<p>I am looking at our school's scattergrams for students with 4.6+ and 1500+ (CR, M).</p>
<p>Some Top schools seem to be 'possible' while Yale appears to be simply out of the question. For Penn, Duke and Harvard there are 'several' green squares - but with Yale, there is one lone green square in a sea of red x's. Same thing for Stanford which is ALL red. </p>
<p>True, I don't know the applicants and their 'other' factors, but does anyone have any thoughts and why Stanford and Yale appear to be so very elusive for a high school where each year the top 2% do get into other Ivys and Top schools?</p>
<p>well, the nationwide stats support what you’re seeing on the scattergrams, goosel – the current USNews college guide (for 2010) says Yale is #1 in selectivity.</p>
<p>over on the Harvard forum, chicagonh talked about this. he quotes US News as saying that its 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.” in the same ranking, Harvard, Princeton, MIT and Stanford are all tied at #2 for selectivity. of course, we’re sort of splitting hairs here …</p>
<p>but here’s my question: could a school have a slightly lower admit rate, but also be slightly easier to get into if you were a top student? it seems to me that if you have a ton of unqualified students applying to a school, then your admit rate would lower. harvard has a slightly lower admit rate than yale (7% v. 7.5%), but that may be due to the fact that it’s deluged with more unqualified applicants who just have heard of it and throw in an application. on the other hand, yale has a smaller student body, and it seems that it’s harder for top students to get in there. i’ve seen that anecdotally, you also have, and the US News stats document it.</p>