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<p>If your D’s IQ were 15 pts higher, would she do better GPA-wise?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t expect any difference in average IQ between some top schools because admission to the most selective schools is not based on SAT scores.</p>
<p>High IQ wouldn’t automatically translate into high GPA, usually it would also take hard work. csdad’s D has high IQ with good work habit, but at her selective college she was only able to get “average GPA.” The reason is probably because most students at her also have high IQ and work just as hard as her.</p>
<p>Average IQ between top schools is not that different, but that’s probably not the case when you go down to next tier (on average). Selective schools do use SAT socres when admitting students. They don’t look for the highest, but they do care about minimum. Most selective schools don’t normally admit schools with below 2000 SAT unless there is a hook. I would think it is because they think students need to have certain minimum score in order to succeed at their school.</p>
<p>“admission to the most selective schools is not based on SAT scores.”</p>
<p>??? average SAT scores are in direct correlation with admission percentage.</p>
<p>@coureur, no need to get defensive. In post #315 I said:</p>
<h2>“coureur, absolutely, it’s great that your daughters were high achievers and hard workers and got the results they wanted. But there are not only two choices: “top” schools and everything else (“the local mediocre U”). And not all students like your daughters end up at the Ivies or other elite universities–many of them don’t apply in the first place. Not everyone wants to be on the east coast, or at a very competitive institution, or at a university where undergraduate teaching is not the priority. And if they are especially non-conformist, they are going to seek out alternatives that are either off most people’s radar or that speak to them in a particular way. As hard as it is for some visitors to this site to comprehend, an Ivy League diploma is not everybody’s dream.”</h2>
<p>It is a fact that undergraduate teaching is not THE priority at Ivies (or other doctorate-granting universities, for that matter). It is also a fact that at such institutions faculty are rewarded for their published research rather than for positive reviews from the undergrads they have to teach. (This is another reason why I have a problem with the USNWR rankings–they place far too much emphasis on factors other than teaching/student engagement.) </p>
<p>In any case, I didn’t (and wouldn’t) say teaching at the Ivies is inferior to that at less-selective large public and private universities. I WOULD say that it is likely to be inferior to that at smaller LACs, where teaching is “the thing” and the faculty are there because they want to work with undergrads.</p>
<p>You know, there doesn’t have to be a Hobson’s choice between research and good teaching. Ideally, teaching undergraduates will benefit a scholar’s research by continually re-exposing it to (and grounding it in) the concerns of non-specialists. Scholarship will benefit instruction, by continually pushing the boundaries of what the teacher already knows.</p>
<p>Admittedly, this ideal is hard to achieve. I doubt any university consistently does achieve it. But I would expect at least a few schools to hit the mark often.</p>
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<p>There’s actually a big difference between Michigan and Berkeley on that score. Until recently, Berkeley has been, by design, over 90% Californians; now it’s starting to ramp up its admission of OOS and international students, mainly because it needs the extra tuition revenue. Michigan has long been much more geographically diverse, overall about 35% OOS or international but recent entering classes have been about 40% OOS or international. Yes, that still leaves it “predominantly” in-state, but the difference between that and many of the elite privates is much less than you imagine. Penn, for example, draws well over half its students from the Washington-Boston corridor, and about 40% of them from just 3 states, PA, NY, and NJ. At Stanford, over half the class comes from California, Oregon, Washington, or Arizona. At Cornell, 60% of the entering class comes from New York or a state that abuts it. At USC, 60% of the class comes from California alone. That’s not so very different from Michigan.</p>
<p>There are about 1,600 international undergrads at Michigan. There are more New Yorkers, Californians, and Texans at Michigan than at Penn, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, or Yale; Harvard has 3 more Texans but fewer New Yorkers and Californians, and Cornell has far more New Yorkers but fewer Californians, Yes, I know, the student body is bigger at Michigan, so in percentage terms those states are less well represented, but the absolute numbers are impressive, and I guarantee any student who goes there is going to have no shortage of encounters with internationals and students from every region of the country.</p>
