Playing the Odds

If you’re a gambling man, you might be better off taking your money to Vegas than putting it on admission to any Ivy League school.

This year Harvard had a 6.9 percent acceptance rate. Book of Odds, a Web site which describes itself as “a reference on the odds of everyday life,” has converted that number into betting style odds.

Harvard was listed as the toughest school to get into—for every 14.23 students who applied, just one was accepted.  At Yale, the school with the second-lowest odds of admission in the Ivies, the chances were one in 13.33.

Based on these odds, the chances that you will make it to the age of 96 (assuming you live until age 13) are greater than those of getting into Harvard or Yale. Said another way, you’re more likely to live to attend your 70th college reunion than you are to be admitted to either school in the first place.

Columbia sits in third and Princeton in fourth, where the odds of admission are one in 11.21 and 10.22, respectively. At Brown, the odds that any student will be admitted are one in 9.13.

To put those numbers into perspective, vegassports-odds.com puts the odds of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series at nine to one, meaning that a championship for the Cubs is predicted to be more likely than admission to any of these schools.

The Cubs haven’t won the World Series since the Roosevelt administration—Theodore Roosevelt, that is.

Rounding out the Ivy League, the odds of admission are one in 8.33 at Dartmouth, one in 5.84 at Penn, and one in 5.24 at Cornell, according to Book of Odds.

For many of the schools in the Ivy League, the number of applications reached all-time highs this year—and the acceptance rates again reached all-time lows. Yale was the notable exception to this trend, with its admit rate stagnating.

For the potential politicos among you, Book of Odds says that the chances a given president attended Harvard are 1 in 5.38.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.