@Coloradomama I agree with your recent post and I live in California. There is a type of elitist entitlement mentality that goes on and I do not approve of it either.
Stanford MIT dual admits choose Stanford 60% of the time.
@sbballer:
Can you substantiate where you got your data?
When I read through your past posts, what is difficult for me is that the majority of them are of the form “Stanford is the answer. What was the question?”
Please try and be more equally critical of all data.
That is interesting data, if true. I could not find any recent authoritative source. There was an academic paper roughly a decade ago (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105), which showed Stanford losing to Harvard, Yale and MIT, splitting with Princeton and beating all others.
In 2008, then Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones, was quoted in the Tech, the MIT newspaper saying “Currently, Harvard and Yale are the only two schools to which MIT loses more students than it wins.” (http://tech.mit.edu/V125/N63/63admissions.html)
In 2007, aware it was losing cross-admit battles, particularly with Harvard, the Stanford president announced to the Stanford faculty that they were looking to make significant changes to improve these battles. What I cannot find is any strong data since 2008 to determine whether and how, Stanford was successful. The only authoritative Stanford cross admit data that I can find comes from another report to the Stanford faculty a year later (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/june18/minutes-061808.html), which does show Stanford winning 60% of the cross-admit battle with MIT for 2014. Separately I can find them winning 52% of the cross admit battle for the class of 2013 and 49% for the class of 2012. These are the only two years where I can find data that shows Stanford beating MIT.
What I cannot find is any data for any class in the last 6 years. So I cannot judge if that 60% figure represents a one year anomaly, or whether it has retained that advantage.
@Coloradomama, you’re obviously entitled to your opinion. But the Stanford swimmer as an example of the social scene influencing kids not from California? Please. That sounds like the kid’s “the party culture and alcohol made me do it” defense. It sounds like he was partying and using drugs back in slow-paced, conservative Ohio. That’s a huge cop out.
There’s plenty of the “fast-paced social scene” for those who choose to pursue it at Stanford and elsewhere, and there’s plenty of opportunity to avoid it for those who don’t desire that kind of scene. I went to Stanford from the East coast. I never stepped foot in a frat house in my 4 years on campus, and got drunk at a party exactly once (freshman year; didn’t like it and never bothered again; the same number of times I got drunk at parties in high school). I never used drugs in high school, and never once saw them in college, because I never looked for them (though I’m sure they weren’t hard to find). I felt no pressure to conform. As you say, there is plenty of “action” elsewhere. I personally doubt that “the pressure is much higher at Stanford than at MIT”. But you are welcome to live in your bubble.
@renaissancedad I do think the social scene is a lot different at Stanford than at MIT. Commenting on that is not living in a bubble.
I think whether we ‘lose’ or ‘win’ more students to/from Stanford (and Harvard for that matter) varies year-by-year. The pool is small enough so that it’s very sensitive to relatively minor fluctuations.
IDK, I sort of think it’s the wrong way to evaluate it. I met with a lot of crossadmits this year. At no point did I ever try to convince any of them to enroll at MIT as opposed to HYPS (or anything else). IMHO, the job is to talk about MIT honestly, and trust the students to make the right decision. In almost every case, the students that I talked to did, I think, and in the few cases where I thought they made the wrong decision…well, it’s theirs to make, and in the past, I’ve been wrong about the wrong-ness of that decision more than I’ve been right. It’s trite to say it all comes down to fit, but also true.
I blogged about the process more here: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/choosing-to-become-yourself
@MITChris That was a fantastic post. It should be required reading for every rising senior who is angsting over what the “right” choice will be. Rather, it should be required reading for every rising senior. 
Stanford wins the dual admit data over MIT by 60%… it was from last year’s faculty minutes. Stanford’s yield is the highest in the nation. MIT is third.
@sbballer.
Do you think your Stanford-only blinders have cost you your credibility?
Admissions yield 2015
Stanford University 81.1%
Harvard University 80.0%
MIT 72.4%*
Yale University 71.7%*
Princeton University 68.6%
University of Pennsylvania 66%
@MITChris has written a fabulous post and one very artfully constructed, but I find myself disagreeing with one of his key tenets, that this is a decision that should be considered and approached philosophically. I went to MIT (obviously) and one of my best friends in secondary school went to Harvard. As a result, I spent a fair amount of time, particularly my freshman and sophomore years visiting her, and she spent time visiting me. I went to some Harvard parties, I hung out a few times in the dorms, and I was struck by how DIFFERENT it felt from the equivalent experiences on the MIT campus. Finally, one evening we were walking along, and I very uncomfortably told her something like “Harvard has always struck me as being vaguely ummm… pretentious, in a way that just never felt particularly comfortable to me.” And she looked at me, grinned, and said something like “Oh I am so glad that you said that. I have always felt exactly the same way about MIT.”
