<p>From your same Parchment info-
Harvard 90%
Duke 10%</p>
<p>Stanford 86%
Duke 14%</p>
<p>Penn 71%
Duke 29%</p>
<p>I think this speaks volumes as well if you want to base everything on things like Parchment and US News. Duke is a desirsable school. Where does your “point about desirability” stand on this info.</p>
<p>I think the bigger point, goldenboy, is that what other people choose when faced with a given decision provides very little guidance as to what I should do in that same situation. If I have a decision to make, I look at whatever criteria are important to ME and make the decision accordingly; I don’t weight very highly the decisions made by other people, who may have completely different criteria.</p>
<p>If I’m choosing between going to the beach and going skiing on vacation, it’s irrelevant to me that 70% of people would choose the beach and only 30% would choose skiing. Completely and utterly irrelevant, if I personally prefer skiing. Why would this be any different with a college decision?</p>
<p>That is exactly correct Pizzagirl. Unfortunately, some kids get hung up with things like US News rankings and bragging rights pretty easily.</p>
<p>The data on parchment.com is inaccurate. Stanford has released [actual</a> data](<a href=“http://mathacle.blogspot.com/2010/10/hypsm-cross-admits-for-2002-2014.html]actual”>Mathacle's Blog: Stanford's HYPSM Cross-Admits for 2002 - 2010) on cross-admits, and all the numbers are starkly different from what parchment.com is reporting. Not very credible.</p>
<p>That is the point. Alot of the data is pretty useless. As Pizzagirl says, make the decision that’s right for you, not what some ranking is telling you to do or what other people are doing.</p>
<p>Given that Parchment has selection bias, and bases its data in part on a year outside the data in the Stanford report, it’s pretty impressive how close the two are. Based on its own data, Stanford does better against Harvard (~35% vs. 21%), about the same vs. Princeton and Yale, and somewhat worse against MIT (~46% vs. 55%, but there is more variation in the MIT numbers than vs. any other school, the 95% confidence range on parchment is huge, and time frame would matter a lot). If you look at 2007-2010 only in the Stanford numbers, the only comparison that’s “starkly different” on Parchment is Harvard. That’s the only one where the “real” numbers fall outside parchment’s 95% confidence range.</p>
<p>For me, the Stanford report lends credibility to the parchment stuff (which is somewhat surprising).</p>
<p>JHS, can you link to Parchment’s detail of their dataset? I found nothing more than the fact they began collecting data in 2009 and, “Tens of thousands of students have contributed to a database of over 120,000 acceptances at hundreds of colleges in the US.” From that, and using US gov’t data indicating 6M+ students matriculated in 2009-11, I concluded the volunteered dataset Parchment used to derive cross-admit information represents the college choices of < 1.xx% of all US high school seniors who matriculated in the past three years.</p>
<p>They either got lucky with Stanford or you were more successful in digging up the relevant dataset.</p>
<p>Ok I"ll bite–the first three students turned Yale, Stanford and MIT because they received the Shipman Scholarship. The 4th candidate here received the ADS Scholarship at MSU and so no reason to venture South when MSU has such a good veterinary school.</p>
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<p>Nope … in state, small merit scholarships but otherwise full pay. The MSU student did not get ADS, but it was a good scholarship with a research job … but mom & dad could easily have afforded any school full pay (they just didn’t want to - I think they mistakenly thought their D would get merit at schools that don’t offer it).</p>
<p>“Of course, some of those 30+ ACT-scorers will be OOS students, especially at Michigan (Michigan State is only 9% OOS).”</p>
<p>This isn’t a little footnote you can ignore, especially considering the high % of OOS students at UofM, and the fact that the OOS students tend to have higher test scores than in-state students.</p>
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<p>Harvard and Stanford are perhaps the two most desirable universities in the country so Duke’s poor performance again is no surprise and is expected. Then again, pretty much every other school outside of Yale and Princeton play second fiddle to these schools so my point on desirability stands.</p>