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<p>Well, there is always rowing.</p>
<p>Some LACs blow all state universities and selective universities out of the water when it comes to international diversity. If that’s your #1 criteria, look smaller, not bigger.</p>
<p>edit: also, the tags on this thread are kind of insulting…</p>
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<p>Diversity is really in the eye of the beholder. What type of diversity is there if the OOS population of Arizona comes from New Mexico or West Texas? What diversity is there to be found at Wisconsin, except for the neighbors? </p>
<p>Does anyone really believe that diversity at a school such as Cal is a meaningful statistic? Is a racial duopoly really an expression of diversity? Different races, perhaps. Diverse? My foot! </p>
<p>Fwiw, when it comes to national versus regional/local draw, Pizza’s point is correct.</p>
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I wouldn’t be bold enough to make a guarantee like that bclintonk. The reason the percentage matters more than the absolute number on this particular metric is that the average Michigan student will most likely only know a couple of hundred students or so in any sort of meaningful capacity (acquaintances) and will be friends with maybe a couple of dozen peers. Unless a University of Michigan student makes a special concerted effort to make his friend group geographically and ethnically diverse, it is very likely that the majority of his friends will be from the state of Michigan, a couple will be from Chicago and NYC suburbs while maybe one or two will be international students. The Common Data Set and IEPDS virtually confirm this to be a fact.</p>
<p>That’s where private schools like Duke or Harvard hold a major advantage. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Where Does Your Freshman Class” Research Study last year, the chance that any two randomly selected freshman will be from different states is 94% at Duke, 92% at Harvard, and only 58% at Michigan.</p>
<p>Duke
[Where</a> Does Your Freshman Class Come From? - Facts & Figures - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=198419]Where”>http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=198419)</p>
<p>Harvard
[Where</a> Does Your Freshman Class Come From? - Facts & Figures - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=166027]Where”>http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=166027)</p>
<p>Michigan
[Where</a> Does Your Freshman Class Come From? - Facts & Figures - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=170976]Where”>http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Does-Your-Freshman-Class/129547/#id=170976)</p>
<p>These figures are especially salient if one wishes to study a subject like Political Science where being exposed to diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints is of paramount importance. In a hypothetical Political Science seminar at one of these three schools that is capped at 15 students, statistically speaking, only 2 out of the 15 students at Duke or Harvard will hail from the same state while it is very likely that 7 Michigan students will be from the Wolverine state. That sort of geographic homogeneity creates a much different academic environment than the two private schools and seriously limits a Michigan student from applying a rigorous framework to evaluate a political idea since he lacks the diversity of perspectives in the classroom needed to successfully accept or refute it. Classroom discussion and the exchange of ideas the follows it is after all the cornerstone of the small class learning experience.</p>
<p>There are a lot of fantastic reasons to go to Michigan or UVA; wanting geographical diversity simply isn’t one of them.</p>
<p>@goldenboy: thanks for those links! that’s a /really/ cool website.</p>
<p>Be a little careful with this website, though. State boundaries are arbitrary; leaving aside state colleges and just looking at private ones, you can’t really compare the % of Harvard students from MA with the % of Duke students from NC because a) the distribution of the applying student body is different and b) the % of the overall population from MA is different from the % of the overall population from NC. I mean, the vast majority of Brown students are from outside RI, but that’s only because RI is tiny.</p>
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That’s a very good point. The best way to evaluate this is on an individual, case-by-case basis. I’m sure elite schools do tend to have higher diversity, but there is wide variation within selectivity classifications. For example, SUNY Buffalo has the highest percentage of undergraduate nonresident aliens (15%) among very high research institutions - higher than any of the Ivies.</p>
