Nerdyparent you are so correct. merc81 used SAT/ACT as a quantifiable measure of school quality and posted that a “15 of them (LAC) would have higher scores than the highest-scoring public CC Top University”.
However, LucietheLakie pointed out that most LACs “have fewer than 2,000 in their entire student bodies”. If defining top freshman students is those having an ACT of 30+ or SAT of 1330+ and the most important factor in assessing the rank of a school is the number of top students that attend a school then the following would demonstrate that UA could be considered a CC top university. The list below includes all of CC Top Universities and the list of Top LAC provided by merc81.
As one can see, University of Alabama has more “top freshman students” on its campus in 2014 than all but 5 Universities on CC Top National Universities List.
Believe it or not, UA has more top students than Stanford, Duke, UNC, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice to name a few. Only UCLA, Berkeley, Southern Cal, University of Michigan and University of Virginia have more top freshman than University of Alabama. BTW UA does not superscore like many LAC and Universities.
Approximate Number of 2014 freshman with ACT 30+/SAT 1330+ attending each school.
- Harvey Mudd - 197
- Pomona - 330
- Amherst - 385
- Swarthmore - 320
- Bowdoin - 451
- Williams - 448
- Carleton - 404
- Claremont McKenna - 262
- Wellesley - 485
10 ) Haverford - 269
11 ) Washington and Lee - 415
12 ) Wesleyan - 610 - Vassar - 554
- Hamilton - 394
- Middlebury - 447
- USC - 2168
- Cal-Berkeley - 2918
- Tulane - 961
- Brandeis - 500
- Miami - 1267
- Stanford -1473
- CalTech -224
- Duke - 1433
- MIT - 1051
- UChicago - could not find data, no CDS
- Notre Dame - 1863
- Washington U St. Louis - 1572
- Northwestern -1740
- UMichigan - 3912
- UVirginia - 2392
- UCLA - 3032
- North Carolina -Chapel Hill - 1713
- Carnegie Mellon - 1154
- Georgetown - 1195
- Johns Hopkins - 1138
- Rice - 800
- Vanderbilt - 1439
University of Alabama - 1937