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Stanford doesn’t reject white kids in favor of URMs. It rejects Asians.</p>
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I don’t understand the question and won’t respond to it. ;-)</p>
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It’s easy. Do you have ANY idea how easy it is to get into Yale? Paint your face black and you’re in. Case in point, Van Jones.</p>
<p>Stanford’s yield is really high because for California kids(and other kids in the Western part of the country), it’s the best school for 3000 miles. trying to base its yield relative to, say, Yale and Princeton, on academic strength is totally off base.</p>
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<p>You missed a zero.</p>
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While I thank you for your concern about my sanity, I’m perfectly in control of my faculties. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Look, I attended an elite private for undergrad. It was great. As a grad student, I’m at a larger public. It’s pretty awesome too. As far as I can tell, there is very little difference in academic quality between the two. I realize that you’re still an undergrad at Penn and don’t have much basis for comparison.</p>
<p>If you wanted to argue that the undergraduate experience is different, I would agree. Students at Yale get a lot more hand-holding. They have greater access to career counselors, pre-graduate and pre-professional advising, and administrators whose sole job is to churn out undergraduate fellowship winners. I don’t think I ever denied that Yale was arguably the better choice for undergrad. In fact, I specifically noted the difference between “better” and “academically stronger.” Is Yale better at the undergrad level? Quite possibly. Is it academically stronger? Absolutely not.</p>
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<p>No, that’s not right. Penn is one of the best schools in a city. Stanford is one of the best schools in a suburb. One of the best schools in the country would be . . . hmm, I dunno, Dartmouth? Williams? Grinnell?</p>
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<p>Well said, IBClass. I, too, have attended both Ivies and top publics. In fact, I’ve taught at both Ivies and top publics. No question the kids at the Ivies are more pampered, and that some of the services they get can give them a leg up as they move on to the next stage of their lives and careers. That’s worth something, possibly a lot. But for pure academic heft, the difference between the top publics and the Ivies is minimal-to-none, and there are many individual departments and programs in which a top public like Berkeley or Michigan will absolutely blow most Ivies out of the water. The mistake a lot of Ivy kids and especially Ivy wannabes make is to conflate pampering, privilege, and difficulty of admission with academic quality. It just ain’t so.</p>
<p>Going to an ivy for undergrad almost always isn’t a “best undergraduate education” play at all. It’s just a brand name deal, which is cool. Mckinsey and Goldman Sachs certainly hire more kids from yale than even a great public school like berkeley.</p>
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But this DOES lower the median SAT range because at HYP, many recruited athletes still fall well within the median range. From what I know of Stanford baseball, many of their recruits have a M+CR score in the 1100-1200 range. When those bottom 25% are composed of mostly athletes, that doesn’t give much leeway for the unhooked to be on par with HYP’s stats.</p>
<p>Once again, another pointless argument about nothing occurs on CC.</p>
<p>^ If you really don’t care then why post? Besides, some pretty interesting info can be gleaned from this thread.</p>
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<p>Not sure I understand your point. So suppose the bottom 25% at both Stanford and HYP are “hooked” applicants—recruited athletes, URMs, and legacies (and best I can tell, there’s no particular reason to assume there are fewer of these privileged categories at HYP than at Stanford). Then so what? Isn’t it just a wash? Yes, Stanford recruits better athletes, at least in part by playing against better competition and in part by offering athletic scholarships. But so long as a comparable number of them are in the bottom quartile, it won’t affect their 25th or 75th percentile median SAT scores or class ranks. So what?</p>
<p>Off topic:</p>
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<p>I think the claim that Yale is superior to Berkeley for undergraduate education (except for engineering and computer science) is well justified, but to include all the rest of the lower ivies isn’t. Berkeley is at least on part with the lower ivies for undergrad and superior to almost all ivies for postgrad across all major fields (except business and law).</p>
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Not really. The vast majority of Stanford’s athletes are in the bottom 25%, whereas in the Ivy Leagues, many athletes fall within the 25-75%. Suppose, then, that you take solely non-athletic admits and compare their 25-75 ranges; I would bet that S is essentially on par with HYP here. BUT, when you factor in the athletes, they will basically anchor down the distribution of SAT scores, shifting the whole bracket of 25-75 down several notches. For HYP, however, since lots of athletes will fall within the non-athlete 25-75, the 25-75 bracket will drop only slightly. Whenever a group takes up part of a range, even if it’s not directly within the 25-75 range, it is still changing the overall percentage calculations and will move where the 25-75 scores reside.</p>
<p>I will use a hypothetical example to emphasize:
Suppose you sample 12 random non-athlete acceptance scores at H and S. Let’s say that the scores are identical, and they are (M+CR):
1350 1380 1400 | 1440 1450 1470 1500 1520 1530 | 1550 1570 1600
The bolded horizontal lines represent the 25-75 brackets.
In this case, the 25-75 at each school would be 1420-1540.</p>
<p>Now, let’s add the scores of 4 random H athletes (athlete scores bolded):
1310 1350 1380 1400 | 1400 1430 1440 1450 1460 1470 1500 1520 | 1530 1550 1570 1600
Recalculating the 25-75 ranges reveals the new range as 1400-1525, a small drop.</p>
<p>Now, suppose you factored in 4 S athletes to the pool:
1170 1210 1250 1300 | 1350 1380 1400 1430 1450 1470 1500 1520 | 1530 1550 1570 1600
A recalculation shows the new S range as 1325-1525, a much more substantial score drop.</p>
<p>Now, interestingly enough, the 75th percentile remained the same, but that is due largely to the small sample size of this example (the 75% bracket takes longer to drag down since for every 3 athletes only 1 shift will occur). Extend the sample size to the thousands, though, and you will start to see Stanford’s 75th percentile bracket shift to the left significantly more than Harvard’s 75th percentile. The point is the numbers illustrate that despite S’s athletes not falling within the 25-75 range, they will still shift the brackets and pull the range down. </p>
<p>By the way, the numbers I used were hypothetical, but given what I know about H and S athletics, they probably are reasonably accurate.</p>