Elite/Ivy grads really do earn more? (new study)

ucbalumnus
Wed, 02 Nov 2016 05:03:08 +0000

3girls3cats:

A poster suggested early on in this discussion that the SAT stats for entering students for Harvard and University of Michigan were virtually indistinguishable. That didn’t sound quite right to me so I looked at it more carefully. I searched the common data sets for both schools and looked at the 2014-2015 cohort in order to avoid any inconsistencies between the old and new SAT scoring. (That being said, the data for 2015-2016 is not appreciably different.) Although the 25th and 75th percentiles showed differences between the two schools (M-620-720 CR 660-760 math and H 700-800 CR 710-800 math), what was really telling was the distribution. Where only 33% of incoming Michigan freshmen scored between 700-800 on CR and 60% did so on math, 78.47% of incoming Harvard freshmen scored at that rate on CR and 81% did so on math. That is a different group of students and no matter what conclusions we draw, I think it’s important to be honest that the cohort at one school is different from the cohort at the other.

Michigan’s frosh class is about four times the size of Harvard’s. The top quarter of the class at Michigan, based on the above SAT scores, appears more than competitive in SAT scores than Harvard’s class. While certainly SAT scores are nowhere near a complete assessment of a student’s academic ability (despite the often over-reliance on such by many posters here), it appears that Michigan includes a cohort that is similar in size to Harvard that is SAT score competitive to Harvard, even though it is mixed into many other students with somewhat lower SAT scores.

So a student with Harvard level SAT scores should be able to find as many or more SAT score peers at Michigan as at Harvard.