<p>About 48% of Harvard undergraduates come from the Northeast, a region that has 18% of the nation’s population. About 43% of Stanford undergraduates come from California, and 57% come from Western states including California. </p>
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<p>It is absolutely true that most students attend college in their home region, if not in their home state. At a few of the most elite colleges (like Harvard) the percentage of students from the college’s own region may be slightly less than half, but even at this level there’s a disproportionate home-region presence. At Penn, for example, 62% of undergrads come from the Northeast; at Cornell, 69%. Most college students attend public universities, and at most public universities in-state students represent 70% or more of the undergraduate student body, and often much higher.</p>
<p>Thanks. Unfortunately it doesn’t let you look at groupings - typical focus on visualization instead of usefulness, oh well. Doesn’t have where people apply from, only attend, but it isn’t bad.</p>
<p>It does support what I said earlier. Stanford’s geographic concentration is really no different than any other top college. </p>
<p>(someone was trying to argue Stanford is different because they have a lot of applicants from California. But it really is no different than HYP having a lot of applicants from the NE).</p>
<p>If there were a way to share a spreadsheet without personally identifying myself, I would share the spreadsheet that bclintonk and I jointly created that shows the indexes. It’s pretty darn clear that almost every college at the elite level – including the Ivies – are heavily overindexed in their home region. The big exception that I remember offhand is Duke, which is more overindexed to the Northeast than to the Southeast. They are ALL regionally driven, so really, the assertion in another thread that a “white female from the northeast need not apply to an ivy” is so much nonsense. </p>
<p>no need to in this case, since the results are what people expect.
But for future reference I believe you can set up an account on google anonymously and then put the file on google drive and share it there.</p>
<p>Follow the money. One reason Stanford is the hot school now is because of the outrageous success of high tech companies and start ups. Where else can a couple of kids with good idea and a team of coders become billionaires over night. Ten years ago, the big money was in high finance where an east coast ivy degree gave the advantage. </p>
<p>Personally, I think one strong advantage Stanford has over the Ivy’s is that it has ALWAYS accepted women. As a result the culture feels much more supportive of women. For example, Stanford doesn’t seem to have incidents of misogyny seen at some of the ivies.</p>
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<li><p>Cornell has always admitted women.</p></li>
<li><p>I haven’t spent enough time there recently to know what the situation is like today, but 30 years ago the culture at Stanford was, if anything, more misogynistic than at the formerly all-male Ivies, albeit in a different way. It was (and remains) a very engineering-centric university, and at the time engineering might just as well have been an all-male discipline. Engineering then was very much a frat-boy culture, with lots of drinking and hijinks. (Engineering firms in Silicon Valley back then almost all stopped work at 4 pm on Fridays and broke out the beer kegs.) In general, too, at least at the undergraduate level, Stanford students then were far, far less politically engaged than comparable students in the East, so fewer women pushed back at manifestations of gross sexism (and the ones who did were generally dismissed as lesbians and ignored). There was a really strong core of feminist faculty, and very slight engagement between them and undergraduate women.</p></li>
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<p>I don’t think that the fact that schools have a regional draw is any surprise at all. As a parent, and knowing many parents, we’d most all much rather have our kids within a comfortable roundtrip day’s drive with a few hours at the school than cross country, all things equal. And, yes, just because of locale, the ivys are going to be a tougher admission for a NE SW, since most of them have a heavy draw from that category. Some years ago, the Brown rep said right out that being for NY makes it tough to get into that school because they can fill their class with qualified applicants from here, and it would be a lot more so skewed geographically, if admissions were done with absolutely no regard to where the students lived. BC has said the same, and I’ve seen outcomes that pretty much are in line with this.</p>
<p>Though when we are talking about single digit admission rates, and keep in mind that when you take out the early admits, special category admits, the percentage is even tinier, it’s really a lottery ticket without some special handle to get accepted to these schools. Even the top of the top in terms of academic prowess get turned down. See it all of the time.</p>
<p>What any school was like 30 years ago is largely irrelevant. The strong athletic culture at S, in which women also excel, seems to be very positive and confidence-affirming for the girls. The Greek/social club scene is also less pronounced there than at some peer schools.</p>
<p>I agree with TheGFG. Just a couple of years ago, an acquaintance in the Bay area was bitterly disappointed when their DD was not accepted to Stanford with double legacy, and higher academic stats and rigor than either parent had, plus a pretty strong EC “hood” as well. Another in my area , has a DD who did not get into Duke with the same type of situations (minus the strong hook), and they are stunned. Until the talked to other alums in the same situation, and that just from their grad class. Had these schools aceepted all the alum kids qualified, the numbers would be even waaay higher than they are now. But back in the day, 30 years or so ago, it was a whole other story. </p>
<p>TheGFG – My post about Stanford 30 years ago was in response to heartponderer’s theory that one advantage Stanford has over the Ivies is that it has always accepted women, therefore less misogynism. It HAS always accepted women, which is very much to its credit, but if it’s a better place for women today than the Ivies it’s not because of that. I agree that the strong athletic culture at Stanford is good for women, especially for the women who are part of it, and I agree that the Greek scene is less pronounced there than at some peer schools (but it’s meaningfully more pronounced than at the peer schools we are talking about here). I suspect a really big difference now vs. the past is that there are a lot more women in engineering majors, and the prominence in Silicon Valley of women like Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Susan Wojcicki.</p>
<p>Remember, it’s more than stats. And S does like a sot of entrepreneurial thinking.
