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[quote=Anonymous]1. I appreciate your frustration with people who offer result-oriented approaches that favor one particular school.  Trust me when I say I really don't care which school gets favored.

2. What's my definition of "desirable" in this context? Probably the one school that the average applicant most wants ... or something like that.  If we could poll applicants and ask them to assume they found a magic ticket to be admitted to any school, and then ask them to list their top-3 schools, then I suppose we might get at the answer.  But we can't do that.  So my admissions % approach looks at how applicants spend their limited money & time.  It assumes the applicants understand their spending at schools with lower admissions % offers less chance of success, but that they apply anyway because they consider the school more desirable.

3. I agreed above that a school of a small size (or a large size) can skew the numbers.  I'm not sure how to determine where the appropriate cut-off is.  I suppose some smart person could tease out a number based on the average number of slots available over a broad range of schools.  In the absence of smarts, I'd just go by gut feel.  In the world of college admissions, I feel like a college with a freshman class of 2000 can be compared with a bigger college having a freshman class of 10,000.  But Curtis's class of 40 feels too small to me.

Also, for Curtis at least, I wonder if a bigger factor in determining skew is the type of education offered.  In other words, are the Curtis numbers skewed because the school is small?  Or is it because not many people really want to go to a music college?

4. Of course your DC didn't make a mistake in selecting a college.  First, just because the raw admissions % numbers might suggest that Harvard is "more desirable" to the collective, those don't tell how desirable it is to an individual.  No one can fault your DC if she just hates that Boston accent!  Second, I hope we'd agree that a 1% difference in admissions % is pretty negligible, so it does not suggest your DC's college is much less different from Harvard in terms of "desirability."  Third, would you really stand behind your most-applications approach, and suggest that your DC should attend Drexel over her Ivy league school, because Drexel has many more applicants in toto?  I doubt it.[/quote]

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