It's an optional question, but I always read into things and overthink and then ponder my life decisions at night:
1. Why would someone choose to fill out this question?
2. Can I choose to only list some of the schools I'm applying to?
Thank you!
I think that insecure schools, or those that are considered safety schools, ask this question as they can data mine the answers to figure out where students rank them, and where students go who get accepted, but don't matriculate to their school.
If a school sees that the majority of their applicants don't apply to the top 5 schools, just a sign that you might be a safety school. Or if schools that competed on par with them, suddenly are taking more and more of their accepted students it means their perceived value has decreased.
If SOPHAS aggregates all this data, like where students applied, were accepted, and ultimately ended up, a computer program could create competitiveness rank list based on how students view the holistic package the school offers, not only perceived prestige, it also price and geography and anything else.
You see it all the time on this message board, people who get accepted to ten schools, but of course you can only go to one.
Maybe if the schools see an applicant who they think they are competitive for, but might get into a better school with a cheaper tuition, they might offer a bit of a scholarship. Given that schools evaluate thousands of applicants, all they have to do is give your application a ranking number based on competitiveness, see where else you applied, and let the computer decide if it is worth it to offer you a scholarship.
Some of the soulless corporate driven schools like BU or Columbia probably do this every year in order to maximize their competitiveness. It's probably like money ball for admissions departments.
Let's say you answer and ALL of the other schools you're applying to have a higher tuition, then the computer says don't offer them a merit scholarship as tuition won't be a deal breaker. Heck, based on previous years data they could compare you to people who had about the same gpa, test scores, years of experience and applied to the same schools to try to predict what you'll do.
In some respects public health schools are a buyer's market as even somebody with good, but not a stellar application can get into the best schools. Of course, when you get done it doesn't mean you'll automatically get a job super quickly like some other degrees.
It probably makes the school's life easy if they accept the best applicants they can, or at least people who could get a decent paying job even without an MPH, so that their career services doesn't grow huge just to help a ton of unemployed graduates.