And of course, she was completely right. MIT is filled with its own pretensions, that are quite different but no less real than those at Harvard. But the thing of it is that the ones at MIT have aligned with my own quirks so that I felt very much at home at MIT, and similarly, she very much at home at Harvard.
I don’t think that this is a decision that you should necessarily approach philosophically. I think you should approach it at a much more gut level. You are not just picking a university. You are picking a home for at least four years. You should feel like you could belong there. There is no best school, such a thing is obviously wrong, but there may be a better choice for an individual student. But only they can know that, and it has very little to do with the trappings of the institution.
To sbballers comment about yield I would only say that yield has only a tangential approach to cross-admits. The key example here is Princeton. About a decade back their administration got very concerned about yield and their admissions office were set targets to improve yield. Their solution to this was to admit kids that they thought would meet Princeton’s needs but who, for one reason or another, were unlikely to be cross-admitted to key other schools such as Harvard or Yale. As such, Princeton’s yield skyrocketed. That directive went away shortly thereafter. These stats can mean whatever you want them to mean.
There are a number of universities that encourage admissions applications from students who cannot possibly be admitted. The purpose of this exercise is to raise their selectivity score, by lowering their admitted percentage. MIT, to its credit, does not do this. Indeed, MIT does not normally appear at college fairs in the US**, on the grounds that anyone who needs a college fair to discover MIT, does not normally match well with MIT, and MIT is supremely unconcerned with encouraging applications from those who obviously do not match well, largely because our faculty and administration do not consider that statistic to be any form of meaningful metric.
Now to be clear, I am not saying that the statistics quoted by sbballer are in any way wrong. However, I am not sure that they have the totemic meaning that seems to be assigned to them.
**(Note: I do appear for MIT at a number of college fairs outside of the US, because the purpose is quite different. I am often meeting with students whose only application to an American university is their MIT application, and we often talk about stuff that would be “obvious” to anyone used to the US tertiary education system).
@Mikalye – I actually don’t think we disagree, although upon re-reading that post, I can see how it may have come across that way. The gut/home thing is and always has been my first heuristic. The set of strategies I outline in that post are to help students with uncertain or ambivalent instincts, where both options seem equally home-like and you need to pick only one.
re @sbballer’s data: I have no reason to doubt it and it wouldn’t surprise me if Stanford’s yield is higher (overall and on xadmits). There are always kids we admit who we think are unlikely to yield but who are still kids we ought to admit, as @Mikalye said. I’m less concerned with the overall rate and more with the individual cases and why people make decisions they do.
all colleges game the system (esp the ivies) to improve yield and admit rate… whether they admit it or not.
those colleges that have relatively high EA admit rates are doing this to goose their yield rates. in particular it’s obvious that HYP are all using high EA rates to goose yield rates. MIT (which has the lowest EA rate in the country) and Stanford less so.
MIT to its credit has the lowest EA admit rate… which will lower overall yield rate.
MIT EA 656 out of 7,767 (8.4%)
Stanford REA 745 out of 7822 (9.5%)
Georgetown EA 892 out of 7027 (12.7%)
Harvard SCEA 918 out of 6173 (14.9%)
Yale SCEA: 795 out of 4662 (17.1%)
Princeton SCEA 785 out of 4229 (18.6%)
MIT doesn’t consider legacy. If you take out legacies out of others, the rate might be comparable.
“Also, according to 2016 listing of universities, Stanford is the 3rd but MIT is below 5?”
Depends which ranking organization you look at. QS World University Rankings places MIT at #1 in the world, with Stanford tied for #3. The U.S. News Best Global Universities Rankings has MIT at #2 and Stanford at #4.
@sbballer - I can’t think of anything we do our process to ‘game’ the yield/admit rate. Sure, we offer competitive financial aid and try to make sure people have a good experience at CPW. But if by ‘gaming’ you mean things like (e.g.) “goosing” our EA admit rates, or not admitting certain kinds of kids (e.g. Californians) because they are statistically less likely to yield…those aren’t really things we do.
@MITChris the fact that your EA rate is the lowest in the nation supports your contention as stated…(although there is always bias in any admission process) the real offenders are HYP which admit half their class with admit rates that are 3-4x higher than RA admit rates… these schools are obviously gaming the system to boost yield rates. MIT EA and RA admit rates are most similar. Stanford less so… and HYP are real outliers…