<p>Tokenadult:</p>
<p>Your analysis of the H,Y,P SAT ranges seems to concord with the findings of Hoxby et al that P accepts fewer students in the 94-98%, apparently conceding the tournament to H & Y to protect its yield. Am I reading this correctly?</p>
<p>"On the issue of someone being qualified for Princeton being necessarily qualified for Harvard and Yale, that doesn't follow from published figures about the SAT interquartile range of the entering classes at each college. </p>
<p>"Qualified" according to Harvard admissions officers means having the SATs, coursework and grades indicating that if accepted to Harvard, the student would have the intellectual ability and discipline to graduate.</p>
<p>Before the SAT was recently revised, an admissions officer told me that the lowest score that would indicate that a student could handle the work would be about a 600. Students scoring below that on any section of the SAT (m, v back then) were probably among those 10% considered to lack the ability to eventually graduate from Harvard. Of course, H has very few students who score in the 600s on any part of the SAT, and more than likely those are students such as highly recruited athletes and offspring of very generous donors.</p>
<p>Since so many factors go into how the Ivies and similar schools select their students, one can't use those SAT figures to say that someone who "qualifies" for P, Y may not qualify for H. I'd guess that H has the highest stats because of its yield. Given a choice between H, P, or Y, most students would pick H, which has the country's highest yield. It may be that if one were to look at the SAT ranges of accepted students, they would be very similar for H, P and Y.</p>
<p>Hi, Marite and Northstarmom, I see you have both commented about my last post in this thread. </p>
<p>Princeton claims to have abandoned the practice of "strategic admission" (yield management) revealed in the study sample Marite mentions. I have no reason to doubt that statement from Princeton's admission office, so I assume that as of today Princeton simply tries to admit the best students it can, without regard to where else they may be admitted. It will be interesting to see how Princeton's entering class figures change after Princeton joins Harvard in going to a single-deadline system next year, while Yale and Stanford continue to be restrictive early action colleges and MIT and Caltech (and other possible "peer" colleges) offer early action or early decision programs. </p>
<p>Northstarmom is quite correct that, really, most of the applicants who apply to the highly selective colleges are "qualified" in the minimal sense. I was adopting the terminology of another post, to which I was replying, by referring to "qualified" students. Really the notion is students with the highest probability of admission ("desirable" students at colleges that reject many applicants). There isn't any strict rank-ordering of students by desirability at ANY selective college. Colleges differ in what they are looking for, especially in the context of who else is applying to that college in that particular year. (The classic example is the college that has to recruit oboe players to its orchestra, because the oboe players are all graduating, while another college still has current students to fill the oboe chairs in the orchestra.) </p>
<p>I don't have any doubt that if the OP is describing the student he met accurately, that that student was "qualified" in the minimal sense to attend any private research university offering majors that student likes. But I am also disagreeing with the idea that insofar as students differ in desirability, according to the varied standards applied by varied colleges, Harvard and Yale will always admit up every student admitted by Princeton. Their high yield at the top end of student desirability (whether desirability is defined by test scores, grades, national EC achievements, sports, or other criteria) is such that they can be (slightly) more choosy. So, again, it shouldn't surprise anyone that once in a while a student is admitted to Princeton and not to Harvard or Yale. And it is only a modest surprise when a student is admitted to Harvard and Yale but not to Princeton (the rarer case), because colleges do differ in how they estimate fit of each student into each year's entering class.</p>