<li> Cal Tech 235</li>
<li> MIT 1073</li>
<li> Dartmouth 1080</li>
<li> Johns Hopkins 1215</li>
<li> Princeton 1245</li>
<li> Wash U 1300</li>
<li> Chicago 1314</li>
<li> Yale 1340</li>
<li> Columbia 1350</li>
<li> Brown 1485</li>
<li> Harvard 1675</li>
<li> Duke 1713</li>
<li> Stanford 1727</li>
<li> Northwestern 2000</li>
<li> Penn 2400</li>
<li> Cornell 3050</li>
</ol>
<p>Would you like actually to argue your point? And, if you consider entering class size so important, why not factor in Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Haverford, et al.?</p>
<p>Of all the possible ways to compare, say, MIT and Dartmouth, two colleges of similar prestige and radically different everything else, noting that MIT enrolled 0.648% fewer students is one of the silliest.</p>
<p>When my kids were considering colleges, they thought that places with under 5,000 undergraduates seemed too small.</p>
<p>The interesting thing about numbers like these is the fact that these top 15 "ranked" colleges enrolled a total of 24202 freshmen. If you eliminate recruited athletes, developmental admits, diversity admits(which I have no problem with in principle), internationals, and feeder school admits, etc, there may be as few as 15,000 totally open to every student applicant. Eliminate the student who choose not to apply ED and the numbers are probably less than 12,000 for regular admits.</p>
<p>Wow.</p>
<p>I think you are exaggerating a bit, originaloog. Internationals and URMs maybe, maybe account for 4,000 of the enrollees, recruited athletes (some of whom are internationals or URMs) add maybe another 1,000-1,500. Developmental admits are a handful at most. Only a little more than half of the schools have ED, and they admit about 4,000 students that way, which includes a lot of overlap with the other groups, especially recruited athletes. So, putting aside non-ED "feeder school" admittees (I'm not certain what difference they make, and I don't think any school has guaranteed slots), my guess is that there are probably about 17,000 slots. (I guess you could count EA, too, which would bring things down lower, but start to get into yield issues.) They will collectively mail out something like 43,000 acceptance letters to fill them, some of which will wind up in the same mailboxes.</p>
<p>The odds facing international applicants are longer than those facing U.S. applicants, so it's hard to think of those kids as being anything like undeserving.</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>Would you like actually to argue your point?<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>Yeah, exactly what is the point of this ranking? Are these the smallest of the "top" academic schools ordered by size but independent of academic ranking? Or is size actually calculated into this overall ranking as an academic virtue along with SAT scores, yield, etc.?</p>
<p>The filling up the available entering classes idea is an interesting idea. I have posted a thread about that </p>
<p>which includes liberal arts colleges as well as universities, in two versions of the ordered list to show that I am agnostic about rankings.</p>
<p>If you are looking at top 17 schools ;) I'll add in Rice (now increasing in size) to 775 incoming freshman. That puts it in place number 2, between Caltech and MIT.</p>
<p>originaloog,</p>
<p>just so you know, internationals at top schools are just as qualifed as the native students, if not more so. when i got my master at stanford, the graduation book shows that internationals, especially those from Singapore, are over-represented in terms of number of them graduating with honors even most of us majored in hard majors like economics or engineering. when i was at northwestern, we (from Hong Kong) had much higher rate of graduating with honors than the university aveage also. 4 of us in my class applied to MBA later and <em>all</em> of them matriculated in top-5 MBA programs (Harvard/MIT/Northwestern/INSEAD (#1 in Europe)).</p>
<p>your comment reminds me of a book on stanford admission in which the author (stanford adcom) mentioned some white parents complained about the "unfair" advantage given to asian students when in fact, asians had been the most under-admitted.</p>
<p>^edit: "asian" = asian american</p>
<p>I'm not sure, on rereading originaloog's post, that there was any implication in it that international students are not qualified, but only the (surely true) implication that every international student admitted is one less domestic student who can be admitted. Perhaps all of us here think, as I do, that it's great for a college to admit international students because they are highly qualified and add a lot to campus life, making the college more worth applying to for the domestic students lucky enough to get in.</p>
<p>Tokenadult, for Oberlin College, was the input data on SAT's only for the liberal arts college, or did it combine the SAT results for both the college and the music conservatory?
