Why is Stanford hard to get into? Forum

[071816]

Harvard has to be a numbers whore because it has a huge class and the amount of applicants who have the requisite #'s is limited.

Isn't that the reason it should not be a numbers wh**e? Because not many applicants have those numbers, so it should look at softs, right? What am I missing?

You serious, Clark?

Yes.

You're missing the fact that Harvard's incoming class size is enormous compared to that of Stanford and Yale and, thus, they can't afford to rely as heavily on softs so they focus more on numbers.

[bk641]

Harvard has to be a numbers whore because it has a huge class and the amount of applicants who have the requisite #'s is limited.

Isn't that the reason it should not be a numbers wh**e? Because not many applicants have those numbers, so it should look at softs, right? What am I missing?

You serious, Clark?

Yes.

if not many people have H median numbers, they are in danger of their medians dropping if they start looking beyond the numbers and they then get applicants they gave offers to deciding to go to Y, S, or even CCN on a big scholarship. hence, they try to lock up as many high scoring applicants as they can to ensure they maintain their medians.

H and S are for all purposes peer schools, just on different coasts. no real difference between #2 and #3.

[094320]

..

[Na_Swatch]

Harvard has to be a numbers whore because it has a huge class and the amount of applicants who have the requisite #'s is limited.

Isn't that the reason it should not be a numbers wh**e? Because not many applicants have those numbers, so it should look at softs, right? What am I missing?

If Harvard put too much weight on softs, it would make it harder for Harvard to maintain their medians. Harvard has ridiculously high medians and a huge class size; only a select amount of applicants can help them maintain their medians and if they get too picky, they'll have to take a hit with their medians. It doesn't seem like Harvard wants to do that.

Stanford, on the other hand, emphasizes the LSAT much less the most other T14 schools. Stanford has shown a pretty consistent devotion to preferring softs and GPA over LSAT. And Stanford has been #2 plenty of times in the past decade with this approach.

You guys are emphasizing LSAT/ GPA medians a bit too much in terms of weight of USNWR rankings. These things only make up 25% of the total ranking score, so in terms of HYS they pretty much are solidified in these slots even with large variations in LSAT/ Medians (like how someone mentioned Yale could drop to 155 LSAT Median and still be ranked 1).

In the end LSAT/GPA are still going to be the most important elements, but all 3 of HYS have the ability to weigh other factors heavily. For example, HYS has maintained/raised is medians the past 3 years even though a there's been a key switch in the admissions office with straight through students going from 50+% of the class to under 25% for the class of 2013 and 2014.

[metaphobe]

. .

[Bildungsroman]

Also, if you look at the average age of 1Ls at Stanford, you'll notice that it's significantly higher than the corresponding age for Harvard and Yale.

The only info I could find said that the average age of Stanford's entering students is 25, which is on par with its peer schools.

[metaphobe]

Also, if you look at the average age of 1Ls at Stanford, you'll notice that it's significantly higher than the corresponding age for Harvard and Yale.

The only info I could find said that the average age of Stanford's entering students is 25, which is on par with its peer schools.

According to SLS's official website, the average age of the class of 2013 is 25.

According to YLS's official website, the average age of the class of 2014 is 24. I tried looking for the class of 2013 numbers but couldn't find them.

I'm no statistics whiz, but given that Stanford and Yale have similar class sizes and similarly small class sizes (around 200), I'd say a variation of 1 year is significant.

I couldn't find current average age data on HLS , but some random sites with 2006/2007ish data (here and here (LinkRemoved)) list average age as 24.

[Bildungsroman]

I'm no statistics whiz, but given that Stanford and Yale have similar class sizes and similarly small class sizes (around 200), I'd say a variation of 1 year is significant.

Since those are obviously rounded numbers, the variation is plausibly much smaller than 1 year, and a 1 year difference is still not that big. Especially not big enough to justify the assertion that Stanford likes "older applicants with more life/career experience" a lot. I do think Stanford is much more holistic than its peer schools, but I don't think their lower LSAT emphasis is an attempt to compensate for the supposedly heavier burden that very slightly older applicants face.