<p>Sally- the “must have basketball” argument or “I need to be able to join the crew team, even if it’s just intramural” arguments always confound me, since I neither like to watch nor participate in team sports. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the views of someone to whom these are important. Kids and their parents post here all the time with crazy lists of “must have’s” and “should haves” and posters bend over backwards to find colleges with those things. Plus merit aid. Can’t be in Florida, the kid hates humidity. Must be near an airport that flies Southwest, etc.</p>
<p>But why or why when the subject has anything to do with high performing academics (and the kids who are interested in that) does everyone go ballistic?</p>
<p>Same reasons why some activists…including some from the educational establishment are against magnet schools or schools for high academic achievers as that’d be “too elitist”. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this isn’t a new phenomenon either as illustrated by similar public controversies in US history such as West Point’s admission standards in the early-mid-19th century being regarded as “too elitist”.</p>
<p>The majority of people who become National Merit Scholars at Chicago (and probably USC and Tuscaloosa) do so because the institution grants the scholarship.</p>
<p>A figure I find more interesting would be calculating the number with a particular Math + Verbal by estimating chance of SAT > x with a normal distribution from the 25th & 75th percentiles, then multiplying by number of students. With this methodology, the order significantly, depending on x (lower x favors big schools). For 99th percentile math and verbal (770 Math, 760 Verbal), I get:</p>
<p>Highest Estimated Number of >=770M and >=760V: Overall
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
Stanford
WUSTL
Chicago
MIT
Penn
Columbia
Vanderbilt</p>
<p>Highest Estimated Number of >=770M and >=760V: Public Colleges
<p>“The “density” argument always confounds me. How much “density” of any one attribute is necessary for happiness and success, in college or elsewhere?”</p>
<p>Density of wealthy people is really, really important!</p>
<p>Data10,
Which USC are you referring to in post #365? Surely not the University of South Carolina? The University of Southern California is a private institution, not public.</p>
<p>Your calculations are all speculative, of course; we don’t know that SAT scores follow an identical “normal” distribution at all these schools. We also don’t know that they report SAT scores the same way–some may be reporting superscores, others best single-sitting scores. It’s also rumored that some private schools “hide” the SAT scores of recruited athletes by asking them to report ACT scores, not SAT scores, so as not to bring down the school’s SAT medians.</p>
<p>Also, for some of these schools, you’re extrapolating from a very small and possibly unrepresentative N. At Minnesota, for example, only 14% of entering freshmen report SAT scores, while 92% report ACT scores–which makes sense, given that about 85% of the entering class comes from Minnesota or Wisconsin, both ACT-dominant states. If you take Minnesota’s 75th percentile SAT CR score of 690 and add it to that school’s 75th percentile SAT M score of 740, you’d get a “75th percentile CR + M” of 1430. But Minnesota’s 75th percentile ACT score is only 30, which according to the official ACT-SAT concordance is the equivalent of a 1340 SAT CR + M. That’s a huge discrepancy, about 90 points. What explains it? Well, as at many public universities, Minnesota’s admission standards might be higher for OOS (non-MN/WI) students, a higher percentage of whom submit SAT scores. So you can’t extrapolate from that small and unrepresentative sample to the student body as a whole. Second, Minnesota’s 75th percentile (CR+M) isn’t really 1430. Its 75th percentile CR is 690, and its 75th percentile M is 740, but it’s likely that many students over the 75th percentile in CR were below the 75th percentile in M and vice versa. So its actual 75th percentile (CR+M) is probably well below 1430. And that’s not unique to Minnesota, it’s going to be true at all schools, though schools might also vary in how “lopsided” their entering classes are. Given all that, your calculations just don’t work.</p>
<p>In the end National merit scholars do not care if scholarship money comes from merit aid or need based aid. In order to make the list like the one you made in post #365 accurate you would have to look at the average total aid provided by each school.</p>
<p>This is where I think it’s slicing the bologna entirely too thin. I think it’s entirely plausible one could desire a high density of motivated and very bright students, but not consider the differences between these schools or the ones below to be so very precious that it’s imperative that you get to Harvard because you wouldn’t be satisfied with those idiots at Vanderbilt. The top schools all have a sufficient “thickness” of these kinds of students – at that point, it gets to personal taste, vibe, etc.</p>
<p>Cobrat, we are talking about COLLEGE. I might make the case that I, personally, might not have been as motivated around the kids at Mizzou as I was at NU, but there’s no case to be made that smart kids are bullied and ostracized at Mizzou. Can you PLEASE stop trying to fit your bullying experiences in middle / high school to a discussion about college?</p>
<p>Oh good lord. Like it would make a difference either way.
