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</p>
<p>Hawkette, my question was:
“what college do you think is doing a better job attracting better students - A university with avg. SATs of 1220-1430 and ~26,000 undergrads or a university with avg. SATs of 1240-1400 and ~4,400 undergrads?”</p>
<p>
Note: Berkeley’s College of Chemistry includes chemical engineering, chemistry and biochemistry majors.</p>
<p>I don’t think you can make a definitive judgment either way. Part of it goes to who is the natural constituency that would be applying to ABC Public and those that would be applying to XYZ Private. </p>
<p>State flagships have huge inherent advantages for getting a large applicant pool and being able to choose the best of that bunch. If it’s a low population state, I think you would probably say that they are doing pretty darn well. If it’s a large population state, maybe not. And this inherent application/enrollment advantage is hugely magnified when you add in the cost differential between what an IS student would pay at ABC and what he/she would pay at XYZ. </p>
<p>Probably a much better comparison would be the OOS applicants/enrollees at a public vs a private. That’s probably a fairer comparison on several levels, including applicant/enrollee population size and cost.</p>
<p>^ Haha! So since the data doesn’t support your notions, you have to throw in other factors like OOS applicants/enrollees and cost.</p>
<p>You said those student populations are comparable in terms of academic strength… Even though one is almost 6x larger and has essentially the same avg. test scores. The larger school is able to attract more high scoring students than the smaller school. It probably says something about the academic programs they offer that attract the better students.</p>
<p>State population of the big public: ~10 million.
State population of the small private: ~ 8 million.</p>
<p>ncram65, I don’t think big public universities should have their own rankings. Most of the schools in hawkette’s “data” are four-year institutions with doctoral programs. These are not LACs --now that would be comparing apples to orange.</p>
<p>I don’t quite understand the use of spending per student. Operating a research university in general has a high basic starting cost. It doesn’t cost twice as much to provide students at a school with 4000 students the exact same things you provide to students at a school with 2000. Additionally, once you’ve spent money on utilities to serve very large numbers of students, the cost of serving additional students is much lower. Whether it be constructing a larger lecture hall, offering more classes, extending facility hours, ect. It would cost more money for that school with 2000 students to expand to 4000 students than it would cost the school of 4000 to expand to 6000 students. And all of that is not even to mention that upkeep and other costs vary tremendously by region. </p>
<p>Thus, spending per pupil in and of itself is a fairly worthless measure. Instead, it would be better to restrict the ranking to the outcome of said spending.</p>
<p>Hawkette, any university that does not publish a CDS has something to hide. There is no exception. A CDS is a verified and validated document based on a very basic data dump that EVERY university in the US can compile in a matter of days. So the question is simple; why not publish the data? I wonder! And don’t worry Hawkette, I have no desire of becoming a Lawyer, diplomat or criminal. I have too straight forward and too blunt to succeed in a job that requires underhandedness.</p>
<p>Again Hawkette, your stats support my point of view and discredit yours. So please, stop avoiding the point I have been arguing with you for the last 20 posts or so and admit you were wrong. You stated that only 25% of Michigan students are of Brown or Cornell or Penn calibre. I corrected your untrue claim by stating the fact that 50% of Michigan students are equal to the top 75% of the students at those universities. Your statistics prove my point beyond any shaddow of a doubt.</p>
<p>Michigan top 50% SAT vs Cornell, Penn and Brown top 75%:
Michigan (not superscored): 1330-1600
Brown (superscored): 1320-1600
Cornell (superscored): 1300-1600
Penn (superscored): 1330-1600</p>
<p>Michigan top 50% ACT vs top 75% Brown, Cornell and Penn ACT
Michigan: 29-36
Brown: 28-36
Cornell: 29-36
Penn: 30-36</p>
<p>Clearly, you feel that you need to completely discredit Michigan student body in order to validate your claim that Michigan is not a top 35 university and clearly, standing by the facts and saying that 50% of Michigan student body is equal to the top 75% of the student body at much smaller private universities would not make yours a convincing arguement. So you have to completely distort the truth and claim that only 25% of Michigan students are of that calibre. But the facts simply do not substantiate your claims.</p>
<p>
Attract or enroll? </p>
<p>There’s a big difference, you know. Do you really think Harvard couldn’t have a student body at least on par with Berkeley’s if it chose to expand in size?</p>
<p>To make your claim valid, you’d have to compare the applicant pools at the two schools – which I notice you have not done.</p>
