<p>Oh please, Clinton! There is no reason to poke fun at “my” new ranking system – with or without quotations. I simply did not present any type of ranking. All I did is suggest that it was interesting to see the number of ED applications on the “unveiled” CDS, and later respond to the table posted by Data10. </p>
<p>I leave it to Hunt the honor of creating new rankings such as his (now seminal) prestigiosity ranking. What I do is take shots at rankings from the biased and cronyist USNews to the irrelevant THES and whatever that Chinese garbage is called today, and finally to the utterly moronic Mother Teresa rankings. </p>
<p>As far as early admission, I maintain that early applications (as I describe them) are a reasonable proxy for the definition of “first choices.” And I defined reasonable as well! In the meantime, if it pleases you to bring up Michigan, Virginia, etc, so be it. I see no reason to dispute that such data is every bit as valid as the point I made about comparing Washu’s ED number to the Ivy League. </p>
<p>Frankly, expect for the intent of arguing for the sake of arguing, I am not sure why much of the recent “pokes” have surfaced. And why there is such insistence in taking simple arguments out of their original context to argue a point … that was in fact never made.</p>
<p>I guess that agreeing to agreeing is not always enough!</p>
No, the score is nowhere near that because a majority of those early OOS applications to Michigan and UVA are from those students who wanted to receive an offer of admission from their match/safety school that they would attend as a “last resort” while they wait on pins and needles for the Ivies/Stanford/MIT/Chicago/Duke/NU to release their admissions results for the regular round.</p>
<p>That was certainly the case in my admissions cycle. It was a huge load off my back to get accepted to UMich by November so even if I got rejected by every USNWR top 15 school I applied to, then I still had an excellent fallback option.</p>
<p>Those brave enough to apply to Harvard SCEA are rolling their dice since they are giving up a chance to get a significant “admissions boost” by applying ED to a school like Duke or Penn or applying EA to a number of schools like UVA/UMich/Georgetown/MIT/Chicago (where they could get multiple acceptances early on without having to stress our for the rest of senior year).</p>
<p>I think a lot of you are thinking about application numbers and selectivity in the wrong way. Ask yourself this: given the choice to attend whatever school they wanted, where would the top 1,000 academic superstars (USAMO/USCho/USPho/RSI/TASP) in high school go to? The answer is HYPSM followed by the remaining Ivies+Chicago+Duke followed by NU/Vandy/Hopkins/Rice/Georgetown followed by UVA/UNC/Michigan/USC.</p>
<p>That pecking order is pretty firm among students regardless of what adults think.</p>
<p>And you know this how?? Why would anyone need to lock in a match or safety if they are such rock star students that other top universities are within their reach?</p>
<p>Interesting, bclintonk. I think of St. Louis as being the “gateway to the south.” It does not feel like the midwest to me at all. In any case, it is a great city and the area immediately around WashU has a lot to offer as well.</p>
<p>Questioning is good, but again, what exactly does not add up?
