What did you like better about Williams vs Amherst ?
Choosing a school based upon a football team is illogical and ridiculous. You go to school to learn not to watch football. If you want to watch football you should subscribe to Directv . They have some great sports packages and they are cheap
Tell that to Duke or UCLA students. As much as both are great schools, sports teams help build certain types of school spirit. As long as they are not the main reasons for attending them, athletics do attract certain students and help build brand name as well. When I think of Duke or North Carolina, I automatically think of their basketball teams. No question Princeton attracts certain types of students and provides a great education.
Even my non sports oriented kid is looking forward to attending Stanford athletic events with his classmates and cheering them on etc. Athletics add to the fun of college imo and make Stanford more attractive.
I am also impressed that Stanford attracts great athletes who are good to great students. That just adds to the wow factor. The fact that Stanford has best athletic programs among HYPSM and even most state schools does help attract students.
IMO the fact that Stanford manages to excel in both academics and sports is a great achievement. Great athletes choose Stanford partly due to its academic prestige, and great students choose it partly due to the school spirit and pride that great athletic teams help engender.
I agree that a part of college experience is sports. Making an entire college decision based on sports is immature at best, but sports is most definitely an integral aspect of the college culture that adds to the school lore. How can I forget the Big Game between Cal and Stanford! and the Beanpot Hockey tournament in Boston! Stanford certainly raises its students’ spirits high with the stellar accomplishments in sports and undoubtedly helps raising its attractiveness to prospective students and the yield percentage. HYP, on the other hand, have the Ivy League that has its own attractiveness based on its old tradition. The Ivy League Conference games play a significant role in the students’ college experiences. Whether a student chooses Stanford or HYP, I’m genuinely happy for that individual. We should all celebrate the hard earned accomplishment. Each college has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it’s a matter of what kind of strengths the prospective student prefers and what kind of weaknesses that the student prefers to avoid. As repeated hundreds of times here on CC, it’s ultimately a matter of an individual fit.
Agree @TiggerDad When I think of UCLA, I think of John Wooden, the great coach/mentor and the historical string of NCAA championship wins by Alcindor-led basketball team. Similarly, what students would not like to be associated with the Olympic gold medals gobbling swimmers at Stanford swimming teams?
As I said, even my un-athletic kid who will be going to Stanford said to me “I hope I can take a photo with Ledecky and Simone.” I told him “You going to Stanford for that?” And he said “Well, how many kids can say he goes to school with Olympic gold medalists who dominated the swimming?” Hey, it’s better than admiring some President’s daughter for being the President’s daughter. lol
No kidding. My D’s friend is hoping to be roommates with Malia Obama, whereas my D is hoping to room someone completely different from her culturally and socioeconomically. Perhaps a Questbridge candidate or someone from a conservative (with an open mind) background, or yes, even a smart jock.
I hope my kid rooms with someone who doesn’t stay up late and makes a lot of noise or snores. I told my kid to room with someone who doesn’t snore and sleeps and wakes up at similar hours and is reasonably accommodating. Long time ago, I roomed with a kid who spent his entire day time with his group of friends, then came to our room and spent next 3 hours talking on the phone with the SAME group of friends with whom he just spent the entire day! I finally had enough and threatened to leave.
My D got to meet and take a pic with Christian McCaffrey last year when he came to her HS for some type of study his Stanford class was working on. And just moving about campus over the years, we’ve met plenty of athletes, including Andrew Luck and several future USNWT and USNMT players who now play professionally. So, I agree, depending on the kid, college sports can play a role in determining a school.
Being around a set of largely academically inferior Neanderthals who in many cases believe the rape and harassment laws were not meant to apply to them was never something me or my kids valued in an academic surrounding. I think there are thousands of good reasons to go to Stanford but being around Andrew Luck types is not one of them. Being around Malia Obama is a good reason to go to her school
Stanford is proud of its athletes and its geeks…
Ivies have long looked down at athletics and engineering. (although that’s changing no doubt in part due to Stanford’s rise)
Stanford celebrates it.
Nerd Nation:)
So athletes are Neandethals who mostly engage in rape and harassment? I don’t think anyone should dignify this person’s comment with a reply.
News flash: the Ivy League is an athletic conference. Its members, which each recruit 180 - 200 athletes per year, agreed the rules of American football more than 140 years ago, before Stanford was founded. The oldest intercollegiate sporting event in the United States is the Harvard-Yale Regatta, which began in 1852. Ivy League athletic teams compete at a high level, and occasionally win national championships, without recourse to athletic scholarships.
Don’t, in response, deluge me with statistics or assertions purporting to prove how much better Stanford’s athletics are - that’s not the point. The issue is that in your zeal to promote Stanford, you say many things that are untrue.
I realize it’s futile to attempt to correct every egregious error you post, @sbballer, but I feel some responsibility to high school students who might not know that everything they read from you should be checked before it’s believed.
“The issue is that in your zeal to promote Stanford, you say many things that are untrue…I realize it’s futile to attempt to correct every egregious error you post, @sbballer, but I feel some responsibility to high school students who might not know that everything they read from you should be checked before it’s believed.”