<p>^^^^Why don’t you ask the same question for any school that isn’t HYPSM? I think I know why.</p>
<p>
Responding to my argument in post #71 would do far more good that repeating yourself.</p>
<p>Alex,
Your bluster is in overdrive…and also not at all convincing. </p>
<p>Accusing every non-CDS school of deceit is a pretty strong charge. Not to mention completely unsubstantiated. What’s next? Are you going to start accusing their college Presidents of beating their wives? You have as much proof of that as you do with your silly CDS accusations.</p>
<p>Re the student body question, I answered it. U Michigan is as close to those higher ranked schools as places like Clemson and Fordham are to U Michigan. </p>
<p>BTW, I think U Michigan’s scores in their CDS are superscored. I think that they are for most schools, regardless of their admission approach. There is quantitative support for my belief and I’d be happy to expound further if you like.</p>
<p>But the superscoring issue and middle 50% numbers for SAT don’t even need to be considered for us to determine where U Michigan’s student body is correctly placed. We have ACT scores (not superscored), we have 75th percentile ACT data and we have % of students scoring at a modestly competitive level (30).</p>
<p>It doesn’t take a genius to see where U Michigan belongs on this completely unbiased number. But, Alex, I would ask you to first remove those rose-tinted glasses before reading the data below.</p>
<p>Here are the facts:</p>
<p>ACT 75th percentile, % scoring 30+, College</p>
<p>34, 73%, Dartmouth
34, 73%, Columbia
33, 82%, Vanderbilt
33, 76%, U Penn
33, 69%, Cornell
33, 66%, Brown</p>
<p>31, 53%, NYU
31, 44%, U Michigan
31, 42%, U Illinois
31, 42%, Wake Forest
31, 38%, Georgia Tech</p>
<p>30, 33%, Pepperdine
30, 28%, U Pittsburgh
30, 28%, Boston University
30, 25%, Ohio State
30, 25%, George Washington
30, 20%, Clemson
29, 24%, U Minnesota
29, 23%, Fordham</p>
<p>Noimag,
It’s an interesting question that you pose, but let me try to put the size and selectivity issue in context. </p>
<p>If you think that 5000 high achieving students on a college’s campus elevates its student body to the level of the non-HYP Ivies, are you willing to extend this thought to all colleges that qualify? Do you believe that the student bodies of colleges all across America from NYU to U Florida to U Texas to BYU and plenty of others are equals to the top privates?</p>
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</p>
<p>Correction. They constitute 30% of Berkeley’s freshmen student body.
L&S comprised 65%. The remaining are students of the rest of the programs.</p>
<p>The thing about Berkeley is that, whilst engineering/chemistry/natural science students mingle and interact with students from other colleges, they do so only on general education subjects, and on very seldom occasions. There’s often an observable scene of engineering/chemistry/science students taking the same courses together, making them attend the same classes under the same faculty as freshmen because their curriculum differs from each other. [General</a> Catalog - Courses & Curricula by Department](<a href=“http://sis.berkeley.edu/gc/curricula.html]General”>http://sis.berkeley.edu/gc/curricula.html) The same scenario can be found for L&S students. And when these students begin enrolling in their major subjects, they’re further segregated from the rest of the students taking different majors. </p>
<p>Modestmelody: My point is, schools as large as Berkeley is run by departments. Every department has its own set of standards, missions, rules and objectives. Unlike small, LAC-like schools such as your alma mater school, Brown, which is run as a whole, that’s why shifting courses is a lot easier, which I would personally prefer actually. At Brown, I suppose the engineering dept doesn’t interfere much with the student selection process. The engineering dept’s concern at Brown is perhaps to educate their incoming and on-going students. At Berkeley, the engineering dept has a say or dictate on which kind of students they should accept. Students admitted to the COE are screened by them as well. (You can read about the Berkeley admissions rules posted by dstark in the other forum.) The entire student population of COE and Chemistry at Berkeley is already almost as big as the entire population of Brown University. </p>
<p>I am not saying it’s right to compare COE students with Brown students. No; that’s not my point. My point is that, Berkeley is too big and too complicated to be compared to a school like Brown or ND or Emory. It has 5 big colleges for undergrad that are different from each other, accommodating different types of students, and whose standards, missions and orientation are different from each other. Therefore, you will be comparing apples to oranges when you are comparing Berkeley to ND, Emory and the like. You can compare the whole Berkeley to the whole Claremont Colleges. But you can’t compare the whole Berkeley to Mudd alone. That’s not the right thing to do. You can compare Berkeley COE to Mudd and Berkeley L&S to Claremont McKenna and so on. That’s the right thing to do.</p>
