<p>It has a 50% acceptance rate?</p>
<p>College</a> Search - University of Michigan - U of M - Admission</p>
<p>Is there something I'm missing here?</p>
<p>Most if not all of the grad schools at Michigan are ranked in the top ten in the country.</p>
<p>Yes but I was asking about the undergrad UMich</p>
<p>How is it one of the top schools with a 50% acceptance rate?</p>
<p>I don't get it</p>
<p>It's a huge school so naturally will take more applicants than smaller ones. Top schools are not defined by acceptance rates. See the other thread where some kid tries to knock the University of Chicago for not having a single-digit acceptance rate.</p>
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<p>i had no idea it was prestigious until now.</p>
<p>Because acceptance rate doesn't really have that much affect on the quality of a school? </p>
<p>To a large extent, it's a function of national visibility and the size of a school. The large public schools like Michigan have a higher acceptance rate because (obviously) they need to accept more students to fill the freshmen class, and they give priority to in-state students. However, especially in a large school like Michigan, you'll rise or fall to the level of your true intellectual peers. Personally, I think this is a much better system, because how high you're able to climb in your field of interest at the college level isn't limited by how you may have done in high school. If you're in the top 10-15% at the top publics like Michigan, you'll be in a peer group whose statistics compare favorably with schools in the top 10-15, and you can pursue special opportunities like the Honors program that give you smaller/more advanced classes and keep you closer to your intellectual peers if that kind of thing is terribly important to you. You also have schools like Chicago, which still have strong student bodies, but because they don't have national name recognition you don't have swarms of underqualified students applying as a reach for the hell of it like you see with Harvard/Princeton/etc.</p>
<p>Nearly every single program at Michigan is top 15 in the nation. With about 20,000-25,000 students, a bunch of underqualified kids are gonna get accepted. However, that doesn't take away from the quality of academics. </p>
<p>We need Alexandre to post in this thread...</p>
<p>Is the OP talking about layperson prestige, academic prestige or employer prestige?</p>
<p>Things Michigan has going for them...
+ Solid alumni network
+ Huge endowment
+ Ability to attract top students from OOS
+ Quality undergrad business and engineering programs
*Many Ross (business) grads get sought-after jobs on Wall Street
+ Quality, award-winning faculty
+ Solid athletic teams, especially football
+ I've heard that the campus is pretty nice</p>
<p>Acceptance rate was closer to 40% this year.</p>
<p>Also, the acceptance rate for OOS is much lower I think. The acceptance rate isn't very accurate for big publics because most have to accept a certain number of in-state students with top 10% class ranks or high GPAs.</p>
<p>I live in Michigan. Most people here seem to be aware that U of Michigan in Ann Arbor is an especially good university. But prestige-lust simply isn't as prominent here as it is on the coasts. Some of the top high schoolers want the very best the state has to offer, but a hell of a lot don't even bother applying to it, and are more than happy to go to Michigan State, Western Michigan, Michigan Tech, and the many other adequate and inexpensive in-state options. In other words, reading College Confidential, you conclude that just about every bright kid in California takes a shot at Berkeley and UCLA. But it simply isn't like that in Michigan. If it were, then U of Michigan would have twice the number of applicants, and a much lower acceptance %.</p>
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<p>I think he may be joking.</p>
Cooper Union has very selective but I never heard of it.
Michigan’s a fairly old university (almost two hundred years old.) It has a strong reputation and has been able to secure its graduates in prominent positions, especially in places like New York. It’s also invested its endowment well enough so that it has one of the highest endowments of all universities. That, and its graduate programs are among the top in the nation.
I think you’re confusing admit rate with selectivity, which isn’t necessarily the case. A university typically educates similar amounts of students year to year. Its admit rate only goes down when it gets more students applying than there are spots for. UCLA and Berkeley might increase the amount of students they educate (i.e. their incoming class sizes) by 1000 per year. But they may get 10,000 more applicants this year than the one before. And so, there admit rate decreases as a result. It doesn’t mean they became more selective. More students just applied than there were positions for. This isn’t yet the case at Michigan, but it may be in a few years.
^ Yes, unlike the Southern Branch which started in 1919, this thread is nearly 7 years old.
Closing