THIS is the kind of pointless-jockeying-for-position-in-some-pointless-contest that reflects poorly on elite school grads. Really, Princeton’s worth can stand on its own without “explaining” or “defending” a #4 showing in some metric.</p>
There are a number of factors including not comparing equivalent measures (75th percentile + 75 percentile is not the same as 75th percentile total). However, yes Minnesota does indeed have higher ACT scores due to out of state students having a different SAT profile than in state students. However, if you compare the 25th/75th ACT percentiles to 25th/75th SAT percentiles, the order for top ACT scores is nearly the same as top SAT scores, so it’s not going to result in huge changes for most in the overall list, as the overall list did not include schools with very different acceptance criteria for out of state. Using your measurement example, the colleges that have the highest 75th percentile ACT are a 7 way tie between HYPM, Columbia, Caltech, and Mudd. If you look at the colleges with the highest 75th percentile math + 75th percentile verbal, the order is nearly identical – a 4 way time between HYP and Caltech, then the others tied just below, fitting with ACT having less granularity. </p>
<p>Sure a normal distribution is not a perfect estimate, there are differences between SAT vs ACT, and there are various other sources of error. It was listed as an “estimated number,” not an exact value.</p>
<p>Let’s create a new metric. Which elite school has graduated the best movie stars? I am making the unilateral decision that YDS doesn’t count because it’s grad school.</p>
<p>Let’s see…</p>
<p>Harvard has Tommy Lee Jones, Mira Sorvino, and Natalie Portman.
Yale has Jodie Foster and Jennifer Beals.
Princeton has Brooke Shields.
Dartmouth has Connie Britton.
Northwes’s do ittern has Charlton Heston.
Wellesley has Ali McGraw.
Bryn Mawr hs Katharine Hepburn. (Did she graduate? Ranking crisis!)
Vassar has Meryl Streep.</p>
<p>Or no, let’s use colleges of characters on Grey’s Anatomy:</p>
<p>Dartmouth - Meredith Grey
Bowdoin - McDreamy
Smith (and Stanford, but that was graduate so it doesn’t count) - Christina Yang
Wellesley - Miranda Bailey</p>
The list was in response to a comment about USC having more national merit scholars than HYPSM to show something about the “density of very smart people.” There are numerous problems with this approach, such as measuring density based on total number with no consideration to class size, and estimating number of “very smart people” based on number of NMS. However, I only focused on the actual number of NMS.</p>
<p>For the record, I listed the estimated number of top scores because I find stats like this interesting, and it fits with the number of NMS tangent. I do not think that you need to go to a college with a large number of top SAT score students to get a good education, or number of top SAT scores is a good measure of “density of very smart people.”</p>
<p>Once again, removing the institution sponsored scholars leaves one with a meaningless list of National merit scholars unless one only wanted compare schools which do not offer merit based aid.</p>
<p>Broaden it to movie/TV/stage stars and you’ve got yourself a deal here, Consolation :-). We used to play a game called “Who’s the NU link” whenever we watched TV. It was pretty easy - McLean Stevenson in MASH, Kimberly Williams in According to Jim, Zach Braff in Scrubs, David Schwimmer in Friends, Shelley Long on Cheers, Megan Mullaly in Will & Grace, Cindy Chupack (writer) in Sex & The City, Laura Innes on ER, Clinton Kelly on What Not To Wear, Jeri Ryan in Deep Space 9, Julia Louis Dreyfus in Seinfeld, Stephen Colbert, Richard Benjamin, Jane Curtin in 3rd Rock, Seth Meyers and Ana Gasteyer and Brad Hall and Gary Kroeger in SNL, Mary Frann on Newhart, Zach Gilford on Friday Night Lights, Mamie Gunner, Marg Helgenberger, Zooey Deschanel, Cloris Leachman, Dermot Mulroney, Jerry Orhbach on Law & Order, Tony Randall, Robert Reed … Charlton Heston is just another name on that list!</p>
<p>It makes for a more interesting alumni magazine that “and then they all went off to Wall Street / medical school / law school. The End.”</p>
10char</p>