“It must be a STEM focused HS.”
Magnet school. 100% of the students go to college, most for STEM. This year a little less than 25% applied, last year it was more.
@Gator88NE and @milee30 : Uhmm…may I remind both of you that Georgia borders Florida (and I know both of you know this) whether the Florida city is 8 hours away from Atlanta (on top of this, I think Atlanta may beat out most southeastern metros for concentration of higher ed. institutions, including say Miami or Tampa Bay) even more. As many colleges as Florida has spreads across the state, it is not surprising that high performing students may consider Georgia schools like Georgia Tech and Emory. I don’t know if Florida has a STEM university a similar caliber to Georgia Tech. If one wanted to try something different from staying in Florida, considering Georgia schools is not the unlikely choice I don’t think.
Either way, I do not think interest from Florida is some giant bench mark for top tier Georgia schools unless you are maybe talking UGA which is a “rival” to UF.
@bernie12 Living in north Florida, I have a pretty good sense of Georgia’s location. 
Being in the CC “bubble” we sometimes overestimate how popular OOS choices can be. My (currently a sophomore) son and his roommate both applied and were accepted to GT (but both ended up at UF). I also have friends with kids at Tech. It’s easy for me to overestimate how popular Tech really is with Florida residents. If you’re in the top 10% of your class, wouldn’t you think about applying to tech? and the answer is nope, they don’t.
Florida (based on the NCES data) had 146,292 first-time state residents enrolled in institutions. About 87% stay in-state (the national average is 81%).
Based on GT’s numbers, about 1,400 Florida residents apply each year. That’s a bit less than 1% of the number of Florida first-year students that enroll in college, that applied to Tech.
Of the 19,000 Florida students that enrolled OOS, only about 100 enrolled at Tech.
@milee30 local magnet school having 25% apply isn’t unreasonable at all for one of Florida’s elite magnet schools, but it’s far from the norm in Florida.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_309.10.asp?current=yes
“I do not think interest from Florida is some giant bench mark for top tier Georgia schools”
Since FL replaced NY as the third most populous state, yes, I think interest from FL is a benchmark for what a huge # of college applicants think, regardless of whether the preference is based on geography or not. After CA, TX and FL are the states with the greatest number of US citizens, so when we’re talking about college popularity we should be looking at which colleges students from those huge states desire. It gets old to listen to people from tiny little states in New England discuss their regional preferences as if they were the default for the entire country. Apparently, it never occurs to them that the millions of people who live “elsewhere” might have different ideas. There are great schools in NE. There are also great schools outside the tiny little insular area called NE and it’s time we started giving them the respect they deserve.
Milee- who doesn’t know that there are great schools outside the “tiny insular area called NE”? Typically considered the top public U’s in the country are Michigan (not NE), Virginia (not NE) Berkeley (not NE), etc. Among the U’s considered “tops overall” are Stanford, U Chicago, Duke-- again, not NE.
There is literally nobody in New England who would tell that U Maine is “better” than U Michigan- except in forestry/paper/pulp.
Other than bashing a region of the country, exactly what point are you trying to make???
Kids from my child’s NE private school go on to great schools all over the country. No one I know thinks this way. Most of the students who don’t want to leave the north east just don’t really want to be that far from home. Which is valid.
Wash U, Tulane, Emory, U Chicago, Northwestern, Michigan, UVA, Pomona, Kenyon, Macalester, McGill, Stanford … all very popular schools.
I think the reason more FL high school kids don’t apply (or attend) Ga Tech is money. GA and GA Tech are not known to have good OOS financial aid or merit aid. Now with Bright Futures covering even more of the costs than it did 4-5 years ago, it doesn’t make financial sense to go to Ga Tech.
If one considers our school to be average (statistically it is with the SAT/ACT, etc), most students want to go to a school that’s at most 4-5 hours from home with a higher preference for 2-3 hours max. Some want to go far, far away (and do), but it’s not the majority.
When our son’s CC saw Georgia Tech near the top of his college list, she commended him and told us in an e-mail that any strong STEM-focused student applying to MIT and its ilk who wasn’t also considering GT needed to explain why. She said she rarely heard any good reasons, just excuses to dismiss it and focus on the usual suspects for perceived prestige. It got tiring. GT is totally underrated among applicants. It is not underrated among any company that hires engineers. Anywhere.
IMO, over-rated schools are those private schools in which you obtain a so-so degree for a lot of $$$ and could have obtained a very good state degree for much less. There are a lot of them. We have some family members with a lot of debt and non-impressive degrees from private middle ranking schools. If you are going to take on debt, IMO-it has to be for a really great school.
@milee30 : My point is very simple: Outside of Georgia, due to regional affects, I would expect Florida (which is very large) to comprise a decent chunk of of applications to somewhat reputable Georgia schools (even if not a huge chunk of Florida HS students percentage wise). More serious benchmarks would be outside of the region because that requires folks to get past regional biases. However, Florida may mimic states like California which may tend to stick to themselves/view their own state as a region. It takes more to get places who are far away from your border to recognize/know the institution than a state that borders. Whether or not students apply is a different story.
@Gator88NE : I would say be careful with analyzing Tech like that. For all intensive purposes, it is still a “niche” school in a sense (despite having some strong non-STEM programs), so I would say getting that many applications from Florida is quite serious, though I wonder if Emory gets more. If Tech was a more comprehensive state flagship like UGA, I would perhaps expect it to have much more pull. But not ever top 10% student wants to be an engineer or even do STEM at a STEM university. Hell, everytime pre-meds consider these schools, they naturally 2nd guess it due to “grade deflation” (I wish people would just start saying: “The damned school is known to be more rigorous than normal, which is a risk for a grade sensitive pre-professional track”. No need to speculate about inflation/deflation). And as someone said before, I think Tech is expensive and naturally stingy w/OOS aid (though they should work on that considering that the families sending students are decently well off, with a similar median income to Emory’s. In addition, Hope Pays for a substantial portion of many students’ tuition. Doesn’t Florida have something called “Bright Futures”. Maybe that also helps keep many in-state).
If you define up as more popular and down as less popular, then I would say that colleges in or near cities are trending up and colleges in more rural areas are trending down.
The very question “Which Overrated Colleges are on the Way Down?” suggests that (1) people will recognize when colleges are overrated, and (2) there will be a correction such that those overrated colleges will decline in their relative “rating.” I’m not sure that either of these things is true.
Concerning point #1, the reality is that people’s understandings of how highly or poorly a school is rated is largely a reflection of existing ranking systems – primarily the USNEWS ranking. Thus an “overrated” school is one that they feel should fall higher in the rankings. But the rankings themselves are just an aggregation of a set of criteria; if someone has a problem with a school’s ranking, then there must be something in the (weighting of) criteria that they don’t agree with – or they haven’t thought through the matter.
Concerning point #2, it seems likely that if a school performs well in the rankings (and thus, in turn, the “ratings”), they will continue to do so unless or until the ranking criteria are changed. They will continue to be “overrated” and may even continue to be “on the Way Up.”