<p>In terms of Notre Dame’s ACT scores, I think it is highly likely that the 31-34 figure is incorrect (although I’m not accusing ND of lying, but possibly making a mistake). That would mean that Notre Dame has ACT scores that equal or exceed every school in the country other than Harvard. For example, Stanford average ACTs are 30-34 and the percentage of students between 30-36 is 77%, whereas Notre Dame is claiming that 83% of its students are in that range. It doesn’t make sense that the ACT scores would be that high.</p>
<p>i think it’s possibly correct, schools in the south and midwest generally have more students take the ACT than the SAT. I noticed that midwestern and southern schools have uniformly higher ACT ranges, this may be because the schools on the coasts have less applicants from the ACT rich regions, and these students get some preferential treatment in admissions, in order to boost geographic diversity, thus lower ACT ranges. </p>
<p>but to add to this discussion regarding selectivity, hawk’s discussion always revolves around average SAT scores, and to help his cause Vandy has had tremendous increase in SAT in the past several years. I think this is quite one dimensional, I went to Michigan, Alexandre went to Michigan, I was an ivy caliber candidate back in high school, Alexandre was admitted to many high ranked private schools. I certainly had a tough time academically, Alex has openly admitted that the coursework was difficult and very challenging. In fact, as a student, I didn’t know any student in any serious major at Michigan that felt unchallenged or that the competition wasn’t great, so all of this talk surrounding this “college success predictor” is a moot point, because ivy caliber candidates were sufficiently challenged. It’s pretty naive for Hawk to make this conversation of student caliber a one dimensional subject focused on SAT/ACT scores, the amount of work I put in to get my Michigan diploma was far far far greater than any amount of work i put into studying for the SATs. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, Michigan is ranked #1 in number of students admitted to Medical schools. Michigan students routinely rank #1 in number of Fulbright scholars. Michigan’s student solar car team is the most successful program in the country for years. There are so many other accomplishments of Michigan students that we can talk about, than just some test people take when they were 17 years old on a saturday morning.</p>
<p>Hawkette, I have often admitted when I was wrong. You never have. In this case, you are wrong. You stated that only 25% of Michigan student are of non-HYPM calibre. Statistically, it is clearly much higher than 25%. In fact, it is rougly 50%. I never said anything about other universities having similar calibre student bodies to Michigan’s, that is all your doing. I have no issues with NYU having a similar calibre student body to Michigan’s…good for them. The only issue I addressed in this post, and the only one you have yet to respond to, is whether or not only a tiny minority (25%) of Michigan students are of non-HYPM calibre. Will you own up to your error or will you not?</p>
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<p>I didn’t say that big public universities should have their own rankings, I just pointed out that RML’s accusation that Hawkette does not understand the difference between big state schools and “schools of different nature, objectives, system and set-up” isn’t correct.</p>
<p>I could care less about rankings at all and I read these threads because I find all the hot air over which school is better amusing. I will admit, though, I completely lost the statistical argument at around post # 30. </p>
<p>For what it is worth, as a parent, I do find persuasive the idea that the giant state universities are really a collection of individual schools under a common banner and that when trying to assess quality of education offered you need to get beneath the university wide data and into the data relevant to the part of the university your kid would attend.</p>
<p>
Of course I do…perhaps better. My point was that as schools expand enrollees average SAT scores should fall and approach the national mean as they get larger. However, the more desireable schools will be able to sustain higher averages. My ranking in Post #98 shows which colleges are over and underperforming in enrolling higher-SAT-scoring-students relative to the USNWR top 75 average for their size.</p>
<p>“Do you really think Harvard couldn’t have a student body at least on par with Berkeley’s if it chose to expand in size?”</p>
<p>IBClass, Harvard most likely could. Princeton, Stanford and Yale probably could too. But that’s about it. For other private elites that enroll 1,000-2,500 freshmen each year to fill a class of 6,000 freshmen like Michigan or 4,000 like Cal would require a significant change in their admissions philosophy. The closest thing to the large Publics is Cornell, but even they arerelatively small when you consider that their college of arts and sciences houses fewer than 5,000 undergrads.</p>
<p>I’ve really enjoyed the discussion on this thread, and am especially appreciative of Hawkette’s data crunching.</p>