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<p>Not so at all. The top publics have just as many if not more “top students” as the privates on this list. The difference is that the publics accept a much larger class, forcing them to go much further down the talent pool, and that drives down their median SAT and ACT scores. But in absolute numbers of “top students,” there are more at the top publics than at the top privates.</p>
<p>Look at it this way. Cal-Berkeley has a 75th percentile SAT score of 1450. That means 1/4 of the students at Berkeley are above that level, out of an undergraduate student body of 23,863. That translates to 5,966 students at Berkeley scoring above 1450 on the SAT (assuming, for purposes of argument, that the 75th percentile SAT score remained stable for 4 years).</p>
<p>Stanford has a mid-level SAT score of 1445, close to Berkeley’s 75th percentile SAT score of 1450. That means half the students out of Stanford’s student body of 6,391, or 3,196 students, scored above 1445.</p>
<p>So 5,966 students at Berkeley scored above 1450, while 3,196 students at Stanford scored above 1445. That’s nearly twice as many “top students” at Berkeley as at Stanford. Indeed, there are more students at this level at Berkeley than at, say, Stanford and Dartmouth combined. </p>
<p>By the same logic, there are as many students at Michigan above that school’s 75th percentile ACT score of 31 (6,355, or 25% of an undergrad student body of 25,422) than there are at Stanford, Williams, Carleton, and Bowdoin combined.</p>
<p>So it’s just flatly false to say that all the “top students” are at the top private schools. Very, very many of them are at the top publics, where they are in fact present in larger numbers and larger concentrations than at almost any elite private school. It’s just that the public universities also dip down deeper into the talent pool to take less highly qualified students, while the elite privates don’t.</p>