<p>I think W&M is highly regarded. It gets a lot of negative sentiment on the ******* board and doesn't have a reputation of being too fun, but is unique in being at least a top 10 state school with an enrollment of <6,000, so it has more of a medium size college feel to it than any other good state school does.</p>
<p>In many cases, I was a bit surprised too and some of the figures don't fit nicely into overall reputation. But everything came from admissions data, weighting avg SAT, admit rate & % in top 10% fairly evenly and then yield rate about half the weight (I think it's somewhat overrated). Even with yield rate at half the allocation of the other parameters, it is the reason that Penn comes out above Dartmouth & Cal Tech and why Midd, Bowdoin (and especially Notre Dame) come out so far in front of Swat, UChic, JHU & Tufts.</p>
<p>Yeaah, yield would really kill Chicago there, for better or worse.</p>
<p>That world rankings list, though... what sort of math are they using? Harvard's scores: alumni 100, award 100, hici 100, n+s 100, sci 100, and size 72.4... score overall? 100. Taken as a mean of the numbers, 100 really isn't the overall score (quite a shock to anyone who's made it through middle school, I know). Even after tracking down their weighting and calculating it that way? Still not a 100. Though the basic premise of the list itself does arouse some suspicion to begin with, having that at the top of the list really doesn't do anything to subdue it.</p>
<p>The math used was weighting % in top 10% ~ 33%, avg SAT & admit rate each ~25% and yield rate ~16%. Then got a total score for each school and ranked by % of the highest score (Harvard). Yale at #2 was 99.9%, Princeton at #3 was 98.3%, Vanderbilt at #50 was 72.8%.</p>
<p>You can play a lot of games with the Top 10% category; there's no way to control for the quality of the graduation class. Schools like Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams that admit mad numbers of preppies get killed here.</p>
<p>I get the impression that most prep schools don't have rank and so those students would be excluded from the percentages. From what I've seen on many top 50 college websites is that only 35-50% of applicants actually report a class rank and from what I've read, this number will be declining further in the future. Also, the top 10% is an arbitrary cut-off anyway and many of the top schools could have 75% of its students in the top 10% just as easily as 100% in the top 10%. If two applicants to Dartmouth apply and one is all-state QB who is ranked in the top 11% and another isn't all-state QB who is top 9%, the all-state QB will get in and won't count towards % in top 10%, but really there's probably not any academic difference btwn the two (no more so than one in the top 7% and top 9% say). A school like MIT, which has much closer to 100% in the top 10% solves this problem with a lower priority on football by getting the QB who was only all-league, but is still as high as top 5% of his class.</p>
<p>where is u o rochester?!!!</p>
<p>brandeis, lehigh, tulane</p>
<p>PENN STATE????? that's top 50</p>
<p>Not if you have LAC's and Univ's together it's not.
I still think it's stupid that this guy forgot wesleyan and had washington and lee on there haha.</p>
<p>penn state is top 50?... but not rochester and ucsd? come on.</p>
<p>The ranking is horrible so just ignore it.</p>
<p>I still think that if you don't think Washington and Lee should be on there, then you dont know anything about Washington and Lee - although I do agree that Wesleyan has as much right to be on the list as W&L.</p>
<p>Guys. It was established in post #4 that Wesleyan of course belongs on the list and was not there only because the OP confused it with Wellesley -- which happens with surprising frequency. Wash & Lee belongs too.</p>
<p>Lol Wellesley belongs on there too though. This is a stupid thread, just kill it already...</p>
<p>I wish there was some way to have a real top 50 lac/univ ranking while talking strictly undergrad. We all know that it's probably not going to happen with any reasonable methodology.</p>
<p>Lets just give it a rest, since this is pointless...</p>
<p>I would say that UMich-Ann Arbor certainly deserves a spot in the top 50 over Trinity...</p>
<p>Wait never mind, UMich is already up there. :)</p>
<p>UCSD doesn't deserve a spot in the top 50. What would it replace?</p>
<p>Carry on.</p>
<p>ihateca.....
how about wake forest.. come on... i have never heard of anyone disputing that ucsd is a top 50 college... and you cant honestly say wake forest belongs on that list and ucsd doesnt.... ucsd is almost always considered a better university than wake forest... i dont even think anyone can argue differently... well your name is ihateca.. so that might explain your feelings on the matter. ucsd ucla uc berkeley all belong on that list. i believe an argument could be made for numerous other uc's, but those three without a question belong on the list.</p>
<p>Wake Forest could probably be dropped for something else; though whether it would be UCSD would be debatable.</p>
<p>UCSD
SAT 1130 -- 1360
ACT 23-29</p>
<p>Wake Forest
SAT 1280-- 1400
S:F ratio 10:1</p>
<p>I won't dispute UC Berkeley and UCLA. But UCSD is disputable. And yes, I have a heavy bias towards schools in the northeast.</p>