10-31-2024, 03:35 PM
(10-31-2024, 02:08 PM)Mick Wrote: ... And may I suggest that a not insubstantial portion of the high school seniors applying to Stanford are attracted by its very unique combination of extraordinary academics and athletics? Keeping a competitive football team in place keeps the acceptance rate ridiculously low and the yield ridiculously high.
You don't know that, and I can't prove otherwise but I disagree. My guess is that it was true decades ago but at this point Stanford has a global brand as one of the world's leading universities and I don't have any sense that athletics has much to do with the number of applications it now receives. When you go to the bookstore and see it overrun with tourists, including many, many (!) Asian ones (including, anecdotally, the Hong Kong tourists looking to buy Stanford gear that happened to ask me for directions not too long ago), I'm confident that few are there due to athletics. No one applies to the Harvards, MITs and Yales for any "unique combination," and at this point I think that's true for Stanford.