<p>Personally, I think socioeconomic diversity is especially important. I would argue that a student from Greenwich, CT might find greater diversity in Bridgeport - just a few miles from home - than across the country in wealthy Mercer Island, WA.</p>
<p>No elite private university comes close to the 30% of UCLA students who are Pell Grantees. Or consider the University of New Mexico, where 60% of students are non-white and 38% receive Pell Grants - even if 88% are from NM. Again, we ought to be careful with generalizations: MIT (19% Pell) is surely more diverse than Princeton (10%) or public UVA (11%).</p>
<p>Sorry, xiggi, but UW-Madison has more than 4,000 international students from more than 130 countries and is consistently ranked among the top 20 universities in the United States with the largest number of international students. Then there are all the “coasties” from NY/NJ/PA/CA who can pay the out-of-state tuition and want to go there because it is a “hot” school. And of course there are predominantly kids from Wisconsin (and surrounding states). But if you think there is any prevailing type of student in this category, you obviously haven’t been following Wisconsin politics over the past year and a half, nor do you understand the complexity of the state’s population. Can state flagships do a better job on diversity? Absolutely. But please do not throw out specious claims you can’t support. </p>
<p>Also: I think looking at states of origin is misleading if socioeconomic status is not also factored in. Did I meet kids from all over the country at Northwestern? Yes. But rather than help diversify my point of view, mostly they affirmed my belief that upper-middle-class kids are basically the same whether they are from Sherman Oaks or Cherry Hill or Edina or Overland Park or Scarsdale. My two best friends were from the North Shore, no more than a 15-minute drive from NU. And I only knew a handful of international students, because I avoided math and science classes like the plague. :)</p>
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<p>Well, since my focus (and THIS forum) is on the undegraduates, I was under the impression that a Board of Regents policy limits the university to having no more than 25 percent of its undergraduate enrollment come from out of state, except for Minnesota students, who are counted as residents under a reciprocity agreement between the two states. </p>
<p>As far as making specious claims, I wrote that diversity remains in the eye of the beholder. If you think that a school that enrolls 65 to 80 percent from two states is highly diverse, I’d say power to you! </p>
<p>While I am not sure why you had to mention politics in this context, as far as the politics of Wisconsin, I admit that, except for analyzing the school choice policies in Milwaukee, and shaking my head in disbelief at the horrendous display by some citizens in Madison, I do not follow the local shenanigans in Wisconsin very closely. Feel free to let me know about the areas that are worth following.</p>
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<p>I’ll agree with you about UC Berkeley and Wisconsin, but I think Michigan is just a qualitatively different case. Here are the top 10 states from which each of these schools draws its students (2010 data from U.S. Dept. of Education).</p>
<p>UC Berkeley: 1. California (3,004); 2. Texas (62); 3. Washington State (58); 4. New York (42); 5. New Jersey (33); 6. Maryland (32); 7. Illinois (28); 8. Florida (26); 9. Arizona (25); 10. Pennsylvania (24). Not much of a national draw there.</p>
<p>Wisconsin: 1. Wisconsin (3,479); 2. Minnesota (738); 3. Illinois (676); 4. California (134); 5. New York (132); 5. New Jersey (59); 6. Massachusetts (37); 7. Maryland (36); 8. Michigan (30); 9. Florida (25); 10. Texas (22). Clearly a heavily regional skew, with most OOS students coming from immediately adjacent states.</p>
<p>Michigan: 1. Michigan (3,946); 2. New York (361); 3. Illinois (319); 4. California (297); 5. New Jersey (234); 6. Ohio (148); 7. Pennsylvania (122); 8. Maryland (104); 9. Massachusetts (80); 10. Texas (78). And you could keep going down Michigan’s list. It’s got more from Florida (65) than UC Berkeley and Wisconsin combined. It’s got twice as many from Connecticut (57) as Berkeley and Wisconsin combined (10 and 17, respectively); nearly the same for Tennessee (18 at Michigan, 8 and 2 respectively for Berkeley and Wisconsin). It’s got more Georgians (20) than the two other schools combined. It’s got almost as many from Colorado (21) as does UC Berkeley (22), and it has more from Utah (7 at Michigan, 5 at Berkeley).</p>
