<p>Have you seen numbers for Penn's yield 10 years ago? A large part of that yield boost is admitting half of the enrolled class ED so you lock up half of the seats without worrying about the students going elsewhere. It's RD yield rate is around 50%, and would probably be lower if Penn admitted only 30% of its entering class ED. Remember, a large part of that 65% is committed to going to Penn through ED. Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT all had higher yield rates even tough none of the admitted students (save maybe athletes) was forced to attend via an ED contract.</p>
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I don't pretend to know the motives for Penn's admissions committee
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I don't either. That was the impression I got from my legacy interview on campus and my alumni interview with an alum who graduated 30+ years ago. Penn tells its legacy applicants "you only get legacy consideration ED." The simple reason for that is because there were lots of legacies who turned down admission at Penn for other schools in the past.</p>
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Considering the relative amount of pre-professionalism (and pre-business, especially) found on Penn's campus, even in the engineering disciplines? Yes. It is.
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<em>shrug</em> I've heard stories about Cornell engineering being very cutthroat from a recent environmental engineering grad and a few current students. You don't need to have a big preprofessional culture for students to be cutthroat in class. Granted, it's only a few isolated incedents, but I havn't experienced anything like that yet at Penn.</p>
<p>From what I have heard Venkats explanation about why Penn uses ED so much is correct. They want kids who really want to be there and it helps them a lot with yield. If your a legacy its kind of a hindrance since you either have to apply ED to a school that may or may not be your first choice and be locked in or not apply ED and possibly get scorned as a result.</p>
<p>Bescraze is here! Welcome! Did your Cornell-sense tingle?</p>
<p>Disclaimer: To anyone considering Cornell, please ignore all posts by Bescraze. We have yet to figure out what happened to cause it, but he seems to detest Cornell. He'll randomly pop in anytime he gets a chance to bash us...because for some reason he like creepily stalks the Cornell forums even though he hates the school.</p>
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<em>shrug</em> I've heard stories about Cornell engineering being very cutthroat from a recent environmental engineering grad and a few current students. You don't need to have a big preprofessional culture for students to be cutthroat in class. Granted, it's only a few isolated incedents, but I havn't experienced anything like that yet at Penn.
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<p>Engineering is cut-throat in any college. Same goes for pre-med.</p>
<p>^there is a difference between competitive and cutthroat. competitive is where you have to work hard and sometimes do very well on tests to get good grades. i've had a math test where a 92% was a B+ because of curves. cutthroat is where no one helps eachother, they rip pages out of library books so other cannot use them (I heard this happened at Cornell from a student), give eachother incorrect information, etc.</p>
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Engineering is cut-throat in any college. Same goes for pre-med.
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<p>Kids won't kill each other... or harm each other to get better grades. I've never seen this happen.</p>
<p>Everybody is usually extremely intelligent in engineering/pre-med so it's difficult to get good grades, but people help each other out all the time.</p>
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they rip pages out of library books so other cannot use them (I heard this happened at Cornell from a student)
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<p>Uhh... I think you read about this in collegeprow1er (the 1 is an l, it won't let me post it for some reason). I have never seen this happen at Cornell yet and I'm an engineer and my roomate is premed. Again, it's not cutthroat but its competitive.</p>
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give eachother incorrect information, etc.
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<p>If somebody gives you incorrect information, they're a d-bag and you probably should not be talking to them in the first place. It's never happened to me or anybody I know at Cornell.</p>
<p>I have seen plenty of kids help each other out so here's a message to prospective students: Cornell is a friendly environment. People don't step on each other's heads or tell each other incorrect information. This is a myth. Yes it's competitive because it's difficult to get good grades, but plenty of engineers and premeds work together.</p>
<p>I can't really imagine any decent human being ripping pages out of library books and giving other people wrong information just to get ahead at any university, let alone Cornell. Maybe I'm just naive. </p>
<p>But the kids in my high school already talking about their future careers as investment bankers, lawyers, etc are already annoying enough. I can't imagine a whole university full of them. I'm glad I got rejected from Penn.</p>
<p>I just said that Cornell engineering was more cutthroat than Penn engineering. I doubt that it's the most cutthroat environment though. </p>
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Uhh... I think you read about this in collegeprow1er
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No, a Cornell grad, class of 2007 told me that. She said it wasn't the most common thing though and still encouraged me to apply. Maybe because she was a transfer she found Cornell to be more competitive than her old school.</p>
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I can't imagine a whole university full of them. I'm glad I got rejected from Penn.
