<p>I have now officially become an addict. I have spent the last 2 hours staring bleary eyed at the screen chasing down what I sensed was a tendency for students to reward Northeastern schools with applications without regard to qualitative indicia. But I really don't have enough time to do a thorough job so I thought it might be interesting to just start some arguments instead. LOL. </p>
<p>Soooo...I went to college board and using their data divided the nation's 4 year colleges and universities by their % of students from out of state. I don't think anyone can argue that a school that pulls 75% of their students from out of state would be anything but a national school. I'm sure several less than 75% schools would qualify as national also, but this was easier for me and I believe it is a large enough sample. I used sat verbal scores to further winnow that number to 50 schools.</p>
<p>Within that 50 schools I ranked their SAT verbal (as shown on the CB site) and their SAT Math (also as on the CB site) and ranked all the schools 1-50 on both categories. I then combined the rank numbers and ranked the resulting composite. I then ranked each school on % of applicants accepted and ranked the schools accordingly. My hypothesis was that there was a distinct regional bias shown by applicants to national selective colleges based on the geographic location of the school. I supposed that there would be some surprising differentials in SAT rank and selectivity rank that could be shown by the + or - differential between the sat ranking and the selectivity ranking and there were. Schools that received the biggest boost in descending order of percentage boost:</p>
<p>Tufts +17
GWU +14
S. Lawrence +13
Bowdoin +13
Connecticut +12
Trinity (Conn.) +11
Brown +10
Hopkins +10
Columbia + 9
Notre Dame +8
Georgetown +7</p>
<p>Those receiving the biggest slam in descending order of their percentage slam: </p>
<p>Chicago -21
Reed -20
Emory -18
Grinnell -15
Macalester -15
Northwestern -14
Bard -12
Wellesley -10
Brandeis -9
Lewis and Clark -7
Middlebury -7</p>
<p>Hey, it's not supposed to be authoritative. It's just supposed to stimulate discussion. </p>
<p>My first impression is that a clear application bias is shown to the schools from D.C. area through New England. My second impression is the same.</p>
<p>If California had the same number of private universities and if it was surrounded by states as populous as New Jersey, then you might see another geographic trend. As it is, the top private universities like Stanford and USC take 50% or more from their own enormous state territory with it's die-hard (who would want to live anywhere else?) and clever population.</p>
<p>AND, a kid from suburban New Jersey crossing the river to go to NYU is still counted as 'out of state'. </p>
<p>Likewise the kid from Northern Virginia going to GWU. Obviously, nearly every student from GWU is from 'out of state'.</p>
<p>You still have to discuss acceptance rate / sat score. The percentage out of state was just the qualifier to get in the race. It wasn't used after selection of the sample 50.</p>
<p>I agree with Cheers - just using out of state isn't a good measurement of whether a school is national or not. You need to see whether a school is pulling from outside a region. Take Bard, for instance. If you pull up the state listing for students for Bard, I bet you will find it is a highly regional insitution with most students from the northeast, and possibly even from just the tri-state area (NY, NJ, CT). It just doesn't pull heavily from the south, the midwest or the west. Same with Lewis & Clark - something like 80% of students are from Oregon, Washington, California, a high percentage of the remaining students are from Hawaii, Idaho, Alaska, Colorado - they get very, very few students from the east coast. I'd call both of those schools regional schools, not national schools. There are several others on the list that I'd say are probably regional schools as well. </p>
<p>Another factor you may want to consider - some of the schools on your list are SAT optional schools - i.e., Lewis & Clark, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College. You may want to drop them off - not sure how many kids actually apply using without submitting SATs to these schools but it may skew results somewhat if you're only using SATs as a measure of selectivity.</p>
<p>Carolyn, use any sample you want to. I just did the easiest based on the college board data. I could have as easily looked for bias within the USNWR top 50. That is just the sample. (By the way Colby,86%, Bowdoin 75%, and L+C 73% reported SAT scores. Just as an example -carleton 82%, Grinnell 56%) What I really find interesting is the stuff in the title of the thread. SAT rank vs. selectivity as measured by % of applicants accepted. Don't you find that interesting ?</p>
<p>I grant your point on some of the schools being regional.I just don't have a quick way to gather out of region stats.I don't want to argue that. But if I was interested in % out of region ,and I am, how would one go about putting together a grid? Hmmmm.</p>
<p>P.S. I am really regretting that I can't edit the original post to eliminate any reference to the word "national". LOL.</p>
<p>You might include those top publics that are considered 'national' even though they accept 80+% from in-state (to better explain to local taxpayers) and your study becomes more subjective. Such schools might be Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, W&M....I'm sure there are others but you get the idea. </p>
<p>Cheers and Carolyn also raise interest points about geographic reach. GT also must accept 90+% from out of the state/District. For example, Tulane likes to point out that over 3/4ths of their students come from more than 750 miles away. While the mileage cutoff is always questionable, this eliminates 'crossing the river' bias.</p>
