<p>I am kind of curious how a school would know that some kid was deferred by another school to target them specifically? </p>
<p>I suspect they are just targeting a bunch of kids at once with the expectation that some may have heard from their EA/ED schools and may still be looking for other choices at that point.</p>
<p>They do NOT have a list of those that were deferred and/or rejected early. They just email high stats kids this time of year because they know that many will be deferred or rejected in the early round and thus may want to add additional colleges to their lists.</p>
<p>So it is not special kids they are looking for, just mass mailing again after the first round? So they are sending to everyone with high stat? Why?</p>
<p>“the fact that Princeton is above Harvard one year or not the next affects me as much as a crayfish burping in the rainforest.”</p>
<p>But if 1-3 were Duke, Northwestern, and Notre Dame, you’d be calling for a congressional investigation.</p>
<p>We are apparently supposed to believe that the same people who study their butts off, prep for years for the SATs, suck up to teachers to get great recommendations, join clubs and fudge service hours, and pull any strings available to get into HYPSMAW suddenly, upon graduation, hit a re-set button and from that point forward no longer care about rankings or how alma mater rates compared to others. Although it’s human nature for supermodels to look at themselves in the mirror, Albert Pujols to keep an eye on his batting average, and the Pope to go to confession…such continual self-assurance is NOT natural for those associated with “… HYPMS, Amherst, Williams: we really don’t care. Frankly, we’re above the conversation.”</p>
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<p>I doubt they have filtered out anyone except their own EA/ED applicants – and that would be only to avoid a bunch of e-mails and calls from people saying “Hey, I thought I was already accepted” or “Hey, I thought I was already rejected.”</p>
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No, we wouldn’t. We’d laugh. And if people chose to go to those schools over HYP because of the USNews ratings, we’d laugh harder.</p>
<p>I guess I’m a bit sorry that there’s no way of putting this that doesn’t seem obnoxious, but there’s nothing USNews can do that can touch the reps of the top schools.</p>
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<p>Very true.</p>
<p>But graduates of Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame, and other schools of that ilk – including my own alma mater, Cornell – are usually pretty satisfied with our lot in life. We may not get the shock-and-awe reaction that HYP graduates get when people glance at their resumes, but we get the respect we have earned. And that’s what it’s all about.</p>
<p>And now I’m going to say something obnoxious, too.</p>
<p>If you graduate from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, many people consider you to be almost a different species from “normal” people. You’re expected to accomplish extraordinary things, and if that doesn’t happen, you’re a disappointment – even though the vast majority of the rest of the world’s people don’t accomplish extraordinary things, either. Graduates of colleges in the next layer down don’t get that reaction or those expectations. In the eyes of the world, we’re not superpeople – we’re just on the high end of normal. And we’re not expected to live up to unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, that works in our favor.</p>
<p>That’s very true, too. It probably explains why people who are students at Harvard et al. don’t always mention it to people when they first meet them.</p>
<p>But my main point is that people at really good schools don’t worry much about ratings. I can’t believe that Duke or Notre Dame worry about them, either. It could be that a few schools that are trying to improve their profile might. One might suspect Wash U and Chicago of caring, based on their heavy PR–I don’t know about Northwestern.</p>
<p>Schmalz wrote: “We are apparently supposed to believe that the same people who study their butts off, prep for years for the SATs, suck up to teachers to get great recommendations, join clubs and fudge service hours, and pull any strings available to get into HYPSMAW suddenly, upon graduation, hit a re-set button and from that point forward no longer care about rankings or how alma mater rates compared to others. Although it’s human nature for supermodels to look at themselves in the mirror, Albert Pujols to keep an eye on his batting average, and the Pope to go to confession…such continual self-assurance is NOT natural for those associated with ‘… HYPMS, Amherst, Williams: we really don’t care. Frankly, we’re above the conversation.’” </p>
<p>No, you’re not supposed to believe that. What you should believe is that the type of person you mention rarely gets into HYPMS Amherst, Williams in the first place and instead harps about how elite and pompous that the aforementioned colleges are on places like CC.</p>
<p>I agree wholeheartedly that the most elite are simply above the conversation. It’s the wannabes who are all over their school’s rankings.</p>
<p>This conversation just went way down hill. It seems to become a us upper Ivies against the rest. I don’t even think most upper Ivies grads think like this against other lower ranked schools but anyway the original premise was that whether the admission offices and administrators care about this ranking and whether their behavior sometimes are effected by them. The attitude of the grads has nothing much to do with the original question. I only see a lot of opinion and chest thumping but not much of an argument that they don’t do any of this. To me, everyone does it to a certain degree.</p>
<p>The study and the survey of admission and administrators say so, the dean at Yale say so, how do all these grads that have never been in any of these admission sessions and meetings know so much?</p>
<p>These elite grads may not care much about rankings, but some of them sure seem to care about repeatedly posting about how little they care.</p>
<p>Just to get things straight, one can simultaneously be “above a conversation” but not above a conversation about that conversation?</p>
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<p>Oh CC has such a short collective memory! Wasn’t Duke ranked #3 in the USNWR a decade ago?</p>
<p>“Just to get things straight, one can simultaneously be “above a conversation” but not above a conversation about that conversation?”</p>
<p>Exactly. There was a writer who made quite a name for himself by continually pointing out how even the elite were not immune to human nature. He also said something about those who protesteth too much.</p>
<p>It’s an amazing feat of multi-tasking some of you are doing…being able to scour the countryside, looking in every Burger King and atop every tractor for diamonds in the rough, yet still having time to tell everybody how wonderful you are on a topic you don’t care about.</p>
<p>Yet none of us spent our vacations visiting as many college campuses as possible.</p>
<p>A few years back, US News ranked CalTech as #1. That year, the amount spent per student was an important part of ranking. After a gazillion people pointed out that this criterion benefited STEM-only colleges, the criterion was dropped. </p>
<p>Despite the current rankings, I don’t know a single person who believes that Columbia is a better school than Stanford or that UPenn is tied with Stanford. Washington & Lee better than Wesleyan.Davidson better than Harvey Mudd. Middlebury better than Wellesley. Um, yeah, sure…</p>
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<p>Well, of course not. It’s sort of the height of dorkiness to categorize at such finite levels. A lot of places are all Very Good to Great, and whether they are “better” depends upon the individual student’s personal preferences (part of country, urban vs rural, campus look and feel). Any time I hear someone talk about upper Ivies vs lower Ivies, or make meaningful distinctions between schools that are (say) 8 spaces apart on USNWR, I know I’m dealing with a fool.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, didn’t you just a few posts ago agreed wholeheartedly with those that made such distinctions?</p>
<p>No, ttparent. Please re-read what I said. I think that it is goofy and dorky when people draw fine distinctions between schools that are all, by any quantifiable measure, excellent. “Upper Ivies” and “lower Ivies” makes me want to puke, as does the concept of treating the Ivies as some special exalted set of elite colleges instead of just 8 of the nation’s elite colleges. I think people who exemplify elite behavior are “above” this kind of parsing-fine-distinctions and recognize that the distinctions at this level are fairly arbitrary, and it’s only the wannabes who are all about “but look, I’m number #8! See how much better I am than number #14!” (or whatever, numbers chosen arbitrarily).</p>