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Penn isn't full of ibankers to be. Just Wharton which is only 20% of the whole student body. Even then, not all Wharton students go into banking. Penn has lots of kids who are unsure of their careers, kids who go on to get PhDs, enter non profit, etc. just like any other top school. A good number of Cornell students go into banking too, so it's not like Cornell is void of preprofessionals, I mean you can't be with a top 10 undergrad business program. Cornell also has good numbers for kids going into med school and law school. I can't say it's the school in America, or even the Ivy League that is able to avoid preprofessionalism.</p>
<p>Venkat89, you might want to include a disclaimer next time you present an unsubstantiated rumor that you "heard" from a "Cornell student" about a college you've never attended as factual information to prospective applicants.</p>
<p>^... I said I heard it from a Cornell student in my initial post. You can take it for what you want, but I really saw no reason for her to lie to me.</p>
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cutthroat is where no one helps eachother, they rip pages out of library books so other cannot use them (I heard this happened at Cornell from a student), give eachother incorrect information, etc.
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<p>and turning it into a broad generalization about Cornell.</p>
<p>Oh, and for the record, I've never experienced any cutthroat/overly competitive behavior at Cornell (maybe because I'm an ILR major). I've studied for most of my in class finals in groups, with study guides put together by several students, so no one had to do the entire thing independently. This kid who I hardly knew gave me a study guide that was at least 50 pages long the night before one of my finals last year, thereby saving my GPA, since I hadn't done any of the readings and the exam was in less than 24 hours. I've done the same thing for other people who I know. At the the last in class final I had, everyone was asking last minute questions up until the test started. I'm pretty sure no one gave me false information, since I got an A+ in the class. </p>
<p>Regardless of how competitive some people might be, most people aren't going to waste their time trying to sabotage their classmates, especially by doing something asinine like ripping some pages out of a library book that no one else will ever read. Most people simply are not that desperate. If you need to resort to sabotage to outperform your classmates, because you are incapable of doing well on your own, chances are you won't be able to. Even if some people are insanely competitive, it has nothing to do with Cornell; maybe it has something to do with the nature of their majors (hmm, I think you said "engineering"). This hypothetical "problem" is just as likely to occur at any top school than it is at Cornell.</p>
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This kid who I hardly knew gave me a study guide that was at least 50 pages long the night before one of my finals last year, thereby saving my GPA, since I hadn't done any of the readings and the exam was in less than 24 hours.
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<p>And then you wonder why people complain about the strength of Cornell's student body?</p>
<p>On the cutthroat question: I graduated last year in engineering. I assure you Cornell engineering is the polar opposite of cutthroat. People are so willing to go out of their way to help even strangers. It's actually expected that an individual offers assistance to another student when asked. Office hours are basically one big study session amongst people who may not even know each other. Almost all homeworks are completed in study groups and even professors sometimes explicitly encourage collaboration (I almost always abstained because it's not always in one's best interest to complete homework with others, but I digress.) So all that stuff about Cornell's ultra competitive environment is garbage.</p>
<p>If I didn't get an A in the class maybe you'd have a point. The readings were intolerably boring. I was simply demonstrating that my experience has not been competitive.</p>
<p>I love the Penn students on this board talking about Cornell as though they've been there. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence especially if its secondary. I am an Engineer at Cornell, and know a whole slew of pre-med students. I have not met a single student who has ever been unwilling to help their peers, let along had the audacity to rip pages out of a library book to sabotage his/her fellow classmates. Yes Cornell is competitive, but it is not cutthroat. The number of study groups and office hour discussions are a testament to the inaccruacy of Venkat and co. statements. </p>
<p>Additionally, I'm not going to talk about prestige too much, but the notion that Penn is more prestigiuos that Cornell in the US is absolutely ridiculous. How does one quanitfy prestige? </p>
<p>Additionally, Penn does use ED vigourously and that's what drives up its yield and lowers its acceptance rates. The evidence on this question is plentiful and empirical and anyone who contends otherwise either in denial or just ignorant.</p>
<p>"And then you wonder why people complain about the strength of Cornell's student body?"</p>
<p>Spanks made an A, so get over it. And you think the entire student body at every other "top-ranked" school reads every single reading they are assigned?</p>
<p>Food for thought: At least Cornellians can make an A without actually having to read the material. That's a weakness now?</p>