<p>Beautiful charts. </p>
<p>The basic question “what’s the best college that will admit me with…” (WTBCTWAMW…) seems to presume exactly this model: students, based on scores, fill slots in some ordering of schools. The charts are a very direct way to see how the model plays out.</p>
<p>The WTBCTWAMW question disregards hooks like “I am a highly recruited athlete” and “my parent is famous and/or I am famous” and “I am a legacy.”</p>
<p>It would be useful to see a version of the charts that estimate these cumulative <em>unhooked</em> freshman enrolled. </p>
<p>For top schools with 4-year graduation rates near 100%, the total of freshman enrolls would be close to 25% of the reported undergrad enrollment (as opposed to the total enrollment used in the charts). The estimate can be refined based on the actual data for graduation rates. </p>
<p>The percent “unhooked” is evidently 25-40, depending on who is estimating (AA/earlyDecision skew the percentage, too).</p>
<p>The cumulative number of <em>unhooked</em> enrolls from Harvard to NYU (using revealed preferences) is therefore, let’s say, more like 0.25<em>0.25</em>80597 … about 5000, rather than 80597.</p>
<p>Note that “cumulative acceptance” could also be estimated, based on yields.</p>
<p>In the version of the chart below, cumulative enrollment is scaled by 0.25*0.25 = 0.625 to estimate the cumulative unhooked enrollment. </p>
<p>These charts also suggest how colleges are pressured to provide aid. if top-40 schools (ranked by student preference) have enough unhooked slots available for all the SAT 2300+ scorers, then one would expect none of the 2300+ scorers to enroll at any school below rank 40. </p>
<p>Top SAT Scorers Revealed Preference Rank ( 25% Unhooked )</p>
<p>score total unhooked name </p>
<p>2400 0294 0267 Harvard, Caltech, Yale, MIT<br>
2390 0419 0375 Stanford<br>
2380 0681 0628 Princeton, Brown, Columbia<br>
2370 1015 0914 Amherst, Dartmouth, Wellesley, Penn<br>
2360 1397 1249 Notre Dame, Swarthmore, Cornell<br>
2350 1881 1737 Georgetown, Rice, Williams, Duke, UVA<br>
2340 2453 2434 Brigham Young, Wesleyan, NWU, Pomona, GA Tech, Middlebury<br>
2330 3117 3084 UC Berkeley, Chicaco, JHU, S Cal, Furman<br>
2320 3870 3859 UNC Chapel Hill, Barnard, Oberlin, Carleton, Vanderbilt, Davidson, UCLA<br>
2310 4765 4729 UT Austin, U FL<br>
2300 5683 5037 NYU</p>