NYU Langone Fall 2008

I have been a silent observer in this forum so far. I recently got admitted to the WEEKEND prg.

My profile:

28 yr M-I-T, 700, Fin., 7 years WE.

ermmmm, MIT undergrad? I would have predicted you as another shoe-in.

Or the other MIT - Male Indian Technie? That's how I interpreted it

Anybody has heard back from Kroll? I cant believe that they have us waiting like this!

Looks like a busy day today. Congrats to the admits. I am getting really nervous now. I am still waiting for a decision for my weekend-only option. Does anyone have an updated count of the database?

Tangaroo got it right I thought the '-' would've made it easier to interpret. Yes, it's Male-Indian-Techie.

Congrats to everyone on their acceptances! 268 is the current database count.

Thanks for the update. Hmmm, 268...and plus some of the admits today.....

Okay, I think I can still relax for a few days.

I am still waiting to hear also for the weekend only program. At least we haven't been rejected yet, they are still considering us!

I haven't heard anything after 5.5 weeks. It's like someone else said, they probably have a huge pile of Kroll reports sitting around waiting to be touched. No one on either message board has reported a Kroll confirmation yet.

Here is the updated candidate pool with the analysis of the wait:
p474295#p474295

I am guessing that we’ll only start to hear about Kroll when the admit count surpasses 400. I would imaging that a higher level adcom person needs to process / approve the background reports that Kroll issues. That person is probably busy reviewing applications right now, but who really knows?

I speculate that if NYU were expecting to find a lot of issues with our Kroll reports, they would have made it more of a priority to process them. Right now, they have 200 seats in the class to fill in 2 weeks, so they are probably scrambling a little to get that done.

In addition to the analysis of the candidates, I was curious about the quality of undergraduate institutions of the admitted applicants. While I won’t name any of the exact institutions of the people admitted, I will show you this. Please see the attached excel file. I took the information from US News’ ranking database. Because they separate colleges into National, Liberal Arts, Baccalaureate, etc, I was originally unable to compare one college to another. For example, is Amherst better than UPenn? However, I got around this by putting every college in the US News database together and making my own ranking system. That database is privileged information, so I had to take out the data used to come up with the rankings. I can, however, tell you how I got to these numbers. I ranked all of the colleges using this system:
34% Peer assessment score, 18% SAT average, 18% Acceptance rate, 15% Graduation rate, 10% Freshmen in top 10% of HS class, 2.5% Freshman retention rate, 2.5% Avg. alumni giving rate

This is the result of that system: 52% of the admits that went to a US undergraduate institution went to one of the top 100 of the 939 US schools. 78.5% of the admits went to a school in the top 25th percentile of US schools. Please note that 70 out of 423 admits, or 16.5%, went to a non-US institution. I didn't rank them but I did put a box in cell K30 that shows what country they studied in. India is the most dominant country with 38.6%.

If the school that you went to isn't on this list, I didn't see it in the US News database. I may have missed a few of the lowest rated schools or the school could be unranked. Parsons for example had no information and that's a decent school.

Dude you're awesome man. I guess they don't give out CFA charter to anyone.

But I don't agree with the category you chose to rank these schools. Vanderbilt is 46? Carnegie Mellon 38? But Middlebury is 20? Pomona is 15?

I don't think you can mix and match different types of schools in the ranking like that...

I think the point is to get a general grouping of the schools and not to discern a #12 spot from a #15 spot. They're, by admission standards, the same school.

Good stuff CFA

I agree. It isn't perfect and it wasn't really meant to be. I was just trying to find a rough top 100 and a rough top 25th percentile. It's pretty much just an interesting analysis with the goal of getting those histograms and a general feel for the quality of the admitted students' undergraduate institutions. What this analysis doesn't touch is how well each person did at those institutions and how good of program they were in. For example, Stern undergrad is #38 in National only and #68 on my ranking with every college. However, their business undergrad is considered top 10. So just take this for what it's worth. It's interesting but not much more.

Pomona is an excellent college.

Great info, CFA!

On the surface, it seems as if NYU explicitly targets people from top undergrad schools, but after thinking about it, I have a few questions about my assumption.

The first thing I wonder is: does NYU look for people from good schools, or do people who graduated from good schools look for NYU?

We all know (painfully know) that you have to put in a lot of time and effort just to get past the gate at NYU. Only someone who values education very highly would do such a thing. Since such strong values on education are most often instilled at an early age, you would presume that they were present when selecting an undergrad school. Thus, those who target and get into top MBA programs also likely targeted and got into top undergrads.

Conversely, those who ended up in lower ranked schools either did not value the quality of their undergrad’s brand as much, could not get into the better school, or made a decision based on finances to go to a lesser school. For the most part, these conditions and feelings are likely to persist when considering graduate schools, dissuading such people from applying to top programs.

Because of this, it seems reasonable to guess that the top MBA program’s applicant pools will likely be represented by far more people from higher ranked u-grad schools than people from bottom schools.

Furthermore, top schools help students land great jobs, and NYU clearly cares about the quality of employment and job progression. So it makes me wonder, does the school matter, or do the life accomplishments to follow, which certainly have been facilitated by a prestigious undergrad degree, matter.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly: is Adcom motivated to recruit from top undergrads? I don’t think there is a single MBA ranking that includes quality of the undergrad school that the applicant attends. So unlike GMAT or GPA, the undergrad schools brand does not directly impact NYU’s bottom line or brand image. Certainly it is considered, but probably well behind other things like job, gmat, GPA and essays.

So, my opinion is that the type of people who target and get into top undergrads will also target and get into top grad schools; however, that NYU is not specifically emphasizing undergrad school in their selection process, because it does not directly impact their bottom line or brand image.


Again, great report, CFA. It's a lot of fun to think about and analyze the decision process of adcom.