Same here. It’s the feeling of responsibility to high school students that I had to respond to sbballer’s posts. It’s unfortunate that he decided to take on the unofficial (and probably very unwelcome) role of a Stanford ambassador. Stanford is a great institution, no doubt, and its reputation shouldn’t be besmirched by someone who acts like a drunken frat boy.
Some of my favorite memories from college are from UW football games I attended and the “game day” atmosphere. Back then student season tickets (home games) were like $40 and between the awesome band, student section antics, the traditions and pageantry and the game itself, Badger football games are/were a blast. Best ticket in town.
For some kids, a rah-rah sports atmosphere is a big plus.
I defined talent, broadly speaking, as whomever Stanford and HYP compete for. Given that their admissions philosophy and policy are holistic, talent is not just academic. Nor is it reducible to test scores, HS gpa, etc. The fact that HYPS reject the majority of those with perfect or near-perfect scores and gpa says as much.
Here is what I posted earlier:
“Higher popularity leads to higher quality. The quality of an undergraduate institution is primarily, if not exclusively, a function of its ability to attract talent. All things being equal, the biggest driving force behind college decisions is peer interaction. Top talent begets more top talent, and so on. If one school attracts better talent than the other, then the former is by definition better than the latter. Stanford wins approximately 60% and 75% of its cross-admit battles against Yale and Princeton, respectively. Basically, this means that Stanford is successfully competing against Yale and Princeton for the same students; consequently, Stanford is getting a greater share of its Plan A students while Yale and Princeton have to settle for a disproportionate share of their Plan B’s, C’s, etc. Not to mention, Stanford has higher yield than either Yale or Princeton, which again implies that it is winning a larger share of its first choice students and losing a smaller share to other schools, whereas the reverse is true for Yale and Princeton.”
As you can see, my definition of talent is objective to the extent that it is empirically-based and value-neutral. The idea is to look at what it is that HYPS do, not what I or anyone else thinks they should do (when it comes to admissions in the context of their institutional needs and priorities.)
@stanfordfoodie the problem with that argument is that it’s dependent on an assumption that there’s a very large overlap among the students HYPS admit. Let’s look at the numbers.
Stanford and Princeton admitted 2,050 and 1,890 students respectively this year. We’ll assume you’re right and Stanford wins 75% of its cross-admits with Princeton (Parchment suggests it’s 66-78% at a 95% confidence interval, but whatever). The question is: how many students were actually cross-admitted?
I’m going to guess maybe 500, and likely far fewer, after you knock out the athletes, legacies and other hooked candidates particular to each of the two schools, and adjust for the fact that many kids won’t apply to Stanford or Princeton because they prefer the other coast, they don’t like something about one of the two schools, they got in early to one and didn’t apply anywhere else, or for any other reason. As well, it goes without saying that some number of students are admitted to Stanford and denied by Princeton, and vice versa. They’ve both got single-digit admit rates and non-identical institutional needs and preferences, and having 30-40k applicants increases the randomness inherent in the process, so many applicants won’t get into both.
Accordingly, out of the 500 overlapping students, we can assume that maybe 350 went to Stanford and 150 went to Princeton, for a net difference of 200 - and Stanford and Princeton have class sizes of roughly 1,525 and 1,350 students respectively. So what you’re saying is that because roughly one out of seven Princeton students is supposedly taking the place of someone Princeton would rather have had but went to Stanford, for any number of reasons, Princeton has lower-quality students and inferior talent relative to Stanford. That doesn’t seem justified by the facts.
The case is weakened further by the fact that Stanford and Princeton assume they’re going to have yields of roughly 80% and 70%. Each of them overadmits in the expectation that they’re going to lose many candidates - and not just to each other. The 30% of its admits that Princeton expects to lose end up going to Harvard, Yale, MIT and various other schools as well as Stanford. The 20% of its admits that Stanford loses enroll at Harvard, Yale, MIT and other schools, including Princeton. Stanford and Princeton both get a substantial majority of those they admit - i.e., those they want - and no one school in particular is beating them, whatever the cross-admit stats say.
It would be more accurate to assert that there’s a pool of top-quality candidates that the tippy-top schools generally divide among themselves, losing some to schools outside the magic circle.
Huh? That seems to say that if HYPS is not interested in you, you are somehow less talented? That is a very strange definition of talent. specially because they all have their own institutional needs and strategy and recruit based on that. Holistic admission pays a lot of attention not just to current achievements but also to “future potential” and it is really difficult to determine future potential of an applicant in a 5-10 minute application read. Venture capitalists spend more time evaluating each start up than these universities spend evaluating each application and even those VC’s fail to recognize winners and invest in duds many times. To think that a bunch of young application readers can sniff out real talent from a pool of $30K+ applicants by devoting 5-10 minutes to an application is being very optimistic.
Getting into these top schools, does not say a whole lot about your talent. I am not even sure what it says about you anymore.
You mean talent like typing “crtl-c ctrl-v ctrl-v … (repeat 100 times)”
Come on now, don’t insult Mr. Ahmed!
I am sure he did it in just in 20 steps (ctrl-c, ctrl-v X 9, ctrl-c (all 10), ctrl-v x 9). That is what made him Stanford worthy!