Different strokes ChoatieMom. My nephew was just admitted into Michigan and received a likely letter from Cornell. He has already chosen to attend Michigan. Ivies are great, but so is Michigan.
@Alexandre It is hard to compare your 15% and acceptances of other institutions. You cannot just directly compare percentages and you even admit that it is “roughly as selective,” which implies theres other private elite universities are the same, if not, greater in selectivity. Furthermore, you cannot compare merely test score ranges and judge the selectivity of an institution. The Ivies have an average acceptance of around 8.6%. By your methodology, the Ivies on average are more selective than Michigan, so what exactly is outdated. I am not discrediting UMichigan as a top university but I am comparing relative selectivity. Applications are do not revolve around just high test scores either, which is why not all students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores get into elite schools. The 15% from Michigan is from a different pool with different applications so it is hard to assume anything. However, there is an apparent trend within schools within public schools within my county. Collectively, schools send multiple times more students to Michigan than all the Ivies. And from those high schools, the applicants to Michigan and the Ivies are the same. To be honest, I think there was just a misunderstanding between nuances of speech. Again, Michigan is an “elite” school (whatever that title entails) but in terms of raw selectivity, it is less.
XAtlas, I think we are in agreement, only I am presenting a slightly different angle. You are absolutely right when you say that the admissions philosophy and approach varies from university to university, and that it is therefore difficult to compare institutions merely by looking at admit rates and standardized test ranges. I agree with you on that point 100%. But when it comes to OOS applicants, Michigan is roughly as selective as some of the Ivies. There is no other way of interpreting the data. Obviously not Harvard or Princeton type selectivity, but definitely Cornell and Penn. If you consider the facts, you will no doubt agree.
I will start by saying that Michigan’s applicant pool is similar to that of most Ivies in terms of academic and intellectual potential. In state applicants will only apply if they are at the top of their class, and OOS applicants are, for the most part, drawn to Michigan’s world class academics, so they too tend to be quite serious about their studies.
Where the Michigan applicant pool differs vastly from most of its private peers is in its intellectual and academic diversity. In this regard, Michigan’s applicant pool is similar to Cornell’s and Penn’s, but very different from Brown and Dartmouth. Not many serious engineer or business majors would consider the majority of the Ivy League. Most students that are very serious about engineering will consider Cornell and Princeton, but that’s about it. Students seeking a business education will obviously dream of Wharton, but beyond that, the Ivies will hold very little appeal, and that’s including Cornell’s Dyson school. Tell me, how many top flight engineering students apply to Dartmouth? 500? 1,000? Michigan’s CoE receives close to 15,000 application, almost exclusively made up of 3.8 GPAs with SAT/ACT scores over 2000/30. Many students that are serious about engineering or business take a very close look at Michigan. It is one of their top choice after MIT and Stanford for Engineers and Wharton for Business.
There are also a lot of very gifted students who find Michigan appealing because of its well balanced campus life; laid back and approachable students, social life and athletic tradition. You are not going to find many “elite” universities that offer Michigan’s well-balanced and all-around excellence. Most universities appeal to a specific type. Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Chicago, JHU etc…will appeal to a very specific applicant pool. Not so in the case of Michigan, which appeal to many types of applicants.
So, while Michigan may admit more students, they admit them from an equally accomplished but significantly larger and more diverse applicant pool.