<p>PG, we already know you don’t care and it doesn’t matter to you. You say something like this in practically every thread in which you post. You are also fond of throwing in a comment about what people of sophistication and the opposite, those provincials, think. Please just allow us to discuss these silly topics free from your disdain. </p>
<p>Smart people, who may or may not be sophisticated, take into consideration every piece of available data when making decisions. Acquiring knowledge is noble and desirable, but most people need to acquire a job too. Therefore, to the extent that a college degree is a requirement for employment and to the extent the school at which the degree is earned evokes in many people an impression of the graduate’s intelligence, knowledge, and specific competencies (that vary by school), part of deciding what is “best” for someone relates to those perceptions evoked in others. If I can attend a school that is considered the best in my major/field or generally the very best over all, or a school that best matches my tastes and preferences, it’s not unsophisticated to select the former, just because you say it is. </p>
<p>GFG, employers use very different criteria than the general public in forming their own internal ranking systems. There are schools which the general public can ooh and aaah over which employers pass over with great regularity; there are schools somewhat off the beaten track which employers love, etc.</p>
<p>I regularly counsel HS kids that making a college decision based on some desired future outcome vis-a-vis employment is a big mistake. First of all- at 17 or 18 kids are clueless about career paths (and frankly, so are their parents). Second of all- the economy is a dynamic construct. Nobody could have predicted that hospitals now employ radiologists in India who read mammograms digitally and communicate back to patients sitting in a hospital in New Jersey. Try telling a parent who is persuading a kid to become a radiologist because it’s a specialty with “family friendly hours” and it can never be outsourced. Hmmm… not so much anymore. And third-while trends in employment and recruitment don’t move in a lock step fashion they do move. The recruiting environment for new grads in 2014 is very different from 2001, and not just because of two recessions since then and not just because of technology (although the recessions and technology have definitely had an impact.)</p>
I know people who, within the past decade, turned down Stanford for Chicago, Brown, and Michigan (granted, in that case with a full scholarship), as well as, of course, Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton.</p>
<p>Stanford is a sensational university. I have my hoodie legitimately (albeit with a graduate degree), and my sister went to college there and is a very active alumna. I have friends on the faculty. It does NOT provide an unparalleled educational experience for undergraduates. There are lots of legitimate reasons why a particular student might prefer any number of other top colleges to Stanford. And vice versa, of course.</p>
<p>I think the reason for Stanford’s lowest-in-the-country admit rate is fairly simple. Except for Caltech, which only competes with Stanford in certain majors and is a small school anyway, Stanford has no equivalents in its part of the country.</p>
<p>In the Northeast, several colleges with reputations comparable to Stanford’s compete with each other for students.</p>
<p>If you want the most prestigious college possible AND you want to be on the West Coast, there’s only one possibility, and it begins with an S.</p>
<p>When one talks about winning a cross admit battle it isn’t that Stanford is always chosen for students offered admission to Stanford and other colleges, but that on average a student will choose to go to Stanford more often.</p>
<p>Of course there are, JHS. But we are not talking about a particular student with particular reasons. We are talking about a broad statistic and its significance in broad terms. And broadly, this means Stanford has grown in popularity and esteem among the general public. The selectivity index impacts rankings and rankings impact esteem. In the end, as has been regularly discussed on CC, rankings aren’t authoritative, but they serve a purpose and do impact the perceptions of employers too. D has interviewed quite a lot lately, and many, many times has been told something along the lines of “We’re interviewing x number of students from H and x from Stanford.” Is that just a coincidence? She’s an econ major (and no, she’s not looking to work at a large investment bank where we know prestige matters more), and we all know Univ. of Chicago is great for econ., so where are the Univ. of Chicago students in their consideration? </p>
<p>Really? Like how many students would willingly turn down Stanford for, say, UChicago or Dartmouth or Columbia?
Look at Stanford stats – It has a very high enrollment yield rate, over 70%, which is only bettered by Harvard, and has been winning against Princeton in the cross-admit battle.
Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth and such schools are great schools, no doubt, but couldn’t even compete with Princeton in enrollment yield.