Oberlin College and Conservatory has been a unified institution for more than l00 years and doesn't care to disaggregate data now just because a magazine publishes rankings. As a result, this particular LAC often takes a "hit" on these lists. The music conservatory students aren't admitted based upon SAT scores, unless you'd like to listen to someone play a 750 on their cello at your local symphony orchestra. Sometimes this suppresses the score results for the LAC part of the institution. It depends on your source; please check it carefully. Many thanks.</p>
<p>^^ Well put :-)</p>
<p>Sam Lee, I did not mean to imply at all that international students were less prepared or deserving for admission than other applicants. </p>
<p>JHS, the numbers are actually worse than I estimated. If you take away ED admits(not EA), international and minority students the freshman class admits is reduced to 8057!!!! We all know that many Asian, AA and Hispanic admits are just as well qualified as any other applicant, but those are the numbers. Now take out developmental admits and recruited athletes and the final number is probably in the 7000's maybe even lower.</p>
<p>Hi, paying3tuitions, you're asking a question about Oberlin that seems to imply that I'm ranking colleges in terms of SAT scores, but I'm not. What Oberlin reports about its admission figures (possibly for a different year, by now) can be found on the College Board site </p>
<p>College</a> Search - Oberlin College - Admission </p>
<p>and the consequences of its admission practices and perceived desirability among all admitted applicants are reflected in its enrolled class figures </p>
<p>College</a> Search - Oberlin College - SAT®, AP®, CLEP® </p>
<p>just as they are for any other college. All of this is methodologically the same as for any other college that includes a school of music or conservatory (e.g., my alma mater).</p>
<p>originaloog: Huh? How do you get from 24,200 to 8,060 when (a) only about half of the schools have ED at all (although, granted, the ED schools represent well over half of the slots), (b) none of the ED schools fills as much as half of its class ED, (c) few, if any of the schools have as much as 10% international and 10% minority. Also, there has to be at least some consideration given to double-counting people in different categories -- it's possible to be a minority, international, recruited athlete admitted ED, and such a kid doesn't take four spots. At these ED schools, especially, there is a huge overlap between athletic recruiting and Early Decision.</p>
<p>Anyway, how did you get 16,000 kids off the top when I counted maybe 9,000, and 7-8,000 after adjusting for double-counting?</p>
<p>Actually, JHS, I'm pretty sure that by the Common Data Set methodology (patterned on federal data reporting in this matter) that it is impossible to be both a minority student and an international student. See, e.g., </p>
<p>U-CAN:</a> Massachusetts Institute of Technology :: Page 1 </p>
<p>U-CAN:</a> Dartmouth College :: Page 1 </p>
<p>U-CAN:</a> Johns Hopkins University :: Page 1 </p>
<p>U-CAN:</a> Princeton University :: Page 1 </p>
<p>The point is well taken that usually athletic recruiting takes place during the early round, which means a lot of recruited athletes are ED admittees at the colleges that have early decision programs.</p>
<p>JHS, oops I did double count and in a variation of the "dog ate my homework" excuse, I shredded my worksheet. But here is what I recall. ED admits totalled about 6040. International admits averaged about 8% and minority admits about 35% of admitted freshmen classes(a number I did recheck). But lets assume that 50% of international are also minorities. If we also assume that the the international/minority students were admitted ED in same proportion to the at-large applicant pool, the number changes from 8060 to 11,100. Include recruited athletes, feeder school, developmental admits and you probably get to a number in the 10,000 area. BTW, the international/minority numbers are from the colleges' CDS and therefore accurate.</p>
<p>We may quibble with some of the assumptions but the point I was making is that for a typical non-minority student, the available admission slots for these uber selective colleges are very small. The one thing I am not suggesting is that ED, minority or international admits are any less deserving of admission that any other applicant or that their numbers should in any way be reduced.</p>
<p>
[quote]
But lets assume that 50% of international are also minorities.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Let's not, because the feds don't define minorities that way and therefore colleges don't count them that way.</p>
<p>Interjecting about Oberlin College and Conservatory:</p>
<p>TokenAdult, your source is the College Board data set. What I see there is that 26% of all "Oberlin College" students major in Visiual or Performing Arts, which obviously indicates the large number of music conservatory students there. SAT scores are not the key factor in the admission of a future concert quality musician. </p>
<p>Oberlin Conservatory is the oldest in the nation. Oberlin College is the first coeducational college and first to admit African Americans. This all happened 150 years ago, long before U.S.News or the College Board was around. They're proud of their integrated school of scholars and musicians. </p>
<p>Despite the lower SAT's of some musicians, "Oberlin College" as reported by College Board has the following Middle 50% of all first year students:
SAT Cr. Wr 650-750; SAT Math 620-710; ACT Composite 27-31.</p>
<p>If Oberlin would disaggregate the musicans' data, their LAC stats might be up in the stratosphere like Swarthmore, Amherst or Williams. </p>
<p>I just get tired of seeing Oberlin take this hit, and your data just carried the old problem forward again. The problem is more OBerlin's stubborn pride here.</p>
<p>TokenAdult, I do appreciate seeing lists that include both Ivies and LAC's, since some students have both on their lists. Others mistakenly think any LAC is a safety against every Ivy, which isn't quite the case. So I appreciate your effort, am just speaking up about a reporting issue from OBerlin towards these kinds of listings, including College Board, USNWR, and so on.</p>
<p>TokenAdult, in plain language can you kindly label your ranking and the maiin idea it demonstrates? Is it to describe "yield"? I surely did get the idea it was a ranking according to SAT scores... If it's for "entering class size" then why also note the SAT's? I'm confoooosed, sorry.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>origionaloog,
Can you clarify if "diversity admit"/"miniority" include Asians? Because it seems like that's what you meant when I put the two above together. So the "every student applicant" = white? Well, I am not sure what you were thinking exactly but just in case, Asians aren't considered "minority" as in URMs. Your point was to differentiate those that get in based on certain status vs those that get in through the open competition, right? In college admission, Asians are in the same pool as whites and therefore belong to your "every student applicant" or "typical non-minority student" category. Also many top colleges say they don't have quota for internationals; so the internationals are actually viewed against the US applicants and vice versa. In other words, they are in direct competition. It's silly to think that internationals are there because colleges "need" them.</p>
<p>^edit: looks like you were indeed excluding asians from the "typical non-minority student" category. therefore, you were simply separating whites and asians. may i know what your point of doing that is other than suggesting they are like other urms? you said they you don't think they are less deserving yet on the other hand, differentiate them from the whites when they are really in the same pool and face the exact same difficulty and selectivitity. so again, what's your point?</p>