Michigan’s overall rank remains steady at #29. No surprise there.
The University’s Peer Assessment Score also remained unchanged at 4.4/5.0, tied at #12 in the nation along with Brown, Duke and Penn. Academically, Michigan’s peers, in addition to Brown, Duke and Penn were:
Caltech (4.6/5.0)
Columbia (4.6/5.0)
Johns Hopkins (4.6/5.0)
Cornell University (4.5/5.0)
University of Chicago (4.5/5.0)
Northwestern (4.3/5.0)
Carnegie Mellon (4.2/5.0)
Dartmouth (4.2/5.0)
UCLA (4.2/5.0)
UVa (4.2/5.0)
Ross remained at #4 (#1 in Management and #3 in Finance).
The College of Engineering improved to #6 (tied with Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech) from #7.
One more spot to go for ChemE (was #12 last year) and then all engineering programs would be within top 10. It is not such a big deal anyway, but it just sounds better.
The % accepted is now 26% and the enrolled average SAT/ACT scores are now higher. I guess that didn’t really affect the ranking, or did other colleges also get more selective?
@ForeverAlone Ironically, %admittance is a miniscule percentage (around 2%) in the methodology formula of the USN&WR rankings. It makes no sense, because the better schools are more selective and have more academically qualified students. Look at Yeshiva University, for example, it admits over 80% of its applicants, and is clearly not too selective, yet it was ranked in the high 40s last year and tied at #52 this year. I think US News ranking methodology should give more weight and consideration to admissions rate.
@GoBlue81 But the admission rate of UMich has been dropping a lot since 2008, not just this year. For 2014 data, should it be affected by the admission rate drop from 40% to 32%? The real reason is the weight they use in ranking.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. I happen to think that selectivity is not precisely related to quality of the educational institution. Especially since the Common App became widespread. Many very high quality colleges have high rates of admission because the types of students who apply are self-selected. @trackmbe3 mentions Yeshiva University above. Clearly, the applicant pool is very limited, but that says nothing about the quality of education. Other great schools that also have a very limited application pool are Sarah Lawrence and Bard.
I agree brantly. Schools like Chicago, JHU and now Michigan did not become elite recently. They were all founding members of the AAU back in 1900. They have been considered elite institutions since the 19th century. Yet their acceptance rates were over 40% until they joined the Common App (until 2005 in the case of Chicago and JHU, and until 2010 in the case of Michigan).
The convenience of CommonApp may actually make applicants less self-selective which contributed to the lower admission rate. There are more high quality students applying, but there are many applying to UMich as a reach school.