<p>I did forget to mention that Tulane accepts all Louisiana students with a 28 ACT and a 3.5 GPA. That means any OOS kids that bring down UVA (statistically speaking of course) are also bringing down TU’s numbers just the same. It’s a valid point to consider OOS kids, but since TU has the same issue, it becomes a non-issue. Tulane calls it their “Focus Louisiana” system.</p>
<p>I didn’t know about the “Focus Louisiana” system at Tulane. Any idea what percent of its and UVa’s undergrads, respectively, are in-staters? (I don’t.)
Also, while it’s not exactly a completely objective criterion, the one statistic that might be interesting to look at is the “Peer Assessment” factor in the USNWR rankings of schools (out of a max of 5.0), which is how academics from other institutions (like presidents, provosts, admissions deans, etc.) regard the academic quality of the school in question. Although I don’t know what these scores were for the last few years, they do tend to stay pretty consistent (and I always thought they were more meaningful than percent of applicants admitted and some other criteria used by USNWR).<br>
NU was usually in the 4.3-4.4 range, about the same as Brown and Dartmouth. I would be curious to know what sort of “Peer Assessment” scores Tulane and UVa get.</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m not sure either. Actually, as much as I hate subjective things like Peer assessments, since all of these systems (USNWR ect) are subjective themselves I think they are a good indicator of how a university is perceived. I think the problem with USNWR rankings in general, is when students use them to EXCLUDE a university simply because they aren’t in the Top 30, 50, 100, whatever. Of course I think even worse than that is when parents EXCLUDE a university for their child because of rankings. My guess would be that UVA has a higher peer assessment (for a variety of reasons) than Tulane. It’s also a shame that USNWR doesn’t try to include segment rankings, for instance the Honors colleges, at various universities. I know this hurts a lot non-public ivy schools (excluding UVA, UMich, ect.) Kids that go to Auburn University’s Honor College, for example, often could have gotten into Duke, Vandy, or many other high ranked universities but chose to stay closer to home where they could take advantage of public/ in-state cost.</p>