<p>Now compare that to Harvard. Harvard’s top-drawing states are 1. California (236); 2. Massachusetts (219); 3. New York (202); 4. New Jersey (86); 5. Texas (81); 6. Pennsylvania (48); 7. Connecticut (42); 8. Florida (40); 9. Illinois (39); and Ohio (36). Mostly the same states as Michigan’s top OOS producers, with the order somewhat shuffled. Every one of those states except Massachusetts and Texas sends more students to Michigan than to Harvard, and for Texas it’s pretty gosh-darn close. Michigan draws more students (373) from the West (11-state region) than Harvard (322). Michigan also draws more from the South (16-state region + DC, the Census Bureau definition of the region) (Michigan 388, Harvard 313). Michigan actually outdraws Harvard by a wide margin even in the Northeast (9-state Census Bureau region) (Michigan 871, Harvard 636). And of course in the Midwest, a region where Harvard doesn’t draw particularly well, it’s no contest; even setting aside Michigan’s in-state students, Michigan draws 583 out-of-state Midwesterners, compared to 184 Midwesterners (including Michiganders) in the 2010 freshman class at Harvard, equaling or exceeding Harvard’s totals in 10 of the 12 states, most by a wide margin. (The 2 outliers are Kansas which sent 7 to Harvard and 6 to Michigan, and Minnesota which sent 34 to Harvard but only 24 to Michigan).</p>
<p>Bottom line, if you compare Michigan OOS students to Harvard’s entering class, the Michigan OOS students are every bit as geographically diverse if not more so than the students at Harvard. And they don’t come from immediately adjacent states—Michigan actually draws more from the Northeast than from the Midwest, and it’s got a better balance among the 4 regions than Harvard (42.3% of Harvard’s students are from its home region, compared to 26.9% of Michigan’s OOS students; and Harvard is notably weak in the Midwest with only 12.2% of its students drawn from there). What Michigan has on top of that, of course, is a large crop of in-state students. But it would be just dead wrong to suggest that the school doesn’t have national appeal.</p>
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<p>Sure. But that means there’s only a 42% chance they’ll be from the same state. And by the time you add a third, the chance that all three are from the same state should be only 17.6%. And by the time you add a fourth, only 7.4%. So by the time you get to the “couple of dozen” that you say you hang out with, there’s going to be lots of geographic diversity. Sure, more will be from Michigan than anywhere else. But then at Harvard more of the people you know will probably be from the Northeast than from anywhere else. And you’re only slightly more likely to meet international students at Duke (7.8% internationals) than at Michigan 6.0% internationals).</p>
<p>And by the way, Duke isn’t all that geographically diverse with respect to domestic students, either. It draws about 60% of its students from the Eastern Seaboard, from Florida to Boston. Apart from Ohio, it doesn’t attract many Midwesterners at all; only 8.4% of its incoming freshmen in 2010 were from the Midwest, and almost 40% of those were from Ohio. Apart from California, it doesn’t draw particular well in the West; only 14.2% of its 2010 incoming freshmen were Westerners, and 60% of those were Californians. And it doesn’t even draw well from the interior South, once you get away from the Atlantic states. Here are Duke’s top 10 states for freshmen beginning in 2010: 1. North Carolina (209); 2. New York (154); 3. California (148); 4. Florida (146); 5. Virginia (93); 6. New Jersey (92); 7. Texas (85); 8. Pennsylvania (74); 9. Georgia (72); 10. Ohio (53). Massachusetts (41), Connecticut (38) and South Carolina (36) aren’t far behind. So basically what Duke does is to extend the Northeast Corridor down to the Carolinas, then draw some from its south (GA, FL). And that’s the bulk of the student body. At the end of the day, it’s a pretty regional school, as most are.</p>
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Yes, that’s a personal view. I don’t personally find it that important, one way or another. It is not the reason I send my kids to college.</p>
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<p>Clinton, that is a nice way to look at it. But, consistent with my “eye of the beholder” theory, here’s a different way to look at the same numbers:</p>
<p>Michigan: 1. Michigan (69); 2. New York (6); 3. Illinois (6); 4. California (5); 5. New Jersey (4); 6. Ohio (3); 7. Pennsylvania (2); 8. Maryland (2); 9. Massachusetts (1); 10. Texas (1). </p>
<p>Now compare that to Harvard. Harvard’s top-drawing states are 1. California (23); 2. Massachusetts (21); 3. New York (20); 4. New Jersey (8); 5. Texas (8); 6. Pennsylvania (5); 7. Connecticut (4); 8. Florida (4); 9. Illinois (4); and Ohio (3). Mostly the same states as Michigan’s top OOS producers, with the order somewhat shuffled. </p>
<p>The difference? I converted the top ten you listed in percentages of the same total. I am not sure how much the percentages would change when expressed over the grand total, but the perception of the same data can be skewed by merely changing the lens.</p>
<p>But again, I do not dispute your findings. Simply looking at it differently --by controlling the absolute numbers.</p>
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Do you find ethnic diversity important?
What about the percent from out-of-state?</p>
<p>If so, why?</p>