I included Bryn Mawr and Haverford (and I think they lend prestige and resources to each other, not just Haverford to BMC) because my daughter was accepted to BMC a number of years ago, but her intended major was only offered if she took the majority of her classes at Haverford. There simply weren’t enough upper-level courses offered to stay on one campus. So yes, I think that campus benefits greatly from it’s affiliation. BMC doesn’t have an art studio (or didn’t, maybe they do now), Haverford students use BMC for performing arts. I can’t speak very specifically to Haverford.
My comments were more about resources than “prestige,” however that’s measured. That’s IMO a bogus measurement anyway, but I don’t think people consider BMC/Haverford buoyed in prestige by each other, or really even affiliated at all unless they know the schools well.
“Illinois’ eleven admits to HBS’ Class of 2020 exceeds that of many outstanding schools …”
Should an OP high school ‘chance me’ class rank listing herself as 25th in her class be taken at face value or do adults usually want to know the denominator before making an assessment i.e. OP please clarify if 25 is out of 50 in the graduating class (Top 50%) vs if 25 is out of 1,000 in the class (Top 2.5%)?
Identically, should an OP posting 11 admits to HBS be taken at face value or should adults want to know the denominator before making an assessment i.e. please, clarify if 11 admits to HBS is out of an undergrad enrollment of 2,000 or 40,000 students? Perhaps, the 20x larger size / additional 38,000 student pool doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters and that is why the University of Illinois was listed in comparison to a variety of universities including those with very large enrollments such as UC-Berkeley, Michigan, Ohio State & Penn State.
Some schools–such as Wellesley College & Williams College-- admit well beyond their weight.
Oh, you really meant better than the partial list of those very large universities, but not as good as the smaller ones you also listed in the very same sentence: Chicago, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice, etc…, but did not differentiate on far smaller size.
Four schools had 8 students admitted to HBS’ MBA class of 2020. Those schools are, USC, Vanderbilt, Wellesley College & Williams College.
USC has about 19,200 undergraduate enrolled full-time, Vanderbilt has about 6,800, Wellesley College enrolls about 2,400, and Williams College enrolls about 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, yet all had the same number of students (8) admitted to HBS’ MBA class of 2020. So, yes, size is another factor to consider.
Illinois is a large public university with a mission to serve the students of its state while many of the other schools are ultra-selective private schools. So there are several ways to differentiate the schools & to present the results.
@PetraMC All excellent to hear. Your comment prompted me to look at what departments the two schools rely on the other for.
BMC students would need to go to Haverford for –
Fine Arts
Music
Astronomy
Religion
Haverford students would need to go to BMC for–
Arabic (also at Swarthmore)
Creative Writing
Theater
Dance
Classical or Near Eastern Archeology
Film
Geology
Growth and Structure of Cities
Hebrew and Judaic Studies
Italian and Italian Studies
Romance Languages
Russian
And the swimming pool for Haverford is at BMC.
It’s hopefully useful to others to see the extend that the colleges cooperate.
I will begin with an act of vanity, quoting, well, me!
I also wrote earlier (I’ll spare quoting my own words) that it’s really tough to separate reputation/prestige from quality of academics because sometimes those things match, and sometimes they only sort of match. I’m sure that U of Chicago does offer rigorous study and probably does deserve its five pens for academics. But for so many schools we have no idea how many pens should be awarded. Someone earlier posted that it was unthinkable that a school like SUNY-Binghamton should receive as many pens as Wake Forest. Why?
Sure, UIUC is a fine place, but so are many other Big Ten schools. It’s not like I thought of kids who went to Indiana U or U of Minnesota as less capable students. I mean, the Big Ten schools (excepting NU) offer pretty similar experiences. I had the chance to go to UIUC. I went elsewhere (to the #66 LAC in the nation–woot! woot!). Never did I think that I was turning down an elite school.
“the quality of students the school attracts as measured by admissions statistics” indicates that the measure is at least partially a proxy of admission selectivity.
@OHMomof2 someone may have provided this information already, but in case not, it is possible to get the Fiske Guide online. If you search on “Fiske Interactive,” it should pop up. It’s published by College Countdown. We took an online subscription ($20 for one year) when my son was looking at schools and it was helpful. You can create different lists, and I think he was far more likely to click through to a candidate school profile online than sit there with the big book.
Many thanks to the OP for the initial post and especially the follow-up!
Our kids did well if the pen score alone were used. We approached the admission process as if it had some lottery (random) aspects. Our goal was to identify a handful of colleges that provided the type of curricular and intellectual atmosphere that the kids wanted, AND that met key criteria for location and size. We did not factor in cost, which is an important factor for many applicants.
After curriculum and academic atmosphere, location, and size, we also factored in chance, namely the admission rate or competition for admission. Allowing for uncertainty, including competition for admissions, came another lottery aspect: how many colleges to apply to, whether to include safeties (not financial safeties).
The application lists were short in both cases: 7 colleges and 6 colleges. Their final “score” was 12 out of 13 acceptances, and they attended outstanding colleges that closely fit their multidimensional criteria (UChicago and RISD). They would have been satisfied (but perhaps not overjoyed) with any of the colleges to which they applied, since all of the colleges fit their core criteria.
I encourage readers to obtain a copy of the Fiske Guide To Colleges 2020 as the book is full of valuable information about each of the 317 colleges & universities listed.
For those interested in the Cal State system, the Fiske Guide just has one full page of discussion, but it contains helpful information.