<p>Penn’s advantage is partially boosted by the presence of Wharton which probably eats up a large chunk of the cross admits but Penn College probably holds a nontrivial desirability edge over Duke as well. But this is Penn as we both well know–a school that could possibly be #6 right after HYPSM.</p>
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<p>versus each school (using 2010 yields reported by Stanford):
H - 81% difference
Y - 39% difference
P - 19% difference
M - 9% difference</p>
<p>I would consider the differences with each of HYP to be “starkly different.” None of these is within a reasonable margin of error. In fact, that the margin of error varies so wildly - from 9% to 81% - is what makes the data useless. If the margin were relatively constant, we might be able to make educated guesses. But we have no way of knowing just how inaccurate each matchup is. These variable differences most definitely do not lend any credence to the parchment.com data (the only way the data is “impressive” is if you had extremely low expectations in the first place). This is to be expected, since the site draws its data from self-reported surveys, which are mostly useless as a rule of thumb.</p>
<p>Goldenboy, The Penn data is actually pretty similar with both Duke and UVa
Duke 29%
Penn 71%</p>
<p>UVa 26%
Penn 74%</p>
<p>All of these schools are desirable as are many others in the US. I don’t think any one of us needs to quibble over this fairly useless data from Parchment. All some of it will prove is the obvious-lots of kids who are in the position to apply to “elite” schools" will gravitate to the higher ranked one. Some of that will be because of perceived prestige.</p>
<p>I actually think the Coll… Prow… stuff is more useful (and funnier) anyway . That puts Duke as less desirable than UVa where it really counts(the hotness of the guys and gals and the nightlife). I will give you that Duke gets a higher ranking in academics (A+ as opposed to A-, oh well). But Duke’s guys get an A-(based just not on attractiveness but also beig smart,friendly,and engaging and a decent male/female ratio). Women get a B+. Nightlife gets a B+. So:
UVa Guys A+ Women A+ Nightlife A-<br>
Duke Guys A- Women B+ Nighlife B+ </p>
<p>More useful maybe but still pretty useless in the scheme of things. Hopefully, kids are checking lots of things and visiting schools they’re interested in. As I said, there are lots of desirable schools out there, even Duke!</p>
<p>phanatasmagoric: You are applying a completely unrealistic standard. </p>
<p>First, you have no idea what’s in the website’s data base, but I assume that it is heavily weighted to 2011, which doesn’t even show up in the Stanford data. </p>
<p>Second, there is always variation year to year – really considerable variation if you look at the Stanford data. So it doesn’t make sense to talk about exact numbers, and it does make sense to use multi-year rolling averages.</p>
<p>Third, the website itself gives you its 95% confidence range (the precise number provided looks like the midpoint of that range). In some cases, the range is quite wide. I checked – using a four-year average, not just 2010, which was not necessarily a typical year – and, as I wrote above, only the Harvard result was outside the range given. You can’t slam it for being inaccurate by holding it to a degree of accuracy it expressly disclaims, or by being too lazy to read the disclaimers.</p>
<p>And, in any event, if you look at the forest and not the trees, it gives you a pretty good understanding of where Stanford fits in the HYPSM ecology. It really doesn’t matter that much if Stanford’s success rate with Harvard cross admits is 35%, 25%, or 20%. Whichever applies, Harvard “wins” more often than any other college against Stanford, by a meaningful margin, and yet it is clear that substantial numbers of cross-admits choose Stanford. With Yale, Princeton, and MIT, it’s closer to a coin flip. If you are looking to get a lot more out of the data, you are abusing it.</p>
<p>LOL. Parchment.com says Michigan 50%, Columbia 50%.</p>
<p>Duke loses to Columbia, 25% to 75%.</p>
<p>I’d say parchment.com’s college matchups are a fun parlor game, not much more than that.</p>
<p>And Duke even loses to Brown 73% to 27%. It is fun stuff to play around with and most of it is fairly predictable with most choosing HYP if admitted over lower ranked US News schools.
Similar results as Michigan with Columbia for UVa.
