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<p>Purely an artifact of small numbers v large numbers, my boy. If you took the stats of the top 1,650 students in Michigan’s entering class, they would outshine the credentials of the 1,650 students in Harvard’s entering class. Do the math. For the class of 2014, a full 25% of Harvard’s entering class had SAT CR+M scores below 1390, and/or ACT scores below 31. The top quartile of Michigan’s entering class–which works out to 1,624 students, awfully close to 1,650–had SAT CR+M scores of 1440 or higher, and/or ACT scores of 31 or higher. The top quartile at Michigan also had unweighted HS GPAs of 3.9 or higher, and they were all in the top 10% of their graduating class (in fact, 90% of Michigan’s entering class were). Harvard doesn’t tell us about HS GPAs, but it’s a safe bet that some were below 3.9. And 5% were not in the top 10% of their HS class.</p>
<p>Bottom line, if you exchanged the top 1,650 students in Michigan’s entering class for the 1,650 in Harvard’s, Harvard’s raw US News score would go up a bit, because statistically, looking at the things US News measures (SAT/ACT scores plus percentage in top 10% of HS class), Harvard’s entering class stats would be stronger if it had Michigan’s top 1,650 students rather than the 1,650 it’s stuck with.</p>
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<p>Actually there’s ample evidence to the country, at least at the college level. Numerous studies have concluded that high-stats, highly motivated individuals tend to have extremely similar outcomes wherever they do their undergraduate work. Other studies have concluded that the supposedly superior outcomes of elite private university graduates are mostly (or perhaps entirely) selection bias effects; if you select a bunch of kids who do well on the SAT, it’s a good bet a fair number of them will do well on the LSAT. That, combined with rampant grade inflation at many elite private schools, means that they have a lot of grads with the credentials to get into top law schools.</p>
<p>But even if we accept your premise, there’s clearly a sufficient critical mass of really, really smart people at Michigan for anyone who needs the reassurance of being in that peer group. And they tend to move together. They come in as part of LS&A Honors, or Ross, or Engineering. They take an accelerated curriculum and end up taking graduate-level courses in their junior and senior years, in some of the top graduate programs in the country. These people are not starved for top-shelf peers. Far from it.</p>
<p>As for the Brown versus Michigan law school admission numbers you provide, it proves nothing. For Brown you go down to as few as 4 admissions per law school. For Michigan the lower bound is 13. If we threw in all the T-14 law schools where Michigan had as few as 4 admits, it might easily equal or exceed Brown’s figures. If we just compare what we can compare–T-14 law schools with 13 or more matriculated from each school-- the score would be MIchigan 58, Brown 26. Again, I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge that we’re comparing the top part of Michigan’s class with all of Brown’s. But the top part of Michigan’s class appears to be doing awfully well. </p>
<p>And that, in a nutshell, is the whole fallacy of the US News ranking system: it rewards institutions that exclude all but a few, and makes them appear to be doing great things when in fact they’re probably doing little more than being exclusionary.</p>