harvard. Princeton is getting more like Yale every day... just look at their new residential college system that is evolving to the way it should be carried out: the Yale way. Before U.S. News took a liking to them, students like this gave their big brothers Harvard and Yale much more respect than they do today, however.</p>
<p>"The rowing competition is still Yale vs. Harvard"</p>
<p>That is absolutely, unequivocably, FALSE.</p>
<p>EDIT: And with that I'm done, this isn't going anywhere, except proving how stubborn and one-sided people are (myself included). But no way in heck is Yale better than Princeton at Rowing. Harvard/Radcliffe maybe, even though we annihilated Radcliffe last season. Princeton crew is /amazing/.</p>
<p>(Just to clear something up, Princeton is better at rowing. But what everyone wants to see in this country is the Harvard-Yale regatta. It's not about who wins, it's the tradition of the historical one-on-one between the two oldest Ivies.)</p>
<p>An oddity: Harvard's all-time edge in the Harvard/Yale crew race is almost precisely equal to its historic margin over Yale in common admits!</p>
<p>I notice you didn't mention The Game, byerly... Yale leads 64-49-8. That may not be the football game that all of America wants to see anymore, but it is certainly the Ivy League game they would most like to see. Harvard rowed first, so they have the historical edge. Yale invented football (literally, Walter Camp) so they have the edge there.</p>
<p>As for common admits, I don't think you can give me a link showing your Harvard edge there, though I may be tempted to believe it exists. (In all fairness, many of America's leaders got into both and chose Y over H: George H. W. Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Bill Clinton - YLS over HLS in his case, and many others. So whether H has an advantage among all applicants or not, the leaders of the bunch seem to pick Y on a disproportionate basis.)</p>
<p>
[quote]
An oddity: Harvard's all-time edge in the Harvard/Yale crew race is almost precisely equal to its historic margin over Yale in common admits!
[/quote]
59 to 41? (based on NBER)</p>
<p>The Revealed Preferences Study? Does it have them for all the schools or just H vs. Y? I'd be interested in Y vs. Pr as well (and others). What page?</p>
<p>The nber numbers are a limited survey of a sub-group, in one year, and do not pretend to be complete and accurate numbers as between particular colleges year by year.</p>
<p>Hmmm... just skimmed through it and didn't see "59 to 41" anywhere. For all I know, it could be 50.1 H to 49.9 Y and 50.2 Y to 49.8 Pr. Let me know if you find it.</p>
<p>So, there's nothing you can point to that says H has a HISTORICAL advantage in common admits, huh Byerly. That would explain the Bushes and Clintons, Kerry and Dean, etc. It seems that Harvard missed a whole generation of leaders (unless you are going to count Al Gore, who would have won if he had reversed his ticket and put the Yalie - Lieberman - on top).</p>
<p>Just dividing the given numbers, Harvard has a 50.6-49.4 advantage over Yale and Yale has a 51.2-48.8 advantage over Princeton.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Hmmm... just skimmed through it and didn't see "59 to 41" anywhere. For all I know, it could be 50.1 H to 49.9 Y and 50.2 Y to 49.8 Pr. Let me know if you find it.
[/quote]
On page 24, there is a conordance between score margins and probability of "winning" a head to head match. Interpolate between 50 and 100 (62 pt diff between H-Y). You get H winning 58.5% of the time. The data is fairly deep for HY (over 100 cross admits), less deep the further down you go.</p>
<p>Bear in mind that in some years there are 400 cross admits. So that 1999 sample was only that - a sample.</p>
<p>"Harvards yieldthe percentage of accepted students who choose to enroll at the Collegeis around 80 percent, which is 10 to 15 points higher than its closest competitors. And according to Leverett Professor of Mathematics Benedict H. Gross, who also serves on the admissions committee, more than three-quarters of students who are accepted at Harvard and one of its top three competitors (Yale, Princeton and Stanford) come to Harvard."</p>
<ul>
<li>Harvard Crimson news story</li>
</ul>
<p>"Yale manages to convince two-thirds of its admitted students to attend. What happens to the other third? The majority are lost to a handful of other colleges, most often Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Harvard has long won the great majority of students admitted to both Yale and Harvard."</p>
<ul>
<li>Yale Alumni Magazine</li>
</ul>
<p>Using the same data, common admits to Yale and Princeton choose Yale 67.33% of the time and Princeton only 32.67% of the time. Common admits to Harvard and Princeton choose Harvard 74.83% of the time and Princeton only 25.17% of the time.</p>
<p>It looks like Gross is exagerrating slightly, as he is correct in that 75% of Princeton common admits choose Harvard, but only 59% of Yale common admits and 65% of Stanford common admits. And there are a lot more Y and S common applicants than P common applicants.</p>
<p>As you say, the data is only from one year... but 1999 wasn't a particularly unusual year for admissions at any of the top schools. It's still impressive, even with the Gross exagerration.</p>
<p>It is interesting though that America's leaders all seem to have chosen Yale. There was a time when Harvard produced the Presidents, but that time has long passed and the last 30 years of the Presidency have been dominated by Yalies with no Harvardites in sight.</p>
<p>4 Yalies (John Kerry, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton) and 1 Harvardite (Al Gore) will be running in 2008 to replace the Yalie who replaced the Yalie who replaced the Yalie as President of the United States.</p>
<p>Maybe modern Harvard people really are just too socially inept to hold positions of power... ;)</p>
<p>George Bush is as much a Harvard man as Bill Clinton was a "Yalie".</p>
<p>But Bill met Hillary at YLS. That means that Yale is better than Harvard. Also, President Bush was born in New Haven. Actually, thinking about it, Byerly and President Bush have something in common! They are both Ivy league cheerleaders!</p>
<p>A quote from an interview with Donald Routh - Yale's Director of Financial Aid - in the Yale Herald, talking about admissions for the same year covered by the limited NBER survey. ("DR" is Donald Routh):</p>
<p>DR:Last year, Harvard got 83 percent of students that got into both Yale and Harvard.
ZK: Do you have a breakdown of what kinds of backgrounds those 83 percent come from?
DR: You mean, do we lose the poor students or the rich students?
ZK: Right. Because then you would know exactly how the new policies affect that.
DR: Well, we know we didn't lose any poor students to Princeton, even though they took the loan obligation out of the package for students under a $40,000 income. And actually, Harvard [got] 83 percent with students believing they were going to have $1,000 extra in self-help, because [Harvard] didn't make any changes until September of this year, and then they made it retroactive. That was the strangest decision that any of us had ever heard.
ZK: Perhaps a large part of the 83 percent were students from middle-income families.
DR: I don't think it has anything to do with financial aid.
EC: I think it does, slightly. My little brother was accepted to both Harvard and Yale last year, and financial aid did influence his decision to go to Harvard because Harvard offered him a better deal.
DR: Did he ask us to review his package?
EC: Oh, you reviewed it, but in the end, Harvard gave him a better package.
ZK: Is that particular to his case?
DR: It happens both ways. That's because the Justice Department won't let us compare notes anymore. For 30 years we exercised what we called "overlap." About 25 schools literally got together around a table and reviewed the need of candidates. All we know now is what the student tells us. We no longer know if we have the same information, because we don't have a chance to compare our analysis. The competition has taken away whatever spirit of cooperation we used to have.
The invisible hand
YH: So would you call this a bidding war?
DR: In overlap, a group of schools with a natural order of selection--nobody at Yale likes you to tell them that 83 percent choose Harvard, but it's a fact."</p>