<p>Marite, Would more students rather go to Furman or UCLA?</p>
<p>dstark:</p>
<p>I have no idea whatsoever and would want to rely on some statistics (aka survey) to draw a conclusion. I do not set myself up as a crystal ball gazer.</p>
<p>Marite, really. You have no idea. I love that answer. ;)</p>
<p>dstark, with all due respect, I don't care all that much about the tens of thousands of kids in California who only apply to schools in California. I'm not condemning them, but they're not in the same value-system I am, and my kid is only interested in a couple of California schools. (I feel almost the same about kids in Pennsylvania who only apply to in-state schools.) </p>
<p>I AM interested in what actual decisions kids make when confronted by the sorts of choices that may confront my kid, and the sorts of choices presented by the OP in this thread. That IS in my value universe, and while I don't think that popularity is the ultimate value, I also respect the kind of information produced by actual markets, as opposed to other types of ranking systems. So I do believe it's interesting that so few kids, facing a choice between Harvard or MIT and a flagship state university, choose the state university, even in states with great universities. (MIT only lost THREE kids to Berkeley last year? That's stunning.) And I'm interested in the choices people make among schools that accept my kid, whatever they turn out to be.</p>
<p>Now, you're right that the revealed preference study can be over-read. Lots of the schools are apples and oranges, like Furman and UCLA. Oberlin or NYU? As it happens, my daughter applied to and was accepted at both. So that's not so crazy at all, except I doubt they have enough data points to make a meaningful comparison. (D went elsewhere, but would have chosen NYU over Oberlin if it came to that. She has three really good friends at Oberlin, though, and sometimes wears the spiffy T-shirt that came with her acceptance package.) Oberlin and USC? Does anyone care about that binary choice? So as a general, apples-to-apples ranking system, it's not interesting at all, except to identify some surprising schools that people can care about a lot, like Notre Dame (which I understand) and, it seems, Furman (I'd like to know more).</p>
<p>If you look within categories, though, the rankings are modestly interesting. The placement of Amherst, Swarthmore, Williams, Oberlin, etc., relative to one another may well be valid (and does not seem very surprising). Certainly at the top of the list, the relative rankings of the Ivies, where there are lots and lots of cross-admits, is probably pretty valid, or at least prompts you to ask what accounts for the surprises. I would like to know more about the relative rankings of Stanford, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA, for which there must be a ton of data points. (Except, I probably wish I could exclude kids who ONLY applied to schools in Los Angeles or Orange Counties from the data, because I REALLY don't care what they think.)</p>
<p>I agree with Marite's assessment as well. It seems that different posters are really posing different questions: Where do students choose to apply in the first place? Or if they have more than one choice, which school wins out in that contest?</p>
<p>Afterall, since Harvard "only" receives approximately 22,000 applications a year, some would say that all other college applicants that year "rejected" Harvard.</p>
<p>JHS, I actually agree with a lot of what you just said.</p>
<p>"MIT only lost THREE kids to Berkeley last year? That's stunning.)"</p>
<p>Do you think it is possible that the kids who preferred Berkeley did not apply to MIT in the first place?</p>
<p>It's not like you are forced to apply to MIT. :)</p>
<p>From my hometown, incredibly small pool of superachievers, someone chose H over MIT, Another chose MIT over Caltech. Kids either stayed in FL or on East coast. LACs have almost no name recognition. Even S's prinicpal had never heard of Caltech. Sometimes it seems they apply to a reach & no match, like Tisch or UF (theater major), H or UF.
