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September 17, 2006

Beating Harvard

I used to date a girl who went to Priceton, and so I had many opportunities to witness that Priceton students and alumni really love Priceton. Honestly, most of the people I spoke to thought getting in was the best thing that ever happened to them. My friends who went to Harvard in comparison, basically thought it was okay. My understanding from the surveys of students is that this is a widespread position. So that raises an interesting question, given a choice between Priceton and Harvard, where would you go?

From today's NY Times Ending Early Admissions: Guess Who Wins?:

A few years ago, a group of economists surveyed 3,200 top high school seniors at 500 schools across the country, asking them which colleges had admitted them and which one they would attend. With this information, the researchers could estimate how often students chose one college over another.

Among those who were admitted to both Harvard and Duke — sometimes called the Harvard of the South — and who attended one of the two, about 3 percent picked Duke, according to the economists’ statistical model. Only 11 percent chose Brown, perhaps the trendiest Ivy League university in recent years, over Harvard. Princeton and Stanford win only about 25 percent of their battles with Harvard. Yale gives the stiffest competition, winning about 35 percent of the time, which in politics would be considered a crushing landslide.

Which just supports my general conclusion that smart people treat a college education as a serious investment, and that they should go where they can get the best combination of education and prestige to maximize the value of their degrees. Little surprise then, that one of the smartest subsets of the American population treats it similarly.

Posted by OneEyedMan at September 17, 2006 7:59 PM

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