True, WashU’s average SAT scores are pretty darn high, yet the admit rate and yield numbers aren’t quite as impressive. Do we expect all these numbers will always move lock-step in the same direction?</p>
<p>What am I missing here? Is there some evidence that WashU is reporting fraudulent numbers? Is it even clear that they are inconsistent with other schools in their averaging methods or how they handle super-scoring? Why should we assume that reporting for the 8 Ivies or any other schools is more reliable?</p>
<p>There’s an undercurrent of old school snobbery in this discussion. If a college advertises too much, it is a striving parvenue. It must not be above chicanery.</p>
<p>Well, that’s interesting. Historically St. Louis was known as the “gateway to the West.” It was already a well established city by the time of the Louisiana Purchase, easily reached by navigation up the Mississippi or down the Ohio. It thus provided a good staging area for the Lewis and Clark Expedition and for later westward expeditions via the Missouri River as far as Independence or St. Joseph, MO and Omaha, NE, and westward from there via the Santa Fe, Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails. Hence the Gateway Arch.</p>
<p>I guess it’s not quite Northern nor Southern, nor Eastern nor Western.</p>
<p>WashU can’t win. If it attracts mostly Midwesterners, it’s a regional school. If it attracts Northeasterners, it’s clearly only a back up to Ivies. </p>
<p>Goldenboy, why would I care about “what the top 1000 superstars do”? That’s not how people of substance make decisions. And you are being naive if you don’t thnk preferences are regional.</p>
<p>Some here might take another look at those “garbage rankings”, their influence is already strong worldwide and growing. You know-among those international types that will run the world sooner or later… </p>
<p>Some here might admit why they like the garbage rankings and never miss an opportunity to post the links to the latest editions in the wrong forum. </p>
<p>Of course, the concept of what is relevant to undergraduates is hard to comprehend after several decades.</p>
<p>Stanford beats all the Ivies not named Harvard/Yale (a tie with Y). It’s not “perhaps”. </p>
<p>If top high school students are really as obssessed with the Ivies as you think, their lists would be full of Ivies sprinkled with just few of the other top 20 schools. The applicant pools for Ivies should be significantly bigger. But that’s not the case. </p>
<p>You use the term Ivies so loosely as if all eight of them are “better” than everyone else in most people’s mind. That’s perhaps true only for HYP and to a lesser extent, Columbia. After that, it’s a lot more complicated. Besides Stanford, CalTech, and MIT, there are reasons why some of the other top 20 schools have higher stats than Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, and Brown. A better but imperfect generalization would be this: the top-20 schools are second choice if they don’t get the nod from HYPS.</p>
<p>I am not sure if the pool could grow significantly bigger than it is at just below 250,000 for the 8 schools. One another way to look at this: select eight comprehensive undergraduate colleges and universities and try to match the number of applications per admitted student and enrolled student. I do not think that you could reach a similar 11 applications per admitted students for any other group of 8 schools.</p>
<p>But there are also many, many kids who just happen to like the top 20 schools who aren’t interested in the Ivies and don’t elevate HYP (or HYPS, or HYPSM, whatever) to the top of the heap. One can just … like Vanderbilt, or like Northwestern, or like Duke, or like WashU, or for that matter, like Yale or like Princeton or like Brown, without having to think about the group of 8 Ivies as having something that binds them together. I think Princeton and Vanderbilt have a lot of similarities, for example, and it’s quite possible the same student who likes them wouldn’t be interested in, say, Brown. Cornell / Penn / NU / WashU is another axis – those 4 have similarities as well. People cut these schools in ways far beyond simply Ivy / not-Ivy.</p>
<p>^^And, don’t forget about small colleges, which by definition may appeal to a smaller universe of applicants, but nevertheless, outside of Dartmouth, have no real Ivy equivalent. Amherst may not be a a world-class university, but then, Yale is not a world-class LAC.</p>
<p>Sorry, I wasn’t clear. What I meant was the Ivies’ applicant pools would be significantly bigger than other top-20 schools’ if all the top high students are as obsessed with the Ivies as you think. One may say the size gap could be filled with applicants of lower caliber but if that were the case, those schools wouldn’t have the high stats like they have now. Also, those schools would not have had the stats that match, let alone be higher than, some of the Ivies as they were just backups for even “lower” (for lack of better term) Ivies like Cornell.</p>
<p>The College GameDay will be in Evanston this Saturday. They never go to Philly or Ithaca. :)</p>
<p>“Of course, the concept of what is relevant to undergraduates is hard to comprehend after several decades.”</p>
<p>In your opinion with little actual support. What is the largest growing sector of students in US colleges-internationals. What ratings/rankings are they most likely to use?? Go figure.</p>
<p>^ Yup. Over parent’s weekend I asked one of my son’s international friends how he’d decided to attend his LAC. You guessed it-the USNWR rankings. Ugh.</p>