Families are stressed out about college. And why shouldn’t they be? If all you hear about college admissions is what gets reported in the media, you would be certain that outstanding students everywhere are being denied admissions in the schools they so rightly deserve while taking out massive loans for jobs that don’t exist.
Admissions
The Selectivity Myth: Or No Really, I Can Get Your Kid into the Ivy League
A couple of weeks ago I came across a link to an Time article titled: College Admissions: The Myth of Higher Selectivity by Dan Edmonds. I read it, thought about commenting because of the cherry picking of stats used, and then got over it and decided I had better things to do.
Then this past weekend I found myself reading College Admissions Misconception by The Ivy Coach, a blog by a private college counseling group that is “Making Ivy League Admission A Reality.”
States with Highest Representation at Elite Colleges
 |
It seems to me that one of the appeals of attending a nationally recognized college would be to interact with other students from across the nation. And from a more cynical perspective, it allows that school to be “nationally” recognized.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the “residence and migration of first-time freshman” from the Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database for a select number of colleges. I picked the colleges based on general prominence and an eye to geographic diversity–no sort of scientific rational involved.