Correction appended*

“Northwestern? Is that the school in Boston?”

Hear that enough times and it’s hard not to develop an inferiority complex. But are we really the “second-choice” school that some Ivy League-obsessed peers would lead us to believe?

It’s true that most of the students admitted to Northwestern choose to attend other colleges. About 34 percent of the students in the class of 2011 who got into Northwestern ended up coming here, which means about two-thirds of admitted students went elsewhere. In the world of college rankings that 34 percent is called our “yield.” You might think that a school’s yield corresponds to its reputation. But that’s not necessarily the case: Although we tie with Brown University at #14 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, Brown yielded 56 percent for the class of 2011 — 22 percentage points higher than NU*.

Northwestern isn’t the only school with a low yield compared to similarly ranked universities. The numbers suggest an East Coast bias for prospective college students. Although the California Institute of Technology ranked fifth in U.S. News and World Report this year, its yield was only 37 percent compared to the lower-ranked Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s 69 percent yield. The same is true of the University of Chicago, which ties with Columbia at #9 but had a yield lower by 25 percentage points.

Michael E. Mills, Northwestern’s associate provost for university enrollment, described NU’s location as a “double-edged sword.”

“It’s hard to get Northeasterners to see Illinois as something other than a state you fly over,” he said.

For some students, though, Chicago is Northwestern’s greatest draw. Nick Renold, a freshman in McCormick, chose NU over Cornell because of its location. He said that he hasn’t heard any criticism regarding his decision to turn down an Ivy League school.

“I went to the job fair a few weeks ago,” he said, “and there were a lot of companies that told me they hire from the Ivy League and from Northwestern – only those schools.”

Christopher Watson, the new dean of undergraduate admission, acknowledged that, but said although “there’s always going to be the Harvard, Yale, Princeton” group, the admissions office isn’t focused on directly competing with them.

“They’re 300 years old,” he said, “and you’re also fighting history here. Those things take generations to overcome.”

A league of our own

Academically, many say that that Northwestern is in the same tier as the Ivies. Although College Prowler: The Big Book of Colleges ‘08 ranks Northwestern’s academics below those of Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Dartmouth, it considers NU on par with Brown, Duke, Harvard and Yale.

Northwestern hired two marketing firms to measure the perceptions of NU held by parents, students and guidance counselors. Through about 1,000 phone interviews done between September 2006 and May 2007, the firms found that Northwestern is seen as being academically on the same level with schools like the University of Pennsylvania and exceeding Duke and Washington University in St. Louis.

According to the questionnaire sent to all admitted students, 91 percent said that academic reputation was the most important factor in their decision to apply to Northwestern, followed by quality of the curriculum and caliber of faculty – indications that people aren’t choosing Northwestern for its dating scene.

Some students seem gripped by a strange paranoia, believing that someone else sees NU as a second-choice school but not actually thinking that themselves - and we’re not the only school that does this. An article last year in Brandeis’ school newspaper lamented that, “Brandeis seems to have garnered a reputation as a ’second-choice’ school - a place for those rejected from the Ivy League or similarly exclusive institutions, like Tufts or Northwestern.”

“I knew before I applied that this would be a place where a lot of people who didn’t get into the Ivies would go,” Weinberg freshman Abby Lembersky said, “but I accepted that and I don’t think it’s a second-choice school.”

Others seemed genuinely shocked that anyone would consider Northwestern second-tier.

“I think that’s evil – it’s wrong,” Medill freshman Meredith Smith, said. “Northwestern is the Harvard of the Midwest.”

Moving up

Although more than 65 percent of admitted students choose to go elsewhere, most of those who do decide to attend Northwestern say they aren’t doing so as a last resort. According to Mills, 66.5 percent of freshmen entering in the fall of 2006 indicated that Northwestern was their first-choice school. In fact, Northwestern’s popularity has been skyrocketing in the past few years, Watson said .

Last year alone applications were up by 19 percent, a jump Watson called “unheard of,” even considering Northwestern’s switch to the Common Application.

“When you look at Northwestern’s peer schools, like the Ivies and then also places like Duke and Stanford, none of those schools have seen the increase in applications that Northwestern has in the past few years – none of them even come close,” Watson said.

Perhaps more significantly, the academic profile of the students applying - in categories such as SAT scores, GPAs and class ranking - has seen one of the greatest increases of any university.

“Statistically, Northwestern’s doing really well,” Watson said. “I would say it’s one of the hottest schools in the country.”

In 2006, students who applied to Northwestern also tended to apply to Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Stanford and the University of Michigan. But according to Mills, the “last two years have been outrageously different,” with Ivy League schools creeping up into that pool more than ever before. He attributed this partially to the all-time largest number of high school graduates applying to colleges and a recent trend of the best applicants all applying to the same schools.

So at the end of the day, admissions statistics and focus groups aside, does Northwestern feel like a second-choice school? According to many students, not at all.

“I think Northwestern has better recognition now than it did before,” said Renold. “I know that once you get up to such high academic standards within all the schools, you can really choose any one of them and you’ll be just as successful.”

So what are we - first-choice or second? It probably depends on whom you ask, but the numbers are definitely increasing in our favor. Says Watson, “If somebody has an inferiority complex, they need to get over it, and get over it fast.”

Correction — November 26, 2007: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the difference between Brown’s and NU’s yield is 15 percent, instead of 15 percentage points. Thanks to commenter David S. North by Northwestern regrets the error.

Correction — November 28, 2007: The original version of this article used an incorrect number to calculate Northwestern’s admissions rate and yield. It used a figure that reflected the number of students admitted without including Early Decision students or those admitted off the waitlist. The original number was 4,852. The correct number was 5,800. The other figures in the article have been corrected accordingly. North by Northwestern regrets the error.