<p>Lots of people are not turning down Harvard to go to UCLA if they get into both schools. Who said that?</p>
<p>It's a persistant theme: A trend of middle-class kids turning down Ivies to go to their state u honors college. I don't even deny that it may exist, only that if it exists it doesn't seem to apply to HYPS. Maybe it SHOULD exist. And of course there are a few people who do make that economic choice -- e.g., curmudgeon's daughter, although that wasn't a state uni -- and lots more who think about it real hard. But I realized that, other than on CC, I didn't know of anyone who had actually done that, and that given the data there simply could not be a lot of people who had actually done that. Given that it seems like a perfectly rational thing to do, I would have expected something else. But if it were happening in any great numbers, the yields at HYPS would have to plummet, and there's no evidence that has happened.</p>
<p>So, either everyone is irrational (pretty unlikely), or the choice isn't really as balanced as people pretend.</p>
<p>HYPS, I know it happens, but probably not in large numbers.</p>
<p>More likely, those kids don't apply to HYPS in the first place.</p>
<p>By the way, how do the schools know what other schools their matriculants were accepted to?</p>
<p>I don't remember my daughter telling the school. Maybe she did?</p>
<p>crazy thread but</p>
<p>If you consider but choose not to apply to a school you have the stats for is that the same as turning it down? How do you measure those numbers in any meaningful way?</p>
<p>I don't think we can really tell how many turned Harvard down for UCLA when you don't even know how many considered it but chose to not apply.</p>
<p>DStark, exactly. Living in Florida I see brilliant kids all the time who would NEVER apply OOS to an Ivy not necessarily for financial reasons but for cultural reasons. IVy football's irrelevant, its cold up there and no one they know from their high school class will be going up there with them. UF Honors is free to the bright ones and they go in droves, together. Many of them are Ivy material (especially considering that they're geographically desirable) but could care less about that sort of prestige factor.</p>
<p>I happen to know three - just last year who were accepted to Harvard and Princeton and turned them down for state universities. In all three cases the decision was based upon money. "Full freight" versus "free" plus significant travel subsidies in one case. "Full fare" versus "less than room and board" in the other two. And, in those three cases, the students explained to Harvard/Princeton why they had made the decisions they made. </p>
<p>There were numerous others who chose state universities over Cornell, Columbia, CalTech, MIT, etc. </p>
<p>Perhaps in the "northeast" the price differential is not as significant as these students experienced.</p>
<p>A couple of comments.</p>
<p>First, Harvard's yield, the highest, is slightly less than 80%. In other words, 20% choose to go elsewhere. Perhaps they choose Y or P or S or M. But equally likely, they choose a less expensive university, or a LAC or a good college or university closer to home, or one that has the kind of sports scene that HYPSM do not. The same applies to other high yield university. None has 100% yield.</p>
<p>Second. JHS is right that the study of revealed preferences shows a strong preference for HYPSM, and for H over Y or P. The author acknowledge that it is more difficult to study preferences below that level.</p>
<p>Third, dstark and others are right to suggest that many students choose not to apply to HYPSM. Among these, some would not be admitted anyway. But some would be eminently admissible. Not all choose not to apply because of financial reasons. Weather, distance, sports, size, are some other factors.</p>
<p>I want to debunk my own argument a bit, after further reflection. I remain convinced that my analysis that it's not likely that more than 200 kids or so turned down Harvard or Yale for economic reasons in any recent year. But I was wrong to suggest that that was a trivial number. I was forgetting that all the numbers here are small. On my analysis, there are only 3,000 to 3,400 total unique kids accepted at both schools, combined. So the number of kids declining for economic reasons is about 5-7% of the total. Not high, but not negligible. And if it's concentrated in the families with incomes between, say 60,000 and 200,000 per year, it's a much higher percentage of those families -- certainly enough to notice, maybe 1 in 7 or 8 accepted kids in some communities. </p>
<p>But then I'm back to the revealed preference study. If so few kids choose Berkeley or UVa over Harvard, where in heck are all those 200 kids coming from (and going)? It isn't Penn State, I don't think.</p>
<p>The numbers I have seen for MIT's enrollment last year support to some degree what JHS is saying -- 70% of those who turn down MIT turn it down for an Ivy, Stanford, or Caltech. Only about 4% of MIT admits (~10% of those who turn down MIT overall) turn down MIT for a state school.</p>
<p>
In all seriousness, Facebook.</p>
<p>EDIT:
[quote]
If so few kids choose Berkeley or UVa over Harvard, where in heck are all those 200 kids coming from (and going)? It isn't Penn State, I don't think.
