<p>The title says it all. How does GT maintain such a high caliber of engineering students with such a high admit rate?</p>
<p>They weed them out with a tough courseload.</p>
<p>I think what’s going on is the US News rankings are overrating state schools because of their sheer size.</p>
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<li><p>Quality of academics =/= acceptance rate</p></li>
<li><p>Mid 50% GPA 3.62 - 3.97
Mid 50% SAT 1280 - 1410
Mid 50% ACT 28 - 32</p></li>
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<p>Seems pretty selective to me. :rolleyes:</p>
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<p>Explain to me how that works. Looking at their methodology, it seems like being a large state school severely hurts your ranking. </p>
<p>And to the OP - you’re getting the actual explanation in the GT forum.</p>
<p>actually Michigan, Georgia Tech, Illinois, and Purdue are all “top-10” engineering schools but they have acceptance rates above 50% (especially Purdue at 70-80%), those big state schools just weed people out the first two years that do not truly belong in the engineering program.</p>
<p>Corroborating the “a ludicrous number of students flunk out every year” notion. IIRC, it’s a pretty killer program, attrition-wise. The fact that you get into Georgia Tech doesn’t mean a ton… The fact that you make it out of there with a diploma is the significant part.</p>
<p>It’s somewhat counterproductive to have this discussion in two separate threads, but as was pointed out in the other thread, Tech has a 93% freshman retention rate, and a 71% (and climbing) 5-year graduation rate for freshman.</p>
<p>Those aren’t really weed-out numbers (although, as it was argued in a different thread, Tech does have a very high rate of Engineering-to-Management transfers, but still nothing approaching “weed out” rate).</p>
<p>Harvard Extension School in that case has a 100% admittance. </p>
<p>I’ve been looking at their biotechnology program, not sure if I want to move to Boston though. They require completion of some courses in order to make admittance. Granted it’s a part-time program/continuing education branch of Harvard, but it’s still Harvard.</p>
<p>^ Wow, I totally fell for that ^</p>
<p>And … as everyone said, the true students who deserve to be in the tougher programs like engineering last for the entire experience.</p>
<p>Harvard Extension doesn’t have a 100% admittance rate for degree-seeking students. Anyone can take courses, but to be admitted to a degree program, you need minimum grades in certain classes.</p>
<p>easy to get into, hard to get out of</p>
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<p>In peer review rankings a school with more alumni is going to get more recognition then a smaller school with fewer students. Look at public and private schools that are similarly ranked on USNews, and you’ll usually find that the private school has higher SAT means.</p>
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<p>Won’t someone shed a tear for the private universities, and the students who are jeopardizing their careers by attending such criminally underrated schools? One must, and I’ll start: :. (</p>
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<p>The undergrad engineering USNWR rankings are performed by college deans familiar with the other school’s program. If a dean doesn’t know a program, he/she doesn’t rank it. So obviously smaller schools tend to receive less rankings, but since the scores are normalized, that does not impact them. </p>
<p>The graduate rankings include the above plus several factors inherently biased towards smaller programs: expenditures per faculty member (smaller programs don’t have a need for teaching faculty due to lower enrollment), student selectivity and acceptance rate (schools that admit less can obviously be a little more picky in their admission). </p>
<p>As for SAT means, you can’t isolate that to engineering programs, but to the overall schools. Public schools are generally required to enroll many more students, and often run into legislative constraints set by self-interested politicians that usually favor GPA (like in Georgia where they’ve implemented the “Freshman Index” and in Texas where the top 10% of every graduating class gain automatic acceptance to any state university) and diversity (in Georgia, there’s a legislative-driven push to admit more rural Georgians, regardless of qualification). In addition, the state schools tend to have more of the “less desirable” majors that attract lower SAT/GPA students. How many private schools offer Veterinary Medicine or Social Work, for example?</p>
<p>It’s amazing though… the private schools claiming “bias” in a USNWR ranking system. What happened the one year that USNWR tried to remove the private school bias from the overall rankings?</p>
<p>Those kids who go to state schools . . . they get all the breaks.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t change the fact that people know the state schools better if they are larger, even if they know the small school well enough to rank it. Also the public schools have more alumni. </p>
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<p>Doesn’t that mean that they are actually more selective and spend more on every student? You seem to be arguing that public schools have problems, not that US News is biased against them. For example, a school that spends little money on its students is going to do poorly on US News. But that does not mean that the US News rankings are flawed, it means that the schools spends little money on its students and has a problem. </p>
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<p>This explains a weakness of public schools; I don’t see how it excuses it. </p>
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<p>This point is irrelevant. The students still go to the school, do they not? Also you see a similar sized gap when you look at 75th percentiles, so the effect of social work majors might not be that significant.</p>
<p>because acceptance rates and 9th grade math skills are so important for successful engineers.</p>
<p>if you judge an engineering school by something as meaningless as admit rate, then you have never been in a challenging engineering program. Looking back, at least 75% of the top 5% of my high school graduating class doesn’t even have the ability to graduate from a great engineering program. Engineering was 10 times harder than anything I’ve ever taken in high school.</p>