Columbia 40 UVa 60
Cornell 50 UVa 50
It is a fun parlor game, bclintonk. :)</p>
<p>Yale 99 Upper Swampgas State College 1</p>
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You’re misinterpreting what the Parchment page is saying regards to the Michigan and Columbia matchup. The reason the numbers aren’t in color is because the number of students deciding between Columbia and Michigan are statistically insignificant and the lack of overlap in this specific choice set indicates that we can be confident at the 95th interval that neither is preferred over the other. Among the thousands of matriculation decisions that Parchment has logged onto its server, there are very few cross-admits who decide between these schools. This could occur for a multitude of reasons such as the difference in culture between Michigan and Columbia or student preferences with regards to where they apply.</p>
<p>You should disregard any matchup in Parchment where both the schools are non colored because that indicates that a) there is not enough data points regarding cross admits at either school or b) neither school is truly preferable over the other.</p>
<p>The results for Columbia and Duke are statistically significant though and I don’t dispute those. However, I must say that it’s far more likely for a New England boarding school student to apply to both Columbia and Duke than from a Southern public school student to apply to Columbia. There are some truly qualified kids that Duke or even Vandy get that wouldn’t even apply to Columbia and would only venture out of the South if admitted to HYPS. This is why Duke and Columbia’s National Merit numbers are similar (93 vs. 88). They are enrolling about equally strong students. The same can’t be said of Michigan.</p>
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Again, you’re abusing the Parchment numbers if you’re not taking self selection and geographical preferences into account. The Ivies share a very limited cross admit pool between UVA and Michigan for the most part for some reason while Duke and UVA share a lot more applicants (the same is true for Michigan for some reason).</p>
<p>All the two admissions matchups you’ve posted indicate is that there aren’t enough cross admits deciding exclusively between Columbia and UVA or Cornell and UVA for the site to make a judgment at the 95% confidence interval that one school is preferrable to another.</p>
<p>I would venture to guess more University of Michigan students applied to Duke and Stanford than they do to Columbia or Caltech. The Michigan student body probably values the strong athletic traditions that the former two privates have compared to Columbia or Caltech.</p>
<p>For all the matchups between top 12-15 private schools that they do share cross admits with, UVA and Michigan lose the lion share of them.</p>
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Exactly, TITCR. Parchment doesn’t pretend to be the godsend Revealed Preference Study to rule them all; it merely has enough statistical data points (thousands between certain schools) for us to draw logical conclusions of the desirability of certain schools vis-a-vis others. We can deduce the rest by using common sense.</p>
<p>And where did they get that data? From schools or other reliable sources. Or from random posters on the interwebs?</p>
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<p>I think your guess is off the mark. At least for Michigan residents, and on the Duke part of it. One indication is how many SAT score reports are sent to a school from a state, which the College Board tells us. For Michigan residents, 2011 college bound seniors sent the following numbers of SAT score reports:</p>
<p>Harvard 702
Northwestern 674
Princeton 516
Cornell 474
MIT 474
Yale 455
Columbia 439
Stanford 418
Penn 390
Chicago 353
Brown 335
Duke 295
WUSTL 281
Dartmouth 276
Johns Hopkins 230
Carnegie Mellon 225
Georgetown 174
Caltech 125</p>
<p>Of course, not all score reports turn into complete applications, and we don’t know that all these Michigan kids also applied to the University of Michigan (though it’s a good bet most of them did, insofar as 2,157 Michigan residents sent SAT score reports to the University of Michigan, far more than to any other school, notwithstanding that it’s an ACT-dominant school and these kids were applying from an ACT-dominant stat ). </p>
<p>I’d say Duke is of at best middling popularity among the students most likely to cross-apply to Michigan and elite privates, namely Michigan residents whose educational horizons include top tier private institutions. Pattern seems pretty clear: most of them are going for the academics, not for sports.</p>
<p>And whatever would lead you to believe that a Michigan fan would ever transfer loyalties and become a Duke fan, of all things? </p>
<p>As for Caltech: well just not that many people apply to Caltech. From anywhere.</p>
<p>The Penn numbers are highlighted and are similar. Duke 29% UVa 26%. You say UVa and Michigan lose the lion’s share of admits to the very top ranked schools. So what. So does Duke. They even lose out to Brown and Columbia. The info is still pretty useless . For the great majority of students, geographical issues and self selection are going to come into play. HYP are going to get most students . None of this is new. Now, do you dispute that UVa has more desirable men and women and better nightlife than Duke since Coll… Prow… says so- so it must be true.
This is all such nonsense. All of these schools we’ve been talking about are fine schools and appeal to different kinds of kids. The kid who likes UVa may very well not like Chicago and vice versa. Prestige and rankings will always trump things for alot of people.</p>