[/quote]
In MIT's case, it's Michigan and Georgia Tech first, the rest nowhere -- the rest of the state schools get one or two kids, presumably in-state.</p>
<p>JHS, I'm going to give it one more shot.</p>
<p>You have the revealed preference survey in front of you?</p>
<p>In the west, do more kids want to go to Virginia or Berkeley?</p>
<p>It's Virginia right?</p>
<p>First off, does that even make sense to you?</p>
<p>If more kids would rather go to Virginia, why do so many more apply to Berkeley? Thousands and thousands and thousands?</p>
<p>Why at my kid's school do somewhere around 80 apply to Berkeley and 3 apply to Virginia?</p>
<p>I don't know 1 California school where more people apply to Virginia than Berkeley.</p>
<p>"By the way, how do the schools know what other schools their matriculants were accepted to? </p>
<p>In all seriousness, Facebook."</p>
<p>You have to love the researchers. :)</p>
<p>Does everybody list the schools they turned down?</p>
<p>Is everybody in Facebook?</p>
<p>Here is the top 25 from the revealed preference survey.</p>
<p>The top 25 schools in Metrick's student preference ranking are: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Amherst, Dartmouth, Wellesley, University of Pennsylvania, University of Notre Dame, Swarthmore College, Cornell, Georgetown, Rice University, Williams College, Duke, University of Virginia, Northwestern, Pomona, Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Middlebury College, Wesleyan, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, University of Southern California, Furman College, University of North Carolina, Barnard College, Oberlin College, Carlton College, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Davidson College, University of Texas, New York University, Tufts, Washington & Lee, University of Michigan, and Vassar College. </p>
<p>First off, How can Wellesley be so high? Are men really that bad? :)</p>
<p>Furman College? The University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, and Oberlin?
Washington and Lee?
Furman College? Yep I hear they have 50,000 applicants a year.</p>
<p>Now I remember why I through this paper in the garbage. :)</p>
<p>
[quote]
In MIT's case, it's Michigan and Georgia Tech first, the rest nowhere -- the rest of the state schools get one or two kids, presumably in-state.
[/quote]
You're forgetting about a public school in CA that's pretty good in science/engineering...</p>
<p>
[quote]
You're forgetting about a public school in CA that's pretty good in science/engineering...
[/quote]
No, I'm not -- Berkeley got three MIT admits last year. It's lower than I would have expected, too, and certainly lower than the number of MIT admits Harvey Mudd, Olin, and Caltech got.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Does everybody list the schools they turned down?</p>
<p>Is everybody in Facebook?
[/quote]
No, they don't list the schools they turn down -- the students who didn't reply already are on a list. I think last year there were about ten MIT acceptees who couldn't be unambiguously located on Facebook.</p>
<p>I think JHS and dstark are talking past each other. The revealed preference study only surveyed students who applied and got admitted to at least 2 schools, not students who did not apply or did not get admitted to at least 2 schools.
So 50,000 students applied to Berkeley and only 20,000 applied to Harvard. By one standard, 30,000 would rather go to Berkeley than Harvard.
Among the 50,000 who applied to Berkeley, some also applied to Harvard. And if they got admitted to both, some preferred to attend Harvard.
These are two very different lines of argument.</p>
<p>I agree with Marite's analysis. It stands to reason that eastern schools would benefit under a system that, to some degree, measures head-to-head contests; the more private colleges in a concentrated geographic area, the more contests between them, ergo: more "points" earned between them.</p>
<p>Marite, forget surveys. Where would students rather go, to Furman or UCLA?
Oberlin or NYU? Middlebury or Michigan? Washington and Lee or Penn State? Penn State isn't even on the list. :)</p>
<p>Then look at the survey. </p>
<p>I'm not arguing about what the survey is. It doesn't do what it says.</p>
<p>I noticed the 4 professors who came up with this, work for private schools. :)</p>
<p>I have always argued that it matters little where one attends college in terms of career success some years down the road.</p>
<p>But I agree that very few student who are admitted to one of the big 3 + CalTech/MIT pass on the opportunity.</p>
<p>There is a good reason why everyone here knows what is meant by HYP.</p>
<p>dstark:</p>
<p>Why should one forget surveys? Rely on anecdotes? Okay here's one. Of the 11 students from S's high school who were admitted to Harvard, only one turned it down--for Stanford.</p>