And though I just generalized, I don’t see how one can do that about how women fit or feel on various campuses, without examining various factors. </p>
<p>“I don’t think that the fact that schools have a regional draw is any surprise at all. As a parent, and knowing many parents, we’d most all much rather have our kids within a comfortable roundtrip day’s drive with a few hours at the school than cross country, all things equal.”</p>
<p>Right. So if we all agree that parents prefer kids to stay close at home, and thus the Ivies are “tilted” towards Northeastern kids, NU / Chicago / WUSTL to Midwest kids, Stanford to West Coast kids and so on and so forth … why does everyone seem to consider the Ivies national universities but the others “up and coming”? Why is it that when WUSTL does outreach to the NE, it’s a “regional university trying to grow its brand” but when Dartmouth does outreach to the Midwest, it’s a “national brand that’s underdeveloped in the Midwest”? It’s still all rooted within one’s home region. </p>
<p>Pizza- I don’t think people think that. My kid got a mailing from Santa Clara University and I thought, “oh cool, a college I never heard of in a place I’ve never been”. And people who think that WUSTL is a regional university don’t know how to read.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, don’t play stupid! You know perfectly well that the definition of “national” is “throughout the Boston-Washington AMTRAK corridor, the western shore of Lake Michigan from Soldier’s Field to the Wisconsin border, San Francisco, Marin, Alameda, and San Mateo counties (and we can add Santa Clara now, if you like), and if you insist Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades.” Furthermore, by conveniently conflating “the Northeast” you are willfully ignoring the vast cultural differences between the Middle Atlantic states and New England. So even though Dartmouth is closer to New York City than, say, Cal Poly SLO is to San Francisco or LA, it’s in a totally different REGION. So when it draws kids from New York, that’s NATIONAL, baby!</p>
<p>Back to OP, I think the factor of home region was brought up in this context to argue that S’s low admit rate and high yield are partially related to its location. As someone put it in another thread: “Stanford’s application volume is driven up (and its admit rate driven down) by the fact that its closest competitors, among private research universities, are at least 2000 miles away. Most students attend college within a few hundred miles from home…” I think it’s true to a certain extent. For those who are applying to multiple HYP’s, chances are they may well apply to S as well undeterred by the distance, but for those (and could be the majority) who have one or two HYPSM etc. as “high reaches” on their list, regional factor may kick in. In this case, people in the east do have a wider range of choices and each peer school may get a smaller share of applicants. S on the other hand is a school in a region with a lot fewer peers, so it can get a much bigger share of applicants from its region AND those who want to move to the west. This holds true in the yield as well - those who are HYP caliber and want to stay or move to the west have much limited choices. (On that note, I don’t see UCLA and USC are true competitive peers schools to Stanford, as Yale and Princeton are to Harvard. Besides the tiny Caltech, UCB may be one but I don’t think it’s a super competitive peer either).</p>
<p>That said, S has <em>always</em> been in Palo Alto, so I do agree it has this upward momentum. And I hope US News has followed this thread. Chances are S may get bumped up a little in the upcoming ranking! </p>
<p>Speaking of Cornell, I just had lunch with a friend whose two older children attended Cornell (one in liberal arts, one in STEM), while the younger one was in the honors program (STEM) at our state flagship. I asked her to compare the experience of the younger with the older. She said there was definitely a noticeable difference in the academic seriousness (not intelligence per se, but motivation and drive) of their respective peer groups, and also in the quality of the opportunities available. On paper and in theory, those opportunities (like research, access to professors) seemed to be comparable, but were in reality they were not. I had thought the younger child was taking advantage of the best of what was offered, on hearing of her activities, so I truly expected a different answer. Just one anecdote which can be easily discounted, but there it is. She did however, say she does not think she would have been willing to pay too much extra for Cornell, as in $30,000 per year, if she had had to. </p>
<p>I am familiar with those Friday events from 20 years ago and it was hardly rowdy or misogynistic. People drank, some more than others, played foosball or ping pong and then before you know it, most people went back to coding or discussing some geeky thing. And there were women there, of course, not as many as men, and they were not treated badly. Maybe 30 years ago it was much worse.</p>
<p>Now, on the other hand, the East Coast version of the tech center, Wall Street and Consulting, made the beer blasts going on in Silicon Valley look like Church picnics.</p>
<p>GFG, that can be true. At my flagship, D1 would have suffered- of her two ideas for a major, one not offerred, the other a common heading. And in her subfield, classes taught by only one guy, set to retire (and not be replaced.)</p>
<p>Otoh, there are three programs at that flagship that are tops nationally. Any kid wanting one of those would be well served, fantastically prepared and, after some general requirements, never share a class with those less academically serious students.</p>
<p>Or it may not.
If Princeton no longer existed, do you think Harvard and Yale would actually get significantly more applicants? And who would they be? Those applicants would either have to believe that Princeton is a lock for them or that Harvard and Yale were just not worth applying to at all. </p>
<p>Looking at the threads here, it is clear that there is a lot of overlap in the applications for the top schools…especially since most people know that the odds are not in their favor.</p>