@northwesty To convince me that Stanford is more elite than Harvard, I would need to have to be convinced that cross-admits usually choose it over Harvard. I don’t think that is the case.
Much – agree that would be the ultimate data. But that data is not easy to find.
If you search here on CC, there are posts reporting that Stanford itself claims to have beat Harvard on cross-admits 52-48 for the class of 2019. If that’s true, you’d have to switch the scale over to mS from mH.
Parchment (which is perhaps suspect data) still has it 56/44. Is that (if true which we don’t know) closer than you would have guessed?
@northwesty Yes. I suspect that Harvard’s yield is likely to be lower because they are in more direct competition with not only Stanford, but also Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, & MIT. I would guess that Stanford has few cross admits with those schools.
To my thinking, the “elite” colleges are schools where high concentrations of “elite” students attend.
These are schools appropriate to the reach end of an application list for an “elite” student who is shopping the national market. About 30 colleges have average SAT M+CR scores >= 1400; almost all of these have admit rates <= 20%; most of them also are full need, need-blind colleges. These research universities and LACs collectively have about 49K freshmen places.
At the risk of being way too precise, here’s a list:
Amherst
Bowdoin
Brown
Cal Tech
Carleton
Carnegie Mellon
Chicago
Claremont McK
Columbia
Cornell
Dartmouth
Duke
Georgetown
Harvard
Harvey Mudd
Haverford
JHU
MIT
Northwestern
Notre Dame
Penn
Pomona
Princeton
Rice
Stanford
Swarthmore
Tufts
Vanderbilt
Washington U
Wellesley
Wesleyan
Williams
Yale
All of the above also are ranked either in the USNWR top 30 national universities or the top 30 national LACs.
Compare to the 47 full need, need-blind colleges listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need-blind_admission
Only five schools on the above list aren’t also on the Wiki need blind, full-need lists:
Carleton
Carnegie Mellon
Tufts
Washington U
Wesleyan
I think that to be truly elite the university needs to be 200+ years old, with a distinguished alumni and faculty, and a reputation for outstanding teaching and/or research. If you don’t meet this criteria, you might be ‘outstanding’ but you aren’t ‘elite’.
@tk21769 Reading your criteria, a thought struck me: many students at ‘elite’ universities are by your definition not elite since many will not have the SAT scores you cite. I find this an intriguing thought.
@tk21769 I don’t see Cal or UCLA on your list. These are both elite, world class universities with high SAT scores and GPA required (your standards).
A solid list. But if you’ve got Bowdoin, Haverford, and Carleton, it’s very hard to justify leaving off Middlebury.
@tk21769 Just noted that there are no fully public colleges or universities on that list. Hence the omission of UCLA, Berkeley, UVA, Michigan, UNC, etc.
Another notable (private) omission - Emory.
@tk21769 Sooo…A list with Carleton , Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Haverford, and Tufts. Leaves out Emory, and UCB :-/ . Well I personally think endowment relative to it’s size is a good measure, or PR scores. Also offering full need can be arbitrary when some schools have such a large percentage of the top 1 percent ( Anchor Down). All of the US News top 30 seem to belong there, one could make a case for NYU (and maybe BC).
They just don’t fit the criteria I used.
The OP asked for a definition and a line. If you set your line at a different point than I did, or used a different set of criteria altogether, you’d get a different list.
I get it with the omission of the public universities, but surely you’ll concede that leaving out Middlebury was an oversight.
As much as this site cares about prestige and rankings, one would think a person that works at US news would be a member here. I think US news has it down fairly well the metrics used are broad and fair, however the weighting of each category is what is debatable imo. Like SAT scores and GPA should be weighted more while counselor scores should be weighted much less.
A Tiered system works best as there is degrees of elite. Harvard and Tufts might be considered elite certainly not in the same vein.
Schools ranked 1-5, 6-13, 14-25, 26-40 are elite in the grad scene of things ( there’s over 3000 Universities in the US) but in there respective tier.
<<about 30="" colleges="" have="" average="" sat="" m+cr="" scores="">= 1400; almost all of these have admit rates <= 20%; most of them also are full need, need-blind colleges.>>
@tk21769 the top publics do fit your criteria <20% admit rates and high SATs.
TK’s list looks pretty good. Agree that MB would seem to meet all the stated criteria.
The way you’d really do the analysis is to overlay a number of these criteria so that you can tease out the couple of outliers that you inevitably get from any one metric. Do a scattergram of YTAR, USNWR ranking, need blind/full need and endowment per student and you’ll get a strong list. The overlaying of various metrics, of course, is exactly what USNWR does.
YTAR alone gets you very close to TK’s list (which is also close to USNWR’s list). Although YTAR does pick up up the noise of BYU in the data. Nice thing about YTAR is it gives you a relative weight/spacing among the schools rather than just a 1-2-3-4-5 ranking. If you had to pick only one metric (rather than the overlay method) YTAR seems to do the best job.
Did USNA and USMA get dropped from TK’s list due to the need blind/full need criteria? While NB/FN is a really good screen, it obviously doesn’t automatically fit for a federally funded school that’s free to all to attend. Or are the service academy test scores a bit too low?
“the top publics do fit your criteria <20% admit rates and high SATs.”
The publics really don’t fit TK’s stated criteria.
Only UNC and UVA are need blind/full need. So UCLA, UCB and UM are out.
UVA, UM and UNC have admit rates above 20%. So they are out too.
Not all of them have 1400+ SAT scores either.
The OOS portion of UM, UVA and UNC are fairly “elite-ish” in terms of test scores and admit rates, but not so much for IS.
For the whole school (IS and OOS) UCLA and UCB are the strongest student bodies.
I thought Vassar had an average score above 1400 but all I can find is that the 25/75 range is 1380/1460. Also all the test optional schools (which Vassar is not) get an artificial boost to their average scores because the low score admits are excluded. If that is the criteria test optional schools should be excluded
Is the avg sat for admitted or enrolled sat scores, and does this particular posters list (which is still arbitrary imo mainly because Universities and Lac’s should not be grouped together under the same metrics, there’s just way too many variables) exclude ACT scores?
Elite to me is a single intial school. HYPSMAWS. Extraordinary, defined as a school which will provide virtually unlimited opportunities to grads, would be something lile the top 25/30 national universities (which captures schools like UCLA/UVa and CMU) and top 15/20 LAC’s (which captures West Point and Annapolis, which despite the dominant political leanings of this community belong in any real discussion of the top educational institutions in the US) on the US News or whatever generally palatable list.
And I strongly agree with @robotrainbow. Vassar has an average SAT above 1400 (median scores of 720/720 for this incoming class) and should be included in @tk21769 list, even though Vassar’s overall admit rate is greater than 20%. The admit rate I find insignificant as a divider, primarily because my daughter is headed there next fall 
The rubric that the service academies use (Whole Candidate Score) includes the requirement for a congressional nomination and the ability to pass a strict test of physical fitness and a DoDMERB medical exam making it difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison with other colleges. The average standardized test scores are lower because the SAs value academics and fitness somewhat equally; they are looking for scholars as well as infantrymen (although any given officer certainly could be both). The main mission of the academies is to produce officers to lead troops and that means the officer class leans a bit more to brawn than brains, although all appointees must meet strict bars for both academics and fitness either directly or by spending a year at the respective academy prep schools first. There are plenty of valedictorians, perfect test scorers, and cadets/mids who turned down Ivies in those pools, but because the focus differs, it is hard to know where to slot the academies into any non-academy ranking list. I think we can agree, though, that it takes a certain kind of kid to go this route and perhaps it is that calling that gives the SAs their own definition of “elite.”