<p>nothing is ridiculous about it. that was my point.</p>
<p>1)Brown
2)Pomona
3)Northwestern</p>
<p>I would say Brown is clearly the most selective out of the 3. Why? It has PLME and Ivy status. It has the pull that neither Pomona nor Northwestern (to an extent) can boast. I put Pomona over Northwestern by a tad. This is due purely to the fact of Pomona's small class sizes. They look for similar students however Northwestern's class is pretty big and it's "numbers" are worse (in terms of top 10% of class and SAT scores). Northwestern however, would probably win in cross admits with Pomona due to the fact of Northwestern's size and arguably more oppurtunities.</p>
<p>FredFredBurger,</p>
<p>Actually NU has HPME that's just like PLME and HPME is associated with higher-ranked med school. The real pull of Brown is Ivy status, as you already mentioned, and the freedom of their open curriculum.</p>
<p>I could imagine many Pomona applicants are also Brown applicants because these types of applicants are looking for similar types of education: undergraduate focused schools with a less structured curriculum. I don't know much about NU but I feel like with it's large graduate population and professional schools indicates to some extent that NU attracts a different type of student who would apply to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. I feel like all three schools offer amazing educations and are somewhat similar yet have distinctive differences. Yet I think that each of the schools has a somewhat more regional appeal but since Brown has a bit more prestige it does attract more applicants. </p>
<p>Frankly, I hate the nonstop CC discussion of prestige, basically people are wasting their time fighting about the prestige and selectivity of three amazing yet unique universities. I think my advice to applicants of these colleges is to ignore selectivity rates because they are looking for something different and if you have that special "something" your chances could be 100% but if you don't have what they are looking for expect a rejection. To give an example, after meeting my fellow 2011'ers at Brown one common theme I've seen is a sense of intellectual curiosity where people are genuinely excited about their classes not just in their prospective major but in a wide variety of subjects. So I am guessing that when Brown looks at its students they look for students with that intellectual curiosity who will make the most of Brown's unique resources and programs. Same goes with NU and Pomona (too bad I don't know a lot about these two colleges).</p>
<p>looks like we've got some SUPER NERDS in this thread. There all amazing schools. I hate these lists that vainly attempt to rank schools. Its whats best for YOU individually, not what some magazine says in their list.</p>
<p>Being an Ivy League does not make Brown more selective - few would argue that Cornell is more selective than Amherst, for example.</p>
<p>I would say that Pomona is more selective than Northwestern (and I love Northwestern) by looking at a lot of factors: acceptance rates, SAT scores, etc. I think Pomona has a stronger student body (Northwestern's would still be among the highest in the nation, but to say "Pomona is a small LAC so it isn't as selective" is absurd).</p>
<p>
I actually agree that it's significantly easier for small schools to be more selective than larger schools, so I do think that you have a valid point that MIT (or Northwestern...) would be more selective if they chose fewer students.</p>
<p>However, they don't, and one of the disadvantages of attending large schools (generally) is that the students aren't as uniformly exceptional as comparable, smaller schools. Whether or not that matters specifically to you, for most intents and purposes, it's the realized selectivity that affects educational quality, and not some speculative notion of how selective a school would be if it were smaller.</p>
<p>1) Pomona, Brown
2) Northwestern</p>
<p>It depends on a lot of things, and there are a lot of ways to cut it. On another note, I would say that the weakest students at Pomona are stronger than the weakest at Northwestern, and both are stronger than the weakest students at Brown. If you consider selectivity "How low a school is willing to stoop for an applicant", I would say its Pomona, Northwestern, Brown.</p>
<p>Yeah Brassmonkey, can you elaborate because I'm not sure on what basis you're making that assertion.</p>
<p>I would say Pomona would not steep very low, relative to Brown and Northwestern who are tied. They both need the sports teams and the development admits; they are large universities that are very well known-unlike Pomona.</p>
<p>“Whether or not that matters specifically to you, for most intents and purposes, it's the realized selectivity that affects educational quality, and not some speculative notion of how selective a school would be if it were smaller.”</p>
<p>-All I was saying is that it doesn’t make much sense to say that one school is ‘more selective’ than another when it is far smaller than the other. I’ll say this: I don’t believe Caltech is any more selective than MIT, but think it can (and many people often do) claim it to be SOLEY because it’s a smaller school. </p>
<p>If you’re concerned about "realized selectivity" and how it affects ‘educational quality’, then perhaps you could tell what you think selectivity actually is- and how one school becomes more selective than another. Is it acceptance rate? Yield? Avg SAT scores? Place on the Revealed Preference ranking? What exactly IS selectivity??? </p>
<p>People keep saying that schools are more or less selective than each other, but provide no real basis for their assertions- just hearsay about stronger and weaker student bodies and how difficult applications are, etc…..</p>
<p>like I said, depending on how one defines 'selective', all of these schools can 'win' out.</p>
<p>Selectivity is not synonymous with "hard to get into". Selectivity, comes down to how picky a school gets to be during admissions. This comes down to pure acceptance rate.</p>
<p>So a concrete answer to the OP question is, in order from most to least selective:
Brown
Pomona
Northwestern</p>
<p>Now, "hard to get into" is another question that has to do with strength of applicant pool which can, in a way be measured by prestige and SAT scores.</p>
<p>Pomona has the highest SAT average, and probably a pretty strong applicant pool; it's applicant numbers wouldn't be as inflated as some schools that attract students which have no chance, but like to apply to a few reach schools (i.e. Stanford, Columbia, Brown). </p>
<p>By my best estimate they are roughly equally hard to get into. People who place Pomona at the bottom of the pool are more likely than not doing so based on a perceived prestige.