There is no justice to compare Stanford to Chicago and such schools. They are not peer schools. </p>
I doubt it’s a coincidence. But I also doubt that it means they aren’t interviewing students from other colleges, unless they are really unsophisticated firms. It seems like something fairly meaningless you might say to flatter a Stanford student. I agree that rankings serve a purpose and impact the perceptions of employers, but any employer so influenced by rankings that it stops interviewing Princeton or MIT students for econ-major-type jobs (for example) is an employer that is not going to survive long in the wild.</p>
<p>
Who knows? The one 2013 University of Chicago graduate I know who majored in Economics is working in the finance department of a Silicon Valley tech start-up with venture funding, and really happy and excited about his job. You think maybe the CFO who hired him didn’t know where Stanford was?</p>
<p>The question whether <em>more students</em>, given the chance, would go to Stanford than to Harvard (or Yale, or Princeton, etc.) is needless and meaningless. The choices students have in this country should be celebrated and explored–more kids need to expand their foci, for heaven’s sake, not have one or two choices anointed as The Very Best, to which every other place is secondary. No college is the best and only choice for everyone! No college is the best and only choice for anyone! The insistence on such a concept is exactly what leads to the kind of idiotic post-mortem we’ve been seeing over and over on the boards this week. Posters continually give lip-service to the idea that there are just too many outstandingly brilliant kids to fit on the anachronistically-defined Ivy campuses, that plenty of brilliant kids (just as brilliant! just as promising!) are happily attending other schools that are just as good, really–and then we have this kind of discussion about the obvious (to the poster) superiority of The Bestest of them All Schools. How stupid, we say, to apply to all of the HYPS-type schools, as if they’re all the same, just for the names. And then we argue over whether anyone would be so insane as to choose Brown over Stanford.</p>
<p>There is no best school. There are lots of great schools. To choose a school based on its selectivity index is to make a very important decision based on a very shallow metric.</p>
<p>Cross-admit stats are inherently dumb as a measure of relative attractiveness since they don’t pick up all of the kids who have a strong enough preference for School X over School Y that they don’t apply to School Y at all. Or, to rephrase, although over 40,000 kids applied to Stanford this year, that means at least a million others didn’t. Some – believe it or not – may have been highly competitive applicants who (1) wanted to stay on the East Coast, (2) don’t think drunken trees are cute, (3) disfavor Taco Bell architecture, or (4) [INSERT REASON HERE]. </p>
<p>But, thankfully for all of us, it’s a big country, and people have choices. Imagine how dull the Norwegian version of CC must be. </p>
<p>CC posters did not invent cross-admit stats. There are smart people at the elite schools and elsewhere who keep track of this data and think it matters as an indication of reputation and appeal. There’s nothing to gained by lamenting over a decline of a percentage point, but a larger decrease in reputation probably matters to their bottom line, and to their ability to attract top students, professors, endowment, and grant money. </p>
<p>So now we are suspecting these employers of lying to impress a student by saying they are only recruiting at H and S, and/or being “unsophisticated” firms if they limit their search to H and S students? How about maybe they’re just small companies with small staffing needs and have decided they are certain to find a quality employee at these two top schools and have no desire to waste time and money looking elsewhere? </p>
They also leave out those who get early admit and withdraw their applications from the other schools. My son got the early nod from Stanford and withdrew his applications from all schools eastward. I’m sure the reverse happens as well(but not as often )</p>
<p>The cross-admit numbers matter a lot to the schools that care. The numbers influence many factors in their decision making. Here are the stats for HYPSM for last year:</p>
<p>Harvard</p>
<p>Number of Early Applications: 4856
Early Admits: 895
Early Admit Rate: 18.4%
Total Number of Applications: 35022
Waitlist Admits: 0
Total Admits: 2029
Admit Rate: 5.8%
Class Size: 1662
Yield: 81.9%
Yield to Admit Ratio: 14.1</p>
<p>Stanford</p>
<p>Number of Early Applications: 6103
Early Admits: 725
Early Admit Rate: 11.9%
Total Number of Applications: 38828
Waitlist Admits: 0
Total Admits: 2210