If one was to graduate with an engineering degree, they would be well-positioned if attended UF or Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>In terms of the survey, it would be interesting to explore which colleges/Us match up.</p>
<p>Of course tons of kids decided to apply to Berkeley and not to apply to MIT. Many of the reasons I can think of for that, though, are not very interesting to me: Not wanting to leave California, wanting a school with Division I athletics, hating snow, recognizing that it's significantly easier to get into Berkeley than MIT given certain stat levels, believing that there would be a cost difference that was significant because of EFC and assets. I think, though, that for kids who share my value system (except for being science types), MIT and Berkeley would be seen as close competitors, and that MIT would definitely be worth an application, see what the actual financial aid package would be . . . And to the extent those kids get into both schools -- and I would think there would be at least dozens of them, maybe more -- it does interest me what choices they make, especially if the choice is unexpected. In this pairing, I would expect some advantage to MIT, but would also expect to see some substantial number of Californians chosing to pay less for equivalent quality at Berkeley. So it does tell me something when that dog doesn't bark. Sure, some people may have made that decision for Berkeley in advance, but I can't tell the difference between them and the football people or the Cali-only people or the wouldn't-get-in-anyway people, and within my value system I don't know why they didn't at least check out what MIT would really cost unless it was because of some mix of football, Cali, and self-assessment. And most out-of-staters, like my family, would have no economic incentive not to apply to both, so their preferences matter to me, too. (My guess: MIT gets more OOS applications than Berkeley.)</p>
<p>My son would definitely prefer Oberlin to NYU and prefers Carleton, Grinnell, Pomona, Reed, etc. to HYP or AWS. And he's "in the ballpark" for any of these schools, but only applying to the ones that feel like fits, therefore no Ivies. Yes we get incredulous looks and blank stares, but I think he knows what he's doing.</p>
<p>JHS-- the Berkelely comparison goes over my head. At least around here (and I confess that I've never visited Berkeley) the environments are perceived to be very, very different. I think it's comparing apples to kiwis.</p>
<p>What would interest me would be a kid who gets substantial merit aid at CMU and chooses MIT with little or no financial aid; kid who gets a full ride at Case but chooses to pay for MIT (or Cal Tech for that matter...) etc. At least then you're comparing schools with a similar academic orientation, urban environment, etc. Living on the East coast I do not know a single kid who applied to Berkeley from my kids HS; I know several who applied to Cal Tech, Stanford,Harvey Mudd and Pomona, so it ain't the California piece that's throwing them.</p>
<p>JHS, we get to choose our own reasons for wanting to go to one school over another. The reasons are valid.</p>
<p>If you want to choose a school based on the decision of successful applicants
at two different schools, that's valid.</p>
<p>If you want to say, more successful applicants who got into both MIT and Berkeley, chose MIT, I'm assuming that is factually correct so how can I argue that.</p>
<p>(I'm not saying you are making the following argument.)</p>
<p>But when it is argued that when comparing MIT and Berkeley more students prefer MIT to Berkeley, that is not correct.</p>
<p>The revealed preference survey does not prove this. Any implication that it does is erroneous.</p>
<p>More students that get into both schools choose MIT; therefore, more students prefer MIT over Berkeley is not logically correct. You can not draw that conclusion from the revealed preference survey and that is what I have a problem with.</p>
<p>The way the revealed preference survey is used by most people is incorrect.</p>
<p>Maybe, maybe, students who get into both Oberlin and NYU would rather go to Oberlin, but more students would rather go to NYU.</p>
<p>If you care about the subset, students that get into 2 schools, and which schools they choose, that's fine.</p>
<p>In most cases it is a very small number, but maybe that is the relevant number to you. From what you are saying, that is the relevant number to you.</p>
<p>Here is one of my problems. The professors are wrong.</p>
<p>"The study, submitted in October to the National Bureau of Economic Research, creates a model that relies solely on the real-world decisions of admitted students. "Our system extends models used for ranking players in tournaments, such as chess or tennis," Metrick says. "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>From the paragraph...</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>That's not the only time I make the head to head comparisons. I make them when I decide where to apply in the first place. The survey omits this vital information.</p>