Pomona's tiny incoming class is a REASON for such high selectivity. It does not disqualify how hard it is to get into, and if anything only supports it.</p>
<p>That's not what I meant by most selective...</p>
<p>A strong applicant pool would skew the accuracy of using purely objective admissions percentages. That's the reason for making this topic.</p>
<p>
Most people don't define selectivity that way (as pure acceptance rate, I mean). They could just call it acceptance rate if that were true. In any case, that's just a semantic issue anyway - no matter how you label it, your "hard to get into" is much more informative than "pure acceptance rate" because the former helps to account for self-selection among applicants.</p>
<p>I define selectivity as pretty much "difficulty to get in", though it's much more useful if you also include some metric of which students actually enroll (which is why US news uses yield). That kind of 'selectivity' gives you a measure of the 'quality' (academic or otherwise - obviously things like being a good artist or musician can be included in this notion - it's not just SAT scores) of the average student. </p>
<p>Why does the 'quality' of the average (say opposed to the top 20 percent) matter? Well, for one, the reputation as a student you get leaving the school is much more closely correlated to the average student. For instance, Berkeley has probably more top students than Caltech, but it's much easier to get, say, a financial job from Caltech than from Berkeley because of the reputation of the students it produces. That is a metric of selectivity (as well as how good the education is, since it's a post-performance test).</p>
<p>More phenomenologically, being around smarter, more gifted students provides more motivation for doing better individually - they provide a better learning environment. Also, education is highly collaborative; often you learn as much (or more!) from your peers as from Professors. Obviously, it's easier to have more productive collaboration at more 'selective' (as I've defined it) schools.</p>
<p>
I don't have a formula, as its very difficult to quantify which schools have the best people in their prospective field. You almost have to break it down by field and say compare biologists and musicians separately, and it would be a mess to sort those together in some kind of school ranking. I think that's why USNEWS just gives up and uses SAT scores and percent of students in top 10 percent of class; not to say these aren't good metrics, but they're not complete metrics across every major. Also, both of these are far too easy for most students at top schools, so everyone is weighted near the top, which provides the least amount of statistical information as possible.</p>
<p>Revealed preferences is interesting in procedure, but the actual sample size of the data in their paper is too small to make conclusions (as they authors themselves state). </p>
<p>I'm also a large fan of post-college assessments. I definitely value things like the Wall Street Journal Feeder Rankings (though, obviously my school doesn't fare well there). Things like this and say, NSF fellowship awards (for a more science / engineering twist), don't probe selectivity directly, since it evaluates how students do after graduating, but the latter quantity is far more interesting anyway. Who cares if school A is more 'selective' than school B if school B provides a better education to its students to put them in a better situation upon graduation? Also, for these things to be useful, they should be normalized to not the number of students at the schools, but rather the number of schools with suitable interests for the goal in question.</p>
<p>Relax, mista kk,</p>
<p>I never said Pomona is more selective than Northwestern, I said that it is inaccurate to perceive it as being more selective than Pomona. NU and Michigan are places where many of my fellow Singaporeans (granted, the highest percentile of academic achievements) actually use as their safeties. It's a fact. I don't think the same can be said of Pomona. Again, let me reiterate this is from an Singaporean perspective, not an American one. I'm not trying to sound arrogant - I speak for top 1 percent of high schoolers in Sg (in terms of academic achievement) and this is my observation. Again, when my school page is online, I will provide the link to it.</p>
<p>also depends on major. ie Nu journalism</p>
<p>Selectivity has nothing to do with acceptance rate; Chicago is a perfect example where the university is very selective yet has a high acceptance rate (~40%).</p>
<p>Mine was based on the 25th percentile of SAT scores. The top, let's say, half of students at each of these schools all stand a reasonable shot at each of the other ones. But its the bottom half of the class that really determines selectivity. A school is selective to me if its very weakest students are still extremely qualified. Though its a pain to resort to numbers to determine qualification, Pomona's 25th percentile was at 1390 (700V, 690M) for the Class of 2011, Northwestern's was at 1320 (650V, 670M), and Brown's was at 1350 (670V, 680M). </p>
<p>So I suppose I was wrong with putting Brown after Northwestern.</p>
<p>I'm ranking</p>
<ol>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>Nu</li>
</ol>
<p>Pomona, I have no idea.</p>
<p>This is based on my own application, and my friends' applications last year. I got into NU but not Brown. I applied to Engineering. From friends in Medill (Journalism) they say that it wasn't tough to get into journalism. I didn't apply or even consider Pomona so i have no idea how tough they were. I'd like to also add that name recognition is pretty big, which is why I didn't look at Pomona. Around Chicago just mentioning NU or UChicago people will say that they are tough schools, but outside of college freshmen very few will ever hear of Pomona or even the rest of the Claremont Colleges. Even NU isn't that big of a name. I'm from the south, Georgia, and a lot of people have never heard of NU. </p>
<p>BTW, Northwestern prefers the acronym of NU or if you are living in the past then NWU.</p>