@TomSrOfBoston perhaps that’s the trade off for having substantially cheaper tuition. In DS19’s case as he will most likely be pursuing a degree in the physical sciences at least his classes should be on the smaller size after first year since those programs tend to be less popular.
Good to see this specially those in top 10
PR is in 7
On January 26, 2018, MSN MoneyTalk News released a list of the “35 Hardest US Colleges To Get Into”.
This list used acceptance rate percentages and SAT scores from the US Dept. of Education to compile the ranking.Although about 9 months old now, the list offers an interesting perspective.
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Harvard
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Stanford
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Yale
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MIT
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Caltech
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Princeton
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Chicago
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Columbia
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Vanderbilt
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Brown
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Penn
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Duke
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Dartmouth College
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Harvey Mudd
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Pomona College
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Northwestern
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Rice
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Johns Hopkins
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Swarthmore College
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Claremont McKenna College
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WashUStL
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Cornell
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Amherst College
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Bowdoin College
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Tufts
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Williams College
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Georgetown
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Cooper Union
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Notre Dame
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US Naval Academy
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USC
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Barnard College
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UCal-Berkeley
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Middlebury College
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US Military Academy at West Point
A. The first question is how did they figure in those two factors? Self selection is a real factor. Let’s use UIUC again, and compare it to U of Minn. UIUC’s acceptance rate is, officially about 65.6%, while UMN’s is 44.6%, so it would seem that UMN is more selective than UIUC, right? However, the middle 50% of ACTs of UIUC admitted undergrads are 27-33 versus UMN’s 27-32. Engineering UIUC - ACT 32-35, Engineering UMN 31-34. While using both ACTs and admission rates can deal with this somewhat, it depends on how each factor fits into the rankings.
B. It doesn’t talk about departments. For example, the acceptance rate of UIUC is pretty high, however, if you are trying to be accepted into their College of Engineering, your chances aren’t any better than if you were applying for an engineering degree at, say, U of Mich.
C. It’s all a popularity contest. Sometimes schools are popular because they are Really That Good, like Harvey Mudd or MIT, and sometimes it’s because they’re really good at advertising and branding, like Harvard.
^ Or… perhaps it truly represents the comparative exclusivity of the schools and comments to the contrary just make people feel better if their personal preferences aren’t well represented. Yeah Harvard is just good at marketing and branding say the 19 of 20 who are rejected.
You can argue around the edges but the list is consistent with the typical results posted on CC. At the high end acceptance rates are a pretty clear barometer of exclusivity, juxtaposed against test scores regardless of weighting would appear to yield a fairly accurate result.
This isn’t claiming to be a list of the “Best” schools, only the list of “Hardest to Get Into.” Given that, I’d say their criteria is pretty good.
However, as stated above, this list looks very close to a list of “Best Undergrad Schools in the US.” And, the order isn’t that different from those that compile said lists. Calling out Harvard for being good at Marketing as the reason why they are on this list? I’m thinking Harvard is Really That Good. I’d also toss up there that the differences between #1 and #35 is marginal for the typical undergrad. If you get into any one of these schools you’re doing great. There isn’t a name on this list that I look at and say “Hey, they sure don’t belong here.” Sure Williams may think they should be better than Pamona and Berkley is probably saying “What the H&*%, USC, Really?!?!?!?!” but I think we are splitting hairs.
I guess, I’d argue that the two hardest to get into on this list are #'s 30 and 35, but the work required to complete the application process isn’t factored into that ranking. My son applied to #7 and #30 and he’d tell you that to get into #30 was much tougher.
Eeyore123 State flagships-not surprising many are so highly rated. They are among the best universities in the world. and some are among the oldest most established schools in the US. Re: Publisher’s comments about teaching undergrads, also not surprising. Obviously each state system was founded by different constituencies for different reasons; often both continue to exert their influence on each system. It’s no coincidence that the very best of them are not in New England, for example, where private colleges took hold early, often educated the wealthy children of those in states that lacked them, and in some cases successfully obstructed efforts to establish state systems.Even when this didn’t happen, the wealthy in places distant from the northeast initially had few options for their offspring-early on shipping them northeast was common. It’s not by chance that the best of the state systems are a distance from New England. (Perhaps others on CC will find this perspective interesting).
the toughest university to get into is Stanford by admit rate. the school with the highest SAT scores by far is Caltech. if you want to play around with data to get your desired result you can fudge with the numbers as MSN has done.
Stanford is one of the few schools in this list that is an FBS conference div 1 school (nothwestern, duke, usc) and is going to have lower SAT scores as a result. Overall for athletes, Stanford is the toughest university to get into in terms of athletic achievement (duke being the exception for b ball of course) so toughest to get into gets very relative based on your perspective.
on another note folks note that UK rankings are biased in favor of UK universities. probably true and I might add that USNWR is biased in favor of eastern universities. Well documented that they curve fit the data to rank HYP high and will change the criteria to do it. (slate article pointed this out).
an argument could be made that global rankings have less bias then US rankings that are by and large created by editors who live in the Northeast and are inherently biased.
as far as global rankings… here are a compilation of world rankings for US based universities based on international rankings.
https://www.mastersportal.com/ranking-country/82/united-states.html
Stanford University 3 2 2 3
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 4 4 1 2
California Institute of Technology - Caltech 5 9 4 6
Harvard University 6 1 3 1
Princeton University 7 6 13 9
Yale University 8 12 15 11
University of Chicago 10 10 9 14
Johns Hopkins University
What about Georgia Tech?
agreed @marvin100 :)>-
The problem with this Best of… as well is the second one is that these are business-related concerns publishing lists related to colleges and universities. The prior one, Forbes’ – actually THE’s – Best Colleges List – undoubtedly took a good amount of research: internationally based as well as maybe a bit more esoterically determined and assembled data.
This one, though, probably took MSN’s staff of, say, four persons 30 minutes to compile. Without looking at a link, here’s how I envision the research was done…. “Here are your metrics for a list of colleges which are toughest to gain entry: acceptance rate and test scores. Go…” Lead staff: “Let’s reduce this to 100 of the nation’s colleges among research and LACs which are historically known to be highly selective, and we’ll compare rates of acceptance and scores from the admit year of 2016. We’ll compile two lists according to the two given parameters, and scores will take precedence, of say, 75 to 25%. We’ll merge the lists to one and we’ll determine a cutoff point later on. Let’s go…” 30 minutes later: “We got it, done in ½ an hour. Darn, we’re good! But let’s look over the list to see if there are any ones that would seem to be outliers. None? Let’s run with it. ”
I don’t think this is a material consideration. If maybe ½ of Stanford’s football and basketball players were special admits, that’s only ~ 15 players/year that escaped regular admission. The rest of its athletes were probably admissible under regular admissions. That’s not even 1% of its total admits of ~ 1,700 students. Stanford does a great job of searching far and wide for admissible fb and bb athletes.
Meanwhile…the colleges that are most public-relations inclined to sell themselves as Best of are constantly trying to game acceptance rates and scores. Public universities are less into gaming and rather doing public good (good to see this as a metric). Thus, many in the first, but only one in the second. If there’s an inordinately large gap between the 25th and 75th percentile scores => university trying to do public good by educating 1st-gen students. The solution to this is to bury them under the 25th, so they go unheeded. Some privates undoubtedly do this to preserve whatever standing.
This year, Pomona refused to announce its acceptance rate. Last year’s was 6.9%.