People admitted to Harvard and Yale... Forum

[mallard]

Isn't the main thing that Harvard wins out against Stanford pretty handily went it comes to cross admits there?

Haribo's post seems to suggest this isn't true.

I don't have the data to speculate otherwise.

Just looking at the large percentage difference in yields and also the fact that there quite a lot of H and S cross-admits I don't see how it could be false.

I mean statistically, the only way the numbers could work out would be if there are large groups of people getting into S, but not H, then turning down S.

Isn't this exactly what my post explains?

[Na_Swatch]

Isn't the main thing that Harvard wins out against Stanford pretty handily went it comes to cross admits there?

Haribo's post seems to suggest this isn't true.

I don't have the data to speculate otherwise.

Just looking at the large percentage difference in yields and also the fact that there quite a lot of H and S cross-admits I don't see how it could be false.

I mean statistically, the only way the numbers could work out would be if there are large groups of people getting into S, but not H, then turning down S.

Isn't this exactly what my post explains?

your post is distorting the numbers too much though... S and Y are basically the same size and also with the amount of people who get into S and not H (thus making them very likely to go to S), the percentage gap is still very significant.

[romothesavior]

It is absolutely out of the question that Haribo would "logic fail." She certainly didn't in this situation.

Imagine that the schools are much smaller. 55 students attend H from 80 admits; 20 students attend S from 45 admits; and 25 students attend Y from, let's say for the sake of convenience, 25 admits - a 100% yield.

Y is very hard to get in to. So let's assume, again contrary to fact, that everyone who gets in to Y gets in to S and H as well.

We see from this that H and S have actually lost exactly the same admits. H has a much higher yield rate, but its yield rate is identical to S's among non-Y admits.

Now, these are fake numbers, but it's almost certain that a phenomenon like this obtains in the actual stats. It's unlikely that it accounts for the entire gap, or even as much of it as Haribo suggests. But you need to think harder before saying "logic fail."

Yeah that's pretty much it. It does have one caveat: the number of Yale admits who applied to Y and H, but not S is similar to the number that applied to Y and S, but not H. Or it could be true that the size of these groups is sufficiently small in comparison to group that applied to all 3 of HYS and were admitted to Yale.

I obviously am just speculating.

But I have no idea what the real statistics are, I'm just speculating.

If this assumption does not hold, Haribo's statement is invalid. However, it does seem to be pretty reasonable.

Do we know the numbers on this? I think there is a good possibility that many students apply to H/Y but not S. I think it is likely that the number of students who do so is greater than the number who apply to S/Y but not H. I can't think of many reasons off the top of my head to apply to Y/S but not to H (class size maybe?), but there are some reasons why people might apply to Y/H and not to S. Y/H have more lay prestige, and many people may have a geographic bias against CA.

[AngryAvocado]

It is absolutely out of the question that Haribo would "logic fail." She certainly didn't in this situation.

Imagine that the schools are much smaller. 55 students attend H from 80 admits; 20 students attend S from 45 admits; and 25 students attend Y from, let's say for the sake of convenience, 25 admits - a 100% yield.

Y is very hard to get in to. So let's assume, again contrary to fact, that everyone who gets in to Y gets in to S and H as well.

We see from this that H and S have actually lost exactly the same admits. H has a much higher yield rate, but its yield rate is identical to S's among non-Y admits.

Now, these are fake numbers, but it's almost certain that a phenomenon like this obtains in the actual stats. It's unlikely that it accounts for the entire gap, or even as much of it as Haribo suggests. But you need to think harder before saying "logic fail."

No, I understand her point about the effect on the general yield rate. What I don't understand is how that point relates to the specific question about the performance of HLS and SLS when it comes to retaining YLS cross-admits. HLS could theoretically have a general yield rate of 1% and still outperform SLS in the YLS cross-admit battle.

Also, if both Stanford and Harvard lose 20 students to Yale, but Harvard likely has more cross-admits thanks to a far larger class size, it still suggests that Harvard performs significantly better than SLS when it comes to wooing students away from the almighty YLS.

[Haribo]

Oops, didn't mean to start a firestorm here. I just think yield isn't a very useful metric when comparing classes with different class sizes.

[I'll admit it is about the only stat on the rankings where having smaller class sizes is a detriment. Spending per student is a particularly egregious example of a statistic that unfairly punishes larger schools.]

[BlueCivic]

Egregious anti-Stanford trolling.

Stanford's yield rate is basically not comparable to Yale's or Harvard's. It's pretty fair to assume they don't fare that well in cross-admit battles with either peer school.

Stanford's yield rate is comparable to Harvard once you normalize for class size and Yale cross-admits. They lose about the same number of raw students to Yale each year as Harvard, but because of their smaller class size the yield rate is much lower.

I'd be interested to see if it really is the case that HLS and SLS yields are equal when you normalize for the Yale losses. If someone had the data to determine that it would be interesting.

FWIW, The fact that SLS and HLS lose about the same amount of raw students to YLS indicate that a much higher percentage of HLS admits stick with HLS over YLS than do SLS admits. I'd guess this is due to the fact that SLS and YLS are more similar to each other than either is to HLS and students view YLS as a better product of the same basic type as SLS, while HLS is a different type of product.

[BlueCivic]

I'd also be interested in how HLS' larger class size figures into selectivity. They have to get a lot more people with great numbers to attend than do SLS or YLS to keep up their stats. I'm not really wrapping my head around what that means with respect to selectivity or the other metrics that we are discussing.