<p>the 2010 USNews college guide lists Yale as #1 in selectivity. Harvard and Yale always banter back and forth about their admit rates, which are released by the admissions offices. and they're always close. Harvard fans may say that Yale has early action, but it's not binding and -- significantly -- Yale did not go to the wait list last year (i heard that it was the only school not to go to the waitlist of these big schools). Harvard had to go to the wait list, and then it has the "Z" list for wealthy, underqualified kids, who are guaranteed slots in a class by waiting a year...</p>
<p>note that the US News calculation looks at (i) the admissions scores of all enrollees who took the SAT or the ACT, (ii) "the proportion of enrolled freshman (for all national universities and liberal arts colleges) who graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes," and (iii) the acceptance rate, or the ratio of admitted students to applicants. with respect this last category, it's even more interesting b/c it may be that Harvard benefits from something like Wash. U. -- many incredibly unqualified kid apply there, whether by their own choice or b/c of parental pressure. so that boosts the total applicant pool for Harvard, and therefore lowers the admit rate when all those kids are rejected. imagine what their stat would be if they didn't have that going in their favor...ykes, they might be #3 (horrors!)...</p>
<p>Harvard is tied at 2 with Princeton, MIT and Stanford for selectivity</p>
<p>It’s clearly a distinction without a difference. Your chances of getting into either one of them are so low that the differences between the two are insignificant.</p>
<p>hmmm…looks like you rattled a few here, chicagonh. when something’s not refutable, just say it’s insignificant. i’d suspect that if the stats ran the other way, the harvard fans on this forum wouldn’t think it was “insignificant” or “uninteresting” </p>
<p>it’s only “significant” because this forum is full of harvard fans who argue that the school is far superior to princeton, stanford, mit and yale. that’s just not the case…and this is evidence of that fact.</p>
Yes, they would claim any difference to be insignificant (unless the claim was out of jest and in the Harvard-Yale rivalry spirit). 7% vs. 7.5% is not a significant difference.</p>
<p>And if we want to refute data, we can scrutinize the top 10% measure. UCSD, I believe, has one of the top 3 highest percentages of top 10% students (I believe the other 2 are Cal and UCLA). Are we to suggest that UCSD is more selective than Harvard? Clearly, Harvard could produce a class of 100% top 10% students. The fact that USNews scrutinizes between 99% and, say, 94%, as an actual selectivity measure is ridiculous.</p>
<p>As you said yourself in post #2, they keep swapping places or tying year to year for the top spot, which strongly suggests that HYPSM are very even and we are just measuring yearly “noise” around the same number. But hey, if the fact that Yale won the splitting-hairs-at-the-high-end battle of selectivity this year is somehow significant to you, the go for it - feel free to strike that loser school Harvard off your list and focus solely on Yale. You’ll clearly feel right at home there.</p>
<p>again…sounding a bit defensive. relax. i agree that the schools are quite close in selectivity. that was very point of chicagonh’s post – as I said above, the only reason to even raise this statistic is because harvard fans are so quick to rush in and say they’re the best. stats like this force them to admit – as you did here – that the differences in selectivity are de minimus. normally harvard parents don’t admit to this…</p>
<p>as to your observation “you’ll clearly feel at home at Yale” – why the need to take a dig at Yale just because i observe that it’s as selective a school as Harvard?</p>
<p>^^No, you’ll feel at home at Yale because in their tours and admissions presentations they are constantly comparing themselves to Harvard and repeatedly telling the parents and students that they are just as good as Harvard. By contrast, Harvard ignores Yale and all other schools when promoting itself for admissions. Thus crowing about winning some selectivity battle by some insignificant margin will fit right in with Yale’s culture of obsessing on whether it’s as good as or better than Harvard.</p>
<p>well, you’re undermining your own argument here, coureur, with your fervor. i have no affiliation with either of these schools. but here we see a harvard fan who’s pretty busy spending time comparing harvard to YPSM. you sure don’t look like your ignoring yale or any of the others…and on admissions tours and talks at harvard, they not surprisingly make oblique reference to these other schools.</p>
<p>^^You don’t see many Harvard people putting up threads on the Yale board about Harvard being ranked number one in this or that poll. And I don’t do that either. I’ve got no “fervor” to run out and rub Yalie’s noses in the superiority of Harvard, especially not “superiority” based on the arcane findings of some magazine. </p>
<p>But unfortunately the converse is not true. Let Yale finish ahead of Harvard in one obscure stat or another and there will be someone over here making a fuss about it. If their bragging is legitimate, good for them. I’m happy to let it pass despite their bad manners. But if the supposed superiority is so tiny, so contrived, and so shaky as to be due just how the apps fell this year and not due to some real difference between the schools, I’m not going to let that nonsense go by without challenge. If Yalies want to brag that’s fine. It’s all part of the fun. But let them do it on the Yale board.</p>
<p>Actually, the only lesson here is how insignificant the USNWR factors are. Either Harvard or Yale could easily boost the number of students they accept in the top 10% of some class, or goose the SAT scores of their admitted pool. They don’t . . . because they both admit people, not class ranks or scores, and sometimes people with 2200 SATs or sub-top-10% ranks have something really special to offer.</p>
<p>Harvard’s yield is higher than Yale’s, or at least it has been as long as I’ve been aware. It does admit 200-300 more students than Yale, because it has about 350 more students in its entering class. And maybe this year Yale skewed higher on SAT scores. So what? People at Yale may look over their shoulders at Harvard more than people at Harvard look at Yale, but Yale has never played the admissions game to “beat” Harvard. That would be horribly self-defeating.</p>
<p>Anyway, back when Princeton had ED, and a much smaller class, Princeton often showed up in USNWR as the most selective. It would admit half its class ED from a small pool – much smaller than the SCEA pools – and then be super-selective in the RD pool. </p>
<p>This is a dumb discussion either way. I doubt anyone from Yale started it. They know better than to brag on anything from USNWR.</p>
<p>What I do find most interesting is that the OP only has one post to their name. So either they are brand new (I doubt that) or they are someone who is ignoring the TOS agreement in order to create a new anonymous sign on for the sole purpose of starting this thread and see what they can stir up.</p>