<p>“Our freshman class has three times the number of Caltech-caliber students that Caltech’s freshman class has! This is an extraordinary development. Caltech enrolls some 200 freshmen each fall. Meanwhile, USC enrolls some 550 students with the same SAT scores and grade point average as Caltech’s freshman class.”</p>
<p>I’m not sure this is a meaningful statement, as it’s cherry-picking to the extreme. All big schools are going to get some Caltech-quality students, but they’ll also have a much larger number of students that wouldn’t have met Caltech standards, dragging the average numbers for the whole class down.</p>