Money's "Best Value" college rankings are out and they are somewhat surprising

Another possibility may be that some average students have excellent coaching, parenting, or packaging that land them in HYPSM, leading to no spots for other top students and resulting in average graduates from the tippy top few schools.

UMich libraries do not have a copy of Gutenberg Bible. This tells you all you need to know.

Actually the problem with the UMich library is it is located at TSUN (that school up north for you coastal types).

O-H-I-O!

This could be an interesting ranking system - by rare book collections - where Stanford, MIT, and ivies outside HYP are Tier 2.

If you were interested in going to a school with the following

**great academics,
high achieving students,
professors who taught well,
strong alum network and
great career services **

what metrics would you measure and which schools would make the top 15 list?

This may not be the right criteria for all students, but I suspect that there is a significant amount of students, particularly here on CC who would care about such a selection of schools

So any guesses?

@eiholi The current context of top students talk is in terms of SAT scores only. I think high scorers are not as clustered in these colleges as suggested by some, but they are nonetheless “clustered”… http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2014/08/04/top-100-sat-scores-ranking-which-colleges-have-the-brightest-kids/#4b73576438a1

Kudos to @VeryLuckyParent for bringing us back to the topic at hand…

I don’t think that follows at all, unless you assume the propensity of top SAT scorers to take the LSAT and apply to law school is evenly distributed geographically and across all institutions–but I don’t think that’s the case. H and Y, in particular, produce boatloads of applicants to top law schools in part because of the prestige of their own law schools and in part because it’s just part of the culture, a well-trod path from the undergraduate college across the street to the law school (or to another law school in that elite tier). I don’t have data to prove it but my sense is proportionally fewer Princeton grads follow that path. A few MIT grads end up in law school, but not many, at least in comparison to H or Y, even though the SAT profiles of those schools are probably quite similar. At a school like Michigan, even though it has a great law school in its own right, a very high percentage of the top undergraduate SAT/ACT scorers these days are in engineering or business–now the most selective undergraduate colleges at Michigan—and those students apply to law school in far smaller percentages than humanities and social sciences majors.

According to the Law School Admissions Council, the undergraduate majors that produce the most law school applicants are political science (by far the most), criminal justice, psychology, English, history, economics, philosophy, “arts & humanities-other”, and sociology, which together accounted for 52% of law school applicants in the 2015-16 application cycle–not surprising, perhaps, when you consider that those are majors that don’t lend themselves to any other “natural” career path of their own. And that doesn’t include numerous other humanities and social sciences majors–religion, anthropology, classics, foreign languages, literature, etc–that together push the humanities/social sciences total to well over 70%. In contrast, engineering majors (all kinds) represented only 1.3% of law school applicants. Business majors (all kinds) represnted slightly over 11% of law school applicants, despite comprising roughly half of all college grads.

@bclintonk Are h and Y graduating significantly more social sciences/humanities majors? What “natural” career paths do those majors (and potential high scorers) from other colleges pursue?

@bclintonk , The two Harvard Law grads we know went to Yale in the 70’s and majored in history, so I do think what you are saying does make sense. Of course though that is anecdotal. It seems like it was a pretty typical path back then , as was majoring in some kind of humanities type of thing at elite schools and going on to a PhD program ( as a family member did). UVA sounds similar these days to Michigan. The average engineering admit there has a 1430 SAT, well above the 1355 average in general. Commerce there is also very competitive. SAT averages in general at the publics are going to be less than at the elite privates. The top publics are educating the citizens of their states (as well as OOS students), have large entering classes, and can’t select for only the highest SAT’s and GPA’s. I do think there are plenty of very high STAT kids at top publics. They are just not concentrated at the levels you would see at a place like Harvard or Yale.

Yes, as measured by percentage of the graduating class. Here are the percentages of undergrad degrees granted to humanities and social sciences majors per each school’s most recent CDS:
Yale 64%
Harvard 61%
Princeton 44%
Michigan 44%
UC Berkeley 43%
Penn 34%
Stanford 32%
Cornell 23%

That obviously still leaves lots of humanities & social science majors at other schools. No doubt some fraction of them apply to law school (just as some fraction of humanities & social science grads at H & Y don’t). I don’t have access to data that would show those relative percentages, My guess, though, is that among students at each of these schools there’s a pretty strong tilt toward applications to their own university’s law school and others in the same region. All these schools except Princeton have very strong law schools in their own right. Top students at Stanford and Berkeley probably apply to Stanford and Berkeley law schools in higher numbers than do top students from colleges in the Northeast and vice versa. Same for the Midwest. The market is to some extent national, but just as for undergraduate admissions, it’s also more regionally skewed than is commonly supposed. Evidence? Well, Columbia Law School reports that 41% of its entering class comes from the Mid-Atlantic region, which represents about 15% of the nation’s population, while only 9% hails from the Midwest, a region that comprises 21% of the nation’s population.