<p>No journalism major at either school. Communications major at Stanford.</p>
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<p>The bigger issue is that the principle of Stanford surpassing Harvard is largely fallacious. If one looks at USNews history, for example, Stanford was number 1 in the 80s for awhile. Schools go in cycles. With HYPS, those cycles tend to have very small amplitudes (e.g., moving from 1st to 4th).</p>
<p>Baelor, I agree about the cyclicality of the rankings as a statistical matter, especially within such a narrow band as we are discussing. I do think, though, that in the coming years, Stanford will overtake Harvard in the cross-admit wars, because Stanford is positioned as The University of the Future (both in reality and in the public imagination), whereas Harvard keeps emphasizing its oldness and history and as such, it seems to many students more like The University of the Past. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds.</p>
<p>Maybe it makes sense to distinguish between professional schools and graduate (phD) school. The former seem to like to admit their own undergrads, while the latter tend to encourage them to go elsewhere. My D was sad to learn that Stanford English department won’t take it’s own undergrads in their phD program. She loves it so much at Stanford she doesn’t want to leave. But it’s a good idea to go somewhere else for another perspective.</p>
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<p>What I’m saying is that that’s nothing new. My dad went through college applications when he was younger, and Stanford has always been doing that. It’s just that our generation has only gone through one cycle, so we know only how the universities are positioning themselves now.</p>
<p>'If you’re applying from one of Harvard’s peer institutions, for example Stanford, there are (presumably) less applicants from your school choosing to apply. Therefore there is less competition between you and your peers, and a greater chance of acceptance."</p>
<p>This isn’t true. Harvard undergrads are able to look at the admissions grids for H students heading to various schools of law, med, etc. The admit rate is sky high, and it’s (in relative terms) almost exactly the same at peer institutions. For example, when I applied, the overall HLS admit rate was ~10%, but ~30% for H undergrads. The overall YLS admit rate was ~6%, but ~18% for H undergrads. In other words, H undergrads had an almost identical edge at YLS and HLS, being about three times likelier to get in than the average applicant. This just isn’t consistent with the theory that HLS is biased against H undergrads.</p>
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<p>I died when I read this, and I don’t mean to be an ahole but the problem you are referring to does not require any calculus, all that you need to know is basic statistics. You generally should not apply a regression equation directly to a ratio, you should apply it to the components of a ratio and then reconstruct the ratio. Since admit rate is number of applicants/number of acceptances, you find a regression equation to those two data sets and then come up with you model. You can start extrapolating from that model, however to take a limit as time approaches infinite would be an abomination of statistics. You can’t extrapolate that far into the future. </p>
<p>See, no multi-variable calculus or linear algebra from math 51 required. Not even single variable is needed, just stats.</p>
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<p>This is, as the lawyers say, a conclusion based on a fact not entered into evidence.</p>
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<p>Firehose, I think you should check out EFSLANG 689 at Stanford.</p>
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I was kidding about taking limits. When the wind blows your way, just feel it, enjoy, don’t think.</p>
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They must be good lawyers, but not the best ones, because the best lawyers know the judge. :)</p>
<p>The undergraduate student body of Stanford is significantly weaker than Harvard’s, because one quarter of its students are division one jocks. This is reflected in lower SAT scores and high school ranks in Stanford students. The achievement of its undergraduates also lags in comparison with Harvard peers, let alone that Harvard faculties are much more productive that Stanford’s in measurable criteria such as funding, publication and impact. It is way too optimistic to call Stanford the University of Future.</p>
<p>a large portion of the student body plays D1 sports, but that doesn’t necessarily make the student body weaker (whatever your definition of “weaker” is)</p>
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<p>Just because the “jocks” in your high school used to shove you in the lockers and lock you in the girls bathroom doesn’t mean that you should resent the Stanford scholar-athletes for taking your “spot” at Stanford. As Dean Shaw says, you shouldn’t take your Stanford rejection personally. If you study and work hard at Harvard, you can always apply to Stanford for grad school.</p>
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<p>Harvard has a 250+ years head start over Stanford. We shall see.</p>
<p>harvardfan is a MIT student. The name tells all, probably. In the past three years, I have seen many kids went to Harvard, including 3 Intel finalists and 1 Newsweek’s top 20 students? None of them were as good as one kid who went to Princeton last year. They were comparable with those who went to Stanford. Remember Harvard admitted enough students who did not know 10-6+4 was when they were top students at 8th grade. Personally I dealt with a kid who did not know x^2-a^2 when he was 10th grade. He went to Harvard three years ago.</p>
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<p>That’s actually not relevant if the university has established itself already – universities don’t progress linearly.</p>
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<p>Neither did the correlation between SAT scores and acceptance rates at Princeton:</p>
<p>"According to a fascinating NBER working paper my brother forwarded me, released by four scholars last October (including Caroline Hoxby, whose work I’ve always found worth reading), schools routinely engage in such manipulation to improve their rankings:</p>
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<p>The authors back up their assertions with data on admissions rates for top students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton, as indexed by combined SAT I percentile scores:</p>
<p>At Harvard and MIT, one’s chances of admission generally increase with SAT score (although the Harvard probabilities are flat between the 93rd and 98th percentile). At Princeton, on the other hand, a candidate in the 98th percentile has a substantially worse chance of acceptance as compared to a candidate in the 93rd percentile. This is unlikely to be the result of legitimate admissions preferences – as if the 98’ers were all timid bookworms, while the 93’ers were happy well-rounded types. This is especially clear since the chances of the students at the very top are the most favored of all. As the authors explain, “if the student’s merit is high enough, a strategic college will probably admit the student even if the competition will be stiff. This is because the prospective gains from enrolling a ‘star’ will more than make up for the prospective losses from a higher admissions rate and lower matriculation rate. (Recall that the crude admissions rate and matriculation rate do not record who is admitted or matriculates.)”</p>
<p>In other words, it’s quite clear that Princeton, and presumably many other schools, are departing from their standard admissions criteria in order to reject well-qualified candidates and to increase the yield. (Rejecting good students also improves–i.e., lowers–a school’s overall admissions rate, by making the school appear harder to get into.)"</p>
<p>Source: Stephen E. Sachs (cites NBER working paper: [SSRN-A</a> Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities by Christopher Avery, Mark Glickman, Caroline Hoxby, Andrew Metrick](<a href=“http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105]SSRN-A”>http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=601105))</p>
<p>^^But they don’t stall out after establishing themselves, either.</p>
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<p>Perhaps, but older universities tend to have greater inertia. This is why Stanford is more innovative and enterprising than HYP. For example, Princeton is a Stanford wannabe:</p>
<p>[Grafton:</a> Welcome to Princeford - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/10/26/24264/]Grafton:”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/10/26/24264/)</p>
<p>All jocks are not created equal. Stanford athletes are of a higher caliber than the vast majority, and the recruits we’ve met have very high SAT scores. My D, who will be playing for Stanford next year, scored in the 2300-2400 range in her first and only sitting, (perfect 800 in CR), and took some 13 AP courses in high school plus other honors and college level classes. And I’m here to tell you that Harvard does indeed lower its standards for athletes because D has met a few recruits of theirs while on her official visit. In a book I read about Ivy recruiting, statistics were cited that showed that it is harder to get into schools like Dartmouth as a jock, than into Harvard.</p>
<p>[The</a> HARDEST Schools To Get Into 2010 (PHOTOS)](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>The HARDEST Schools To Get Into 2010 (PHOTOS) | HuffPost College)</p>
<p>Can’t wait to see the yields. It will be grossly lower than last year’s for everyone.</p>