Admit Rate: 5.7%
Class Size: 1679
Yield: 76.0%
Yield to Admit Ratio: 13.3</p>
<p>Yale</p>
<p>Number of Early Applications: 4520
Early Admits: 649
Early Admit Rate: 14.4%
Total Number of Applications: 29610
Waitlist Admits: 40
Total Admits: 2031
Admit Rate: 6.9%
Class Size: 1360
Yield: 67.0%
Yield to Admit Ratio: 9.8</p>
<p>Princeton</p>
<p>Number of Early Applications: 3810
Early Admits: 697
Early Admit Rate: 18.3%
Total Number of Applications: 26498
Waitlist Admits: 32
Total Admits: 1963
Admit Rate: 7.4%
Class Size: 1291
Yield: 65.8%
Yield to Admit Ratio: 8.9</p>
<p>MIT</p>
<p>Number of Early Applications: 6541
Early Admits: 650
Early Admit Rate: 9.9%
Total Number of Applications: 18989
Waitlist Admits: 0
Total Admits: 1548
Admit Rate: 8.2%
Class Size: 1116
Yield: 72.1%
Yield to Admit Ratio: 8.8</p>
<p>Yes, the schools themselves care a lot about yield, especially when it comes to cross-admits. I find them interesting because I’m a nerd about this sort of thing, and I do admissions predictions for a living. I don’t think these stats ought to be much of a factor for students fortunate enough to have the choice.</p>
<p>"And broadly, this means Stanford has grown in popularity and esteem among the general public. The selectivity index impacts rankings and rankings impact esteem. In the end, as has been regularly discussed on CC, rankings aren’t authoritative, but they serve a purpose and do impact the perceptions of employers too. D has interviewed quite a lot lately, and many, many times has been told something along the lines of “We’re interviewing x number of students from H and x from Stanford.” </p>
<p>I think you keep thinking that life is a ranking game. Above a certain level, it just doesn’t matter and parsing out best versus second best is just silly.</p>
<p>"So now we are suspecting these employers of lying to impress a student by saying they are only recruiting at H and S, and/or being “unsophisticated” firms if they limit their search to H and S students? "</p>
<p>I don’t think they’re lying. But you have a real fear-based view of the world – what if they don’t think my kid’s school is the Toppest of the Very Top – and THEN WHAT? What makes you so insecure about this? Why don’t you get that Harvard might have 35,000 opportunities, and Stanford 34,500, and U of Chicago 34,000 and blah blah blah down the food chain but all of those are thousands more than any one student can take advantage of?</p>
<p>TheGFG: You do not have any actual evidence that any firm is only recruiting at Harvard and Stanford. What you have is something your daughter told you that either she interpreted as saying that or you interpreted as saying that. The actual quote you gave – and I understand, it probably wasn’t an actual quote, and I’m not holding you to its precise terms – was ambiguous. It didn’t say “We are recruiting exclusively at Stanford and Harvard;” it said “We are recruiting (heavily) at Stanford and Harvard.”</p>
<p>Here’s my experience of the world: While it’s not impossible that there is some firm somewhere that only recruits at Stanford and Harvard, there are powerful reasons to believe that there aren’t many of them, and they aren’t terribly important in the grand scheme of things. </p>
<p>I actually worked, for a long time, at a firm that had once done almost all its hiring at two schools. One was the highest-quality local school, the other a large, higher-quality national school from which many of our senior people had graduated. When the firm needed to hire more than a couple entry-level people a year, that became unsustainable – we just could not hire enough great people at those two schools. And it was never as exclusive as it looked: the firm’s experience was that it had trouble recruiting at top schools out of its local area where it had no prior relationships. It was more than happy to interview and to offer employment to students at schools like that who expressed interest in the firm. So even when it was doing all its formal recruiting at two schools, it was really doing only about 80% of its hiring there, and hiring people from equivalent schools as they made themselves known.</p>
<p>But if my child has the choice, why not select one of the handful of top schools most people consider to be the best of the best? Why stubbornly insist that H or S just aren’t that great, the rankings are silly, it doesn’t matter so long as the school is in the top whatever, etc. etc., just to be a sophisticated iconoclast? Many of schools are just fine and their students will do just fine. But if it’s a matter of odds, then there are safer choices than others, especially in a very tough job market, which is probably better where you live than where I do. </p>
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