<p>I prefer UCLA over Washington and Lee in a head to head battle.</p>
<p>In most cases, I don't apply to Washington and Lee.</p>
<p>The survey doesn't measure this.</p>
<p>My son would be an example of a kid that would not have been included in the survey. He would have been competitive at several of the schools ranked higher than UVA by US News. </p>
<p>We live in VA, but we told him that although the difference in tuition would be a consideration, it was not what his decision should be based on, because we were willing and able to pay for his education regardless of cost. </p>
<p>Because he chose UVA, he didn't apply to the schools higher in rankings. There was no reason for him to do that. However, had he wanted to attend H,Y,P, MIT, etc, he most certainly would have also applied to UVA. </p>
<p>His preference was for UVA. However, in the example, he would not have been included in the preference survey.</p>
<p>I hope this makes sense. :)</p>
<p>Yes it does. ;)</p>
<p>blossom:</p>
<p>Funny -- My kid has applied to Berkeley, but not Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, or Pomona. He's not really an MIT-type, although he often thinks about eventually going to medical school. He loves Northern California, not so much Southern California. He likes cities and public transportation. He saw Berkeley a few years ago and thought it was really cool. (And he mis-read the UC application. He thought all he needed was his stats, and didn't realize that he had to write a couple of extra essays for it until he was effectively committed to apply.)</p>
<p>His school -- large northeast-corridor urban public magnet -- has sent a kid or two to Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA every year. The Claremont schools and Cal Tech are almost unheard of (except that one of his friends is applying to Pomona). The Claremont Colleges are pretty popular with private school kids here, though. My daughter has friends at Pomona, Pitzer, and CMC.</p>
<p>I think you're a little wrong about the differences between Berkeley and MIT. Sure, Berkeley is a lot bigger, and it has a top-ranked English department and Pac-10 sports teams. But it has always been a world-class center of scientific research and engineering, especially in physics, and I think the majority of students there are doing science-and-math-y things (including economics and business). Apart from worrying about sheer size, I don't know why a kid who was interested in, say, MIT and CMU wouldn't be curious about it. But one downside -- and this will probably matter to us -- is that it seems to have the highest room-and-board costs anywhere.</p>
<p>JHS, good luck to your son.</p>
<p>
I find the CMU/Case data puzzling too -- two MIT admits to CMU, one to Case. Only two to Johns Hopkins, also. And just from the applicants I saw on CC, I know the cross-admit numbers were much, much higher than that, and substantial merit aid was on the table in a large number of cases.</p>
<p>Like others, I do find the Berkeley numbers quite surprising. California is the best-represented state among students who attend MIT (currently 493 of the 4,127 undergrads at MIT are from California; state-by-state data here</a>), and there must be a much larger number of cross-admits to the UCs, and Berkeley in particular, than there are for some of the other schools with which MIT competes.</p>
<p>Originally Posted by blossom </p>
<p>"What would interest me would be a kid who gets substantial merit aid at CMU and chooses MIT with little or no financial aid; kid who gets a full ride at Case but chooses to pay for MIT (or Cal Tech for that matter...) etc."</p>
<p>This has been discussed at lenght in other forums and the choice in the end is up to the family and finances etc.</p>
<p>DD passed on very large merit aid at RPI and significant merit aid at CMU for MIT. In our case that was the right choice. DD of course did not know that until she actually attended. We had our fingers crossed hoping for the best until Christmas break when it became obvious the right choice had been made.</p>
<p>One objective comparison of Berkeley and MIT is the future PhD percentages of undergrads. The data (Weighted Baccalaureate Origins Study, Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium) show MIT in the top ten of at least six academic categories (including overall). This is a very narrow measure with limited meaning, but for comparing undergrad PhD preparation in, e.g., biology, engineering, computer science, physics and general science, MIT's percentages are significantly higher.</p>
<p>To be sure, Berkeley is one of the top destiations for earning PhDs.</p>
<p>Dstark: I know absolutely nothing about Furman except that it's somewhere in the South.</p>
<p>Blossom: I do not know any kid who applied to Berkeley, either, though I know several who at least considered the others on your list.</p>