<p>You can save yourself a lot of ciphering if you subscribe to the USNEWS online premium edition. It give you tables of stats for all colleges and universities which can be sorted by anything you like (selectivity, SAT, acceptance rate, etc.) with a single mouse-click. It's $9.95 for a one-year subscription.</p>
<p>You did a lot of work to prove the obvious -- that Northeast/New England schools are highly desired locations and, therefore applicants pay an admissions "premium" relative to the same school in another region. That's no big secret.</p>
<p>It may be obvious to the pros but I'm just a first year.Yes,I "knew" that it existed, but I had no idea it was as strong a pull as these numbers show. I also find it odd that some schools have overcome the pull while some schools have not benefited from it. Examples Swarthmore at -6 and Davidson at even.</p>
<p>Anyway , that seems kind of like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. The schools are highly desired because they are in highly desired locations. Well, isn't the reason the location of Dartmouth is "highly desired" the fact that Dartmouth is there? I really don't know anybody who wants to live in central New Jersey and many students wouldn't think of going there but for Princeton.I don't see Chaminade or Hawaii -Hilo on the Highly desired lists.As always, just my opinion and I'm willing to learn.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, I do think it is very interesting information indeed. To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of it. Does this confirm that schools in the northeast are more selective simply because they do pull nationally? Or that schools that pull nationally in general are more selective no matter where they are located?</p>
<p>I think it would be a huge job to put together the percentage out of region data - it's certainly available on most college web sites in their freshman profiles, but you'd have to go through each school by hand. </p>
<p>And, yes, you are getting addicted. Welcome to the club. Soon, you'll be like me, finding yourself dreaming about college admissions data. :)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It may be obvious to the pros but I'm just a first year.Yes,I "knew" that it existed, but I had no idea it was as strong a pull as these numbers show. I also find it odd that some schools have overcome the pull while some schools have not benefited from it. Examples Swarthmore at -6 and Davidson at even.</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>Swarthmore's -6 is not really geographic. It is because their well-deserved reputation for brutal academic workload scares off "fringe" applicants. Compare to the U of Chicago, which features exactly the same brutal academic scare tactic PLUS a strong geographic penalty. You can see the same kind of self-selection at work in Harvey Mudd's numbers. In reality, Harvey Mudd has incredibly high median SATs and is very, very difficult to get into. But, its relatively high acceptance rate masks that reality. To an even greater degree than Swarthmore, the only people who apply are people that are well-qualified. The bottom tier of applicants has already been scared off. You see the opposite effect among the "an Ivy, any Ivy, I don't even know the difference" crowd. This generate a lot of extra apps for places like Dartmouth and Brown, some from applicants who probably couldn't even find New Hampshire or Rhode Island on a map. Of course, these kids aren't very likely to get accepted, but they inflate the number of apps and make the acceptance rate look more daunting than it really is for a qualified applicant. There is also an impact from international apps, which are highly driven by guidebook rankings.</p>
<p>Davidson overcomes their geographic penalty by having the biggest merit aid inducement of any highly ranked liberal arts college. Ten percent of the student body receives merit aid -- a surefire technique for raising your SAT scores. Plus, you tend to get higher SATs when you don't have any diversity -- either racial or socio-economic. Again something that happens when you invest your financial aid in merit inducements rather than "need-based" aid.
I think the regional pull of the northeast/NY area is most vividly seen in the stats for places like BU and NYU. These schools are FAR more selective than they should be based on any objective view of their overall quality of undergrad programs. Both are fine universities, but they were commuter schools just three decades ago.</p>
<p>The Northeast pull is two-fold. First, its a function of the huge population base in the northeast corrider. There are just a lot of people and most kids only look at schools near home. Then, because the country's best schools have historically been concentrated in the northeast, kids who don't know better just assume that ALL colleges in the northeast are superior.</p>
<p>Living in Massachusetts, we don't really see that same mystique. A lot of schools are "just another school" to us. Of course, many of them are quite well-respected.</p>
<p>I do agree with your premise. I have always felt that the best admissions values lie outside the Northeast. For those of us in New England, I definitely recommend the "reverse commute" strategy of college applications.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, That brings up a question I really have been meaning to look into - do you have any sense that people in the northeast (or elsewhere) tend to be better educated? That could also account for some of the northeastern selectivity - if more people tend to go to college in the first place (as I suspect), then you're going to have higher application numbers to start with. I think I'll see if the US Census has any info. on college education levels. (Note: I'm not trying to stereotype any part of the country, just think that in certain parts of the country going on to college is more of an automatic assumption than it is in others.)</p>
<p>Well, this doesn't exactly answer the question but census bureau figures for the states with the highest proportion of residents with Bachelor's degrees:
