<p>Byerly-</p>
<p>Your posts have started to become egregious. You have failed to respond to any of my opinions or questions in #101 this thread while continuing to post in it; this suggests you concede my correctness and find my questions as to your credentials, the importance of cross-admit data, etc to be unanswerable. I trust I am wrong in these assertions and that you will subsequently explain why.</p>
<p>Mensa:
[quote]
The common admit data, in the event it could be verified, would be highly relevant.For example, if there were two or three very similar restaurants on the same street, and one of them routinely gets 80% of the diners, doesn't that suggest the food is better? If Harvard routinely gets 80% of the common admits, what's the explanation? It seems pretty obvious to me. No, it's not the food.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is a grave oversimplification that, if taken at face value, would surely result in many unintelligent decisions. Your example suggests that the relevance of the cross-admit data is to determine which is better (because "cross-dining" data ceteris paribus demonstrates the better food.) Measuring a college's quality (i.e., how "good" it is and whether it is "better" than another) is not so simple a task! Restaurants defy rigid quantitative standards as well, but at least it would be EASIER to say "within this price range, this type of food, this proximity to my house + a couple other characteristics" and then compare for purported food quality.</p>
<p>Colleges CANNOT be broken down that way. Harvard, Yale and Princeton all undeniably have different campus atmospheres, and the extent of this difference is noted by students at any of the institutions should he/she bother to spend any amount of time at the other two. For some students, like me, the difference in atmosphere was so notable that it immediately determined what school to attend. </p>
<p>Cross-admit data is stunningly irrelevant because choosing a college is such an utterly personal decision that is only convoluted by a desire to stastically "simplify" the matter. If 84.3% of students spent authentic time at both Harvard and Yale and decided that Harvard was the better fit - EXCELLENT. I hope that this was the way they arrived at their decision; judging based on which school felt more comfortable to them. However, their decisions have no relevance to me since the atmosphere that defines my comfort is incomparable, intangible and certainly not stastically quantifiable.</p>
<p>I think I illuminated on this more thoroughly in post #101 and I apologize for reiterating, but it pains me to see the discussion regress to the assumed idea that cross-admit data is relevant to a student's decision or that it helps answer the question with no answer, the title of this thread: Yale v. Princeton v. Harvard. (For a couple of examples of appropriate thread titles, see the post I made previous to #101 in this thread... post #something-in-the-late-90s.)</p>
<p>I invite, encourage- nay BEG for some refutation of my ideas here and esp. post #101, because in discussion, being brutally criticized is much more helpful in finding the truth than is being uncontested and ignored.</p>