<p>goldenboy8784,
As I’ve explained in another thread, most high school seniors vote with their applications. About 3 million HS students graduate each year; out of that number, about 70% (around 2.1 million) enroll in college. About 35,000 apply to Harvard. You do the math. Many don’t apply because they have no chance of getting in (though that doesn’t deter many in the 35,000 who do apply who have no realistic chance of admission but apply anyway). </p>
<p>But a very large number of those who are plausible candidates for admission just don’t care to apply. Why? Some prefer to stay closer to home. That’s one reason why Northwestern gets about 60% more applications from Illinoisans than Harvard does, and why Northwestern gets more than 4 times as many applications from Illinoisans as Duke does. And why Stanford gets 260% the number of applications from Californians that Harvard gets.</p>
<p>Some just prefer other schools. Harvard is the 7th-most popular Ivy for Connecticut residents to apply to; only Princeton is less popular, perhaps because H & P are seen as major rivals to the home-state favorite, Yale, which leads the pack of Ivies among Connecticut college applicants, followed closely by Brown which is not only nearby but also perceived by some to be the “most Yale-like” after Yale itself. For their part, Massachusetts residents appear to hold Yale in similarly low regard; Yale doesn’t crack their top 50 for SAT score reports, though interestingly, Brown narrowly edges out Harvard for most popular Ivy among Bay State seniors. New Jerseyans apply to Penn, Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia in large numbers; Harvard, not so much, as it doesn’t make their top 50.</p>
<p>My own D1 had Ivy-level credentials and we would have paid for her to go to any college she chose. She looked at 7 of the 8 Ivies (ruling out Dartmouth as a non-starter on the basis of location and its reputation as a hard-partying, Greek-dominated school). The only Ivy she cared for at all was Brown and she would have applied there RD, but her clear first choice was the LAC where she applied ED, was accepted, and is now happily attending in her sophomore year. She’s hardly a unique case: she’s one of tens of thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands who preferred a non-Ivy to all the Ivies, and whose preferences won’t show up in parchment.com’s cross-admit data because she voted her preferences with her applications and took herself out of the running for that rarefied data set.</p>
<p>As I’ve explained before, I think what’s mostly going on with the cross-admit data is that if people are contemplating an extremely selective school and a slightly or somewhat less selective one, they’ll act differently depending on which of the two they prefer. If their first choice is the more selective school, they’re likely to apply to both, because they need back-ups (not necessarily just safeties, but also matches and even additional reaches that are slightly less reachy). But if their first choice is the less selective school, they’re much less likely to apply to both, because they’ll still figure they need a hedging strategy in case they don’t get into their first choice school, and it’s kind of dumb to think that if you don’t get into your first-choice school, your fallback should be a school that’s even more selective than your first choice. So the cross-admits are going to be heavily biased in the direction of people whose first choice was the more selective school; those who prefer the less selective school in most cases won’t even apply to the more selective school, even if objectively they have a reasonable chance of getting in. So you can’t read cross-admit data as reflecting in any absolute or general sense the preferences of HS seniors, or the absolute or relative desirability of schools. </p>
<p>For all we know, there might be just as many HS seniors who prefer Brown to Harvard as vice versa (I believe Brown may actually get more applications these days), but most of those who prefer Brown (as between the two) will not apply to Harvard; they’ll choose schools with a higher admit rate than Brown—say, a Johns Hopkins, a Chicago, a Duke–as their fallback schools. But of those whose first choice is Harvard, many will include Brown on their list of fallbacks. So the Harvard-Brown cross-admit pool will be overwhelmingly composed of people who were predisposed to choose Harvard over Brown, because of selection bias in the class of cross-applicants. The cross-admit data that show Harvard crushing Brown 90% to 10% doesn’t tell us anything about the desirability of each school to the broader group of HS seniors–roughly 99% of whom will apply to neither school. It only tells us about the preferences of the cross-admits. Meanwhile, those whose first choice was Brown and cross-applied to Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Duke on their back-up list will be similarly biased in favor of the most selective of these schools (Brown), and sure enough, in the cross-admit data Brown crushes all three slightly-less-selective schools (84-16 over JHU, 69-31 over Chicago, 73-27 over Duke). It doesn’t have anything to do with the preferences of HS seniors in general, or the absolute or relative merits of these various schools. It doesn’t even have all that much to do with US News rankings (Chicago, Duke, and JHU are all ranked higher than Brown in US News). It’s just about which school is the most selective (Brown’s admit rate is roughly half of the three other schools), and the sensible hedging strategies that most college applicants employ–starting with your first-choice school, and then adding some slightly to somewhat less selective schools to your list.</p>