1. Maryland
2. Colorado
3. Virginia
4. Mass.
5. CT
6. NJ
7. Vermont
8. Minnesota
9. New Hampshire/ Rhode Island (tie)</p>
<p>So, assuming that parents who have college educations are more likely to send their kids to college, then I guess it's fair to say that there is probably a higher emphasis on "going to college" in the northeast than in other parts of the country. Which was my impression - when I was in high school way back when in NY, it was just generally assumed that most people were going to go to college - here in California, there's much less of that assumption. Friends who live in other parts of the country seem to have even less of an assumption about their children going on to college automatically. Again, not stereotyping AT ALL - just looking at this from an anthropological point of view, society's emphasis on education value. It may also explain why we have a relative lack of students (and parents for that matter) from certain parts of the country here on CC and such a large representation from the northeast.</p>
<p>I've never seen any stats on education levels. I would guess that the northeast tends to be higher educated, simply because it also tends to be so predominantly urban.</p>
<p>My own personal hunch is that selected sunbelt growth cities (Atlanta, Dallas, Charlotte, etc.) may be more educated and more white collar on average than the northeast cities -- due to the booming sunbelt economies eclipsing the old manufacturing economies of the northeast. People who haven't lived in the northeast may not fully understand the predominance of blue-collar neighborhoods in the prevailing culture -- for example, the extent to which Southie and similar neighborhoods influence Massachusetts politics.</p>
<p>I think we're missing the obvious. States with highest parental level of education (for which degrees can be seen as a reasonable surrogate) are (when combined with small-area geographic spread) going to have the highest SAT scores. Also, likely, schools with highest percentage of legacies (we know by definition that their parents graduated, usually from highly prestigious places.) It's highly circular.</p>
<p>Of course, just as there are schools that heavily de-emphasize SAT scores (you named a few, but there are a lot more), there are some (I'm thinking Pomona, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Swarthmore in that category) for whom they are primary, or at least provide a relatively hard "bottom cutoff".</p>
<p>There is also an impact from international apps, which are highly driven by guidebook rankings.</p>
<p>What?? Are you saying that International applications go up or down if the guidebook rankings go up or down? For Ivy league or Oxbridge schools?</p>
<p>I hope you give a bit more credit to internationals. It's quite a sophisticated world out here, ID. Most of the world knows the value of an Ivy league or Oxbridge education--without the aid of guidebooks or rankings. </p>
<p>If the international student is not up to Ivy/Oxbridge standards,they MIGHT turn to the guidebooks.</p>
<p>"Davidson overcomes their geographic penalty"? Oh dear. Yes, it is not in the northeast or mid-Atlantic and to many of us that is a disadvantage. But "penalty"? That's a little provincial. It's true about the merit aid being a sweetener but that is by no means the school's only attraction. It has the usual fine faculty, impressive facilities, and is located in a pretty little town that feels hauntingly like a parallel-universe Williamstown. It's half an hour from a major airport and is right off an interstate so has easy access both to good shopping and to Charlotte's urban attractions. North Carolina has four seasons, public libraries, and a great network of interstate highways. Instead of focusing on the pain of a location 300 miles south of CC prime, it might be useful to more people on this board to know about Davidson, because it is a nice option for students and parents looking at really good LACs, with or without financial incentives.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course, just as there are schools that heavily de-emphasize SAT scores (you named a few, but there are a lot more), there are some (I'm thinking Pomona, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Swarthmore in that category) for whom they are primary, or at least provide a relatively hard "bottom cutoff".</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<p>I think the "hard cut-off" is more likely to be class rank. 50% of Swat's freshmen were in the top 2% of their high school classes. 92% were in the top 10%. I suspect that there is a very strong correlation between those class ranks and reasonably high SAT scores.</p>
<p>As I read the numbers, you CAN get into Swat with SATs below 1370. In fact, 25% of the freshman class has SATs below that combined number. However, it is very difficult to get in if you aren't at the top of your high school class. Only 8% of the freshmen were outside the top 10% of their class -- and that includes some selective prep schools, elite international schools, and URMs at large urban magnet schools where top 10% is a very impressive standard.</p>