Good point above about test scores.
Stanford’s Mid-Range:
CR: 690-780
M: 700-800
W: 690-780
I think it’s easy to look at that and think 25% have 2080 or lower and 25% have 2360+, when in reality most admitted students who score low (for Stanford) in one area probably make up for it by doing extremely well in another.
@ClarinetDad16 Sure you can’t see individual SAT score patterns, but you can see percentages by range for each SAT section. The ACT reporting is pretty much useless though as they just show the percentage in the 30-36 range.
I think what it does show, anyway, is that most Stanford applicants have done very well in grades and class rank, but that many are well below Stanford norms in SAT scores. I’m not sure but maybe that’s one aspect Dean Shaw means in saying a significant number of applicants are just taking a shot in the dark.
Can I ask what you mean in post 76 by the way? If you’re talking about Stanford in particular, it eliminated early decision (and moved to early action) in 2002.
Many schools manipulate their selectivity by leveraging ED. If across the board ED was aboloshed, schools would have to admit far more applicants because their yield would decrease tremendously. There are Ivy’s taking around half their student body ED with 100% yield. Do the math how this impacts their admit rate…
Interesting idea on ED, though I think you could argue it the other way too - that if Stanford and its peers all went from EA to ED, that could increase acceptance rates by reducing application volumes since those admitted ED are not supposed to apply elsewhere.
Unless the methodology of the college rankings changes, colleges will continue to drive down their admit rate and increase their yield by maximizing early acceptances and such.
@ClarinetDad16 brings up an interesting point (i.e. that colleges are disproportionally taking too many applicants from ED rather than RD, so ED should be eliminated). There’s a fine line, I think. If some college reported taking 70% of its class ED, I think fewer people would apply RD to that school. I know of two people at my school that did not apply to Northwestern (who takes 50-60% early) because of that reasoning. The point is that colleges want to take enough ED applicants to solidify their yield, but not too many as to discourage RD applicants from looking “almost full.”
^ I am not aware that yield is used in any current ranking methodology. I know for sure that it isn’t used in the USNWR ranking.
yield and admit rate are closely related plus impacts other parts of the us news ranking
If a school historically had a 20% admit rate and no ED - historical yield 30%.
Then added ED and took 50% of the class ED, how much would that move their admit rate?
@golfcashoahu not sure people do realize it is 50% + for Northwestern or any of them. I did not know until after my kid applied and was WL RD at places way below kid’s stats. When I looked I realized they were at 50% ED admission.
Here are the schools using ED the most:
HYP are the biggest manipulators of EA to boost their yield… all admitting 1/2 their class EA. Stanford’s admits 1/3 of the class EA.
If that suburban middle class student doesn’t know how to use the internet to seek out ways to research, advance and distinguish themselves, they probably won’t do that well at a top school anyway.
While H is close to 50% EA, YP certainly are not.
@skyoverme, I’m not sure that’s true at all. A lot of suburban kids have no idea what they don’t know, especially the ones who aren’t ultra-competitive or motivated by prestige.
I know a young man who got rejected from all the Ivies except Cornell. Graduated early and had his choice of several top tier graduate programs in a STEM field. He earned his PhD from a HYP last year and is now doing a postdoc. He told me he had no idea about all the competitions his classmates at the HYP had participated in in HS.
They may have had some research experience on him when they got to college, and clearly that experience made a difference for gaining admission to HYPM, but the cream usually rises to the top, and in the long run this student was at no disadvantage.
Ambition and raw talent are not one and the same.
Of course they aren’t the same.
But talent without ambition will only get someone so far, especially in environments like the top schools where there are plenty of people who have both.
You don’t need to be either ultra competitive or motivated by prestige to find ways you can expand beyond what your suburban high school offers. Google search: 2 seconds.
For the admitted students stat for Stanford, I notice it has a column for “4.0 and above”. Does this mean that this info is based on Weighed GPA? Because that makes a huge difference most of the time.
last year’s data
Admit rate
Stanford University 5.0%
Harvard College 5.3%
Columbia University 6.1%
Yale College 6.5%
Princeton University 7.0%
Admit Yield
Stanford University 81.1%
Harvard University 80.0%
MIT 72.4%*
Yale University 71.7%*
Princeton University 68.6%
What are the asterisks for, @sbballer ?
Maybe not everybody wants to expand beyond their high school offerings, @skyoverme. You act like it means their futures are ruined. Maybe students like the young man I know value getting eight hours of sleep a night. He wasn’t exactly a slacker. He had near perfect SAT scores and 4+ GPA. And he managed to “advance and distinguish” himself just fine in college and beyond. And he had an offer from Stanford too for graduate school, to bring this back to the topic.
The Common Application needs to go. It’s a tremendous money maker for schools (multiply $70 times 30,000 applications — assuming 5,000 are free) and creates false hopes. MIT does not use the Common Application and has far fewer applicants. As long as colleges are making millions of dollars from applicants with no chance of acceptance, they are acting unethically and have no incentive to change.
Stanford’s application fee is the highest $90!