<p>pinke123: "Hey, xokandykyssox, I'm just curious, where did you get that list of cross-admitted schools?"</p>
<p>xokandykyssesox is citing a ranking (mostly Harvard and U Penn researchers) based on student preference in where they choose to finally enroll among acceptances, in effect a series of head to head competitions (pages 26-28 <a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1287.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1287.pdf</a> )</p>
<p>As one of the authors (Metrick) states on a Wharton site discussion of this research paper, "When a student decides to enroll at one college among those that have admitted him, he effectively decides which college won in head-to-head competition. This model efficiently combines the information contained in thousands of these wins and losses, and produces a ranking that would be very difficult for a college to manipulate."</p>
<p>Brigham Young, Wellesley, Georgetown, Notre Dame:</p>
<p>Several factors go into skewing the rank order from that of US News rankings. Brigham Young is given as an example of regional/religious preference in the report (p. 41 of the PDF). Utah has a high percentage of Mormons and thus students from Utah give a high preference to Brigham Young.</p>
<p>An AP article ( <a href="http://boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/20/new_ranking_system_based_on_choice/%5B/url%5D">http://boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/20/new_ranking_system_based_on_choice/</a> ) summarizes why certain other schools may do well including Wellesley:</p>
<p>"Wellesley's appeal as a women's college evidently helps it beat elite universities. Georgetown and Notre Dame score higher than they do in US News, probably because of their popularity with Roman Catholic students." </p>
<p>I think these examples, including Wellesley, are true examples of 'self selective' schools. Students who apply to these schools are more likely to go to them in comparison to other seemingly better schools. </p>
<p>Princeton, Duke, Wash U</p>
<p>I think one interesting discussion is the manipulation by Princeton and Duke. Princeton, in effect, practices a form of 'Tufts syndrome', rejecting some more qualified applicants because of competitive pressures from more selective colleges, eg Harvard and MIT.</p>
<p>From the report for Princeton:
"consider Princeton admissions in Figure 1 (p. 6 of the PDF). At Princeton, the admissions probability rises to 20 percent at the 93 percentile (of SAT scores), then falls to 10 percent at the 98 percentile (precisely the region where competition is toughest), and then rises again for students with SAT scores in the top 2 percentiles."
"If a college is not practicing strategic admissions, then the probability that a student is admitted ought to rise monotonically in his or her merit (MIT is shown as an example). In contrast, a college that is strategic (Princeton is given as an example) will have non-monotonic admissions probabilities. A student's probability of admission will first rise in his or her merit and then fall as his or her merit moves into the range in which the strategic college faces stiff competition. In other words, the college will avoid admitting students in the range in which it is likely to lose in a matriculation tournament. Finally, if the student's merit is high enough, a strategic college will probably admit the student even if the competition will be stiff. This is because the prospective gains from enrolling a "star" will more than make up for the prospective losses from a higher admissions rate and lower matriculation rate." </p>
<p>As for Duke (p. 11 of the PDF):
"In addition, colleges can manipulate their admissions rate by encouraging applications from students who have little chance of actually gaining admission. A college can advertise less stringent criteria than it actually applies. By doing so, it encourages marginal students to apply, increases its number of applications, decreases its admissions rate, and raises its apparent desirability, even though its real desirability has not changed. For instance, this is how Toor (2000) described her job as an admissions officer at Duke University: "The job of admissions officers is to recruit, to boost application numbers. The more applications, the lower the admit rate, the higher the institutional ranking. Increasing application numbers is usually the No. 1 mandate of the recruiting season. Partly, that means trying to get the very best students to apply. But it also means trying to persuade those regular, old Bright Well-Rounded Kids (B.W.R.K.'s, in admissionese) to apply -- so that the college can reject them and bolster its selectivity rating."</p>
<p>A better example of what Duke does may be going on at Washington University in St. Louis. It's given as an example of the discrepancy with US News rankings (from the Harvard Crimson, ( <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503948%5B/url%5D">www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503948</a>) :
"Washington University in St. Louis, for example, ranks 11th in U.S. News, but 62nd in the NBER study. Avery pointed to such discrepancies as a testament to the strength of the system he and his co-authors proposed. It shows that U.S. News is valuing something that is not being valued by students in the same way, said Avery." </p>
<p>Wash U's very highly statistically qualified students but 62 preference ranking would seem to imply that applicants to Wash U when given the chance to choose another school would choose the other school. Therefore, the students going to Wash U are composed of many students rejected by other schools. So for Wash U's relatively low acceptance to be true, they must be accepting most of the very qualified students balanced by rejecting many underqualified students. This probably explains Wash U's disproportionate amount of mailers to applicants.</p>