<p>“I do think Penn is somewhat overrated of a school though.”</p>
<p>Wow, just because it has produced fewer Rhodes scholars than other universities?</p>
<p>“The Rhodes Scholarships - Winner Statistics by Endorsing Institutions
Michigan has produced ONE Rhodes Scholar in the past 12 years. That is absolutely embarrassing. Wisconsin has only produced ONE in the past 12 years and ZERO in the past 10 years. UVA and UNC, in my opinion, are better <em>undergraduate</em> institutions than Michigan or Berkeley and even they have only produced 4 and 6 Rhodes Scholars respectively over the same timeframe.”</p>
<p>Michigan has produced three (Fiona Rose in 1998, Joseph Jewell in 2005 and Abdulrahman El Sayed in 2009) in the last 12 years and two in the last 5 years. And no, UNC and UVa are not better undergraduate academic institutions than Cal or Michigan.</p>
<p>“Even if Michigan has produced more Fullbrights than Duke (one of the few measures where UM outperforms Duke in a measure of graduate success even in terms of raw numbers), the fact that LS&A is about 3-4 times as large as Duke’s Trinity College makes Duke’s performance in the Fullbright competition far more impressive than Michigan’s.”</p>
<p>And yet Michigan does as well as Cornell and Penn on a per capita basis. Oh wait, I forgot, those two schools are overrated. </p>
<p>“You can dismiss each statistical measure of graduate success individually Alexandre, but you can’t ignore the cumulative effect of all these data points that all paint the SAME PICTURE than the non-HYP Ivies, Duke, Stanford, etc. are better undergraduate institutions than UMich, Cal, UVA, UNC, UCLA and William & Mary.”</p>
<p>No they aren’t. The quality of undergraduate education at some of those publics is just as good as the quality of education at non-HYP Ivies and Duke. Stanford is indeed superior and on par with HYPM. If your point is that, on average, students at smaller private elites are better than students at public elites, I would agree with you. Public elites still have to accept some students that aren’t quite as gifted and others with different academic interests. But take any top student at a private elite and have them attend a public elite and the undergraduate experience will remain equally as good.</p>