<p>It is a disadvantage to apply to a super-reach in the Northeast, from the Northeast.</p>
<p>That needs to be qualified only slightly, though, with the historical reality of feeder high schools which are located in the Northeast, but particularly to Northeast <em>LAC's</em>. Size may be somewhat a consideration in this. Hard to break into that tradition. You can do a statistical history & I promise it will come up a very, very low CA admit rate to some of these sought-after LAC's in the NE & mid-Atlantic. Part of this may be financial, btw. Chances are higher for an alum population of those smaller schools to have settled in the NE as opposed to across the country, proportionally speaking. Alum contributions do figure into acceptances at some of these schools with smaller endowments & fewer places to offer to a national student population.</p>
<p>In addition, there's a town-and-gown relationship with high schools extremely close to highly regarded U's such as Harvard, Princeton, etc. You will find disproportionally high admit rates from Princeton High School to Princeton U., but that is a <em>local</em> effect, as opposed to a <em>regional</em> effect.</p>
<p>Stanford and the Silicon Valley are not only married to each other (and always have been), they reaffirm their vows annually. The cluster of schools near Stanford produce tech-headed and other science-oriented students feeding into the cutting edge local industries such as biogenetics and the like. Many of those students have parents in those industries. Also CA has a huge student population, and of those, a scientifically ambitious group that is merely increasing in that direction every year. Lots of them, in northern & in southern CA, are eager to get into the promising areas such as bioengineering, which is growing in this region daily. Stanford cannot ignore this, and is only too happy to admit large segments of them. Still, not many students/families in CA consider it an "advantage" for Stanford admissions, to be a Californian. One still has a better chance of admission to Stanford, given the exact same profile, if one is not from CA.</p>
<p>Manzanas y naranjas, I say. You're comparing Ivies + LACs to some top-tier Southern/Midwestern schools-all these colleges/universities are looking for different things from their applicants. I'm assuming your son is what the S/M schools were looking for-perhaps the Ivies + LACs thought he was a competitive applicant (I guess so, since they waitlisted him), but maybe they found others who could add something "else" to their respective incoming classes. For the record, as schools take a "holistic" approach to admissions, they take geographic residence into account-people from the South are underrepresented in the Northern schools, so they are given a "boost" when compared to the overrepresented applicants.</p>
<p>
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Stanford for one has a student body composed of a disproportionate amount of Californians.
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this is true and also is at the crux of the issue ... it is also true the acceptance rate for California applicants at Stanford is lower than average. </p>
<p>Kids tend to apply locally and school seek geographic diversity ... for almost all top schools the acceptance rate is worse for states closest to the school.</p>
<p>Amherst does not deny admission out of a fear that students will not enroll - they overenrolled by about 40 students last year! They could employ a lot of techniques that other schools do to increase yield, but choose not to.</p>
<p>Just because your son is a top-applicant to Duke and Vandy and Wash U., it doesn't make him a top-applicant for other schools. Different schools are looking for different things. HYP are the tip top and your son was probably just another one of the thousands of perfect applications they've received. While Duke, Vandy, and Wash U. are still super competitive, I don't think they are in comparison to HYP, even as top-candidates. As it's been said a billion times, HYP are crapshoots.</p>