<p>truazn8948532 - i am sure you love columbia, as does s snack and SOOOOO many of the other rabid posters on this site. But your obsession with driving Columbia to the nirvana of Harvard-dom is a bit pathological. It's so bad it's laugable. </p>
<p>Pointing to the fact that Columbia is exceedingly selective to justify it's worth as an institution is stupid. That's the only word for it. </p>
<p>Here are a couple of stats for you ALL to think about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Chicago admitted 3628 of 10408 students, a 34.9% rate</li>
<li>Berkeley admitted 20.2% of its applicants</li>
<li>Stanford was at a 10.3% rate</li>
</ul>
<p>All three schools are academically, if not in entirety, superior too most schools in the Ivies (and my statement certainly includes Columbia), and balanced somewhat by Yale and Princeton. Only Harvard can truly claim to rival Stanford and Berkeley. Based on the reasoning i see all over this thread, Chicago would be turned to farmland given that it accepts 35% of applications; "why it MUST be a waste of a school with stats like", right CU boosters??? That's the logical conclusion of your contorted thinking. NOT!!!</p>
<p>You want so bad to be like HYP, you feed the common belief that your school is mostly populated by rejects from H-Y-P. If you check the Penn, Cornell, Brown, Stanford and Chicago sites, you see nowhere near the pretentious dribble about how their institutions' are just an admit away from HYP. </p>
<p>Get over yourselves. Think about the times you live in: the 10.4% rate you love is a combination of sheer demographics, and the new found love for cities students have who are entering college life. All urban schools are benefitting from this trend. And worse, the demographic bubble will deflate in 3-4 years. Then imagine what'll happen to your precious rates.</p>
<p>And for the record, stop quoting 8.6% as the admit rate for CU; that's for CC; that's like Penn quoting 9% for it's admit rate, when that's supposedly the rate for Wharton. It's just an absurdity.</p>
<p>Two other things-</p>
<p>The TRUE metric of a quality of a school's admit process is it's regular decision yield. This factors out the early decision games which Penn, Columbia, Yale, Brown and Cornell practice in large measure (ED admits > 30% of a class). And the yield proection which Princeton uses to boost itself against Stanford and H Y is even worse. But back to RD yields ---- I think CU's is still sub 50%, which is the second WORST in the Ivy League!!! If someone has stats for the Class of 2010, I would love to stand corrected, if anyone can prove me wrong:-) </p>
<p>Finally, regarding the fiction that this admit rate makes CU an equal to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. Hah. Now you guys are truly ridiculous. The true differences between the schools lies in (....where should I begin......):</p>
<ul>
<li>At least $5 billion of endowment wealth, which grows consistently at 15%+ per year; whereas CU's best year in the last 10 years was abt 16%</li>
<li>Grad schools which are ALL on average among the top 5 in their fields (CU doesn't come close)</li>
<li>alumni giving rates in the 40%+ range; again, CU doesn't come close</li>
<li>A proportionaly high % of it's faculty in the National Academies; CU's % is much smaller</li>
<li>Significant research programs (CU is strong here, but only in the middle of all the elite schools)</li>
</ul>
<p>Admit rates are nice, but all these schools are sourcing from the same global pool of students. At this level (sub-20% admit rates), it's a crap shoot for all the applicants and for the schools too. The student bodies are all great. The only rough generalizations & stereotypes you can make (assuming self selection vs parental/legacy factors are):</p>
<ul>
<li>Harvard kids love the name as much as anything else</li>
<li>Yale/Princeton kids go there to become self-consciously intellectual</li>
<li>Columbia students just wanted to be in NY anyway</li>
<li>Penn students wanted to have fun as much as get an Ivy degree</li>
<li>Cornell & Dartmouth students wanted Books in the Woods</li>
<li>Brown kids love freedom, freedom and more freedom (ie. life as a P/F option)</li>
</ul>
<p>Here's to the top 20% of high schoolers everywhere</p>