Ah yes. Now I see that all those students from MD and NJ are better people with whom to live, work, study, and play than those lowly Midwesterners. It really sucks for those of us born in the Midwest who just never had the opportunity to get an East Coast high school education and therefore were more poorly prepared to be good colleagues in college. I don’t blame folks for not wanting to go to a school filled with us. I get it now.
Let’s check off some reasons why admissions profiles are a terrible set of criteria to use to evaluate a program.
[ol]
[li]The admissions profiles you provide are university-wide, not limited to the engineering programs, which would be much more representative of the students with whom a prospective student will interact on a daily basis. Of course, it is easy and common to interact with and befriend non-engineers outside of class, but that’s not relevant to what you are talking about here.[/li]
[li]Admitted student profile is not a good way to discern the quality of a program at a school. Public universities often have their admissions at least somewhat dictated by their associated governments and therefore have a lot less control over selectivity than, say, the MITs of the world. That doesn’t mean the quality of education is any lower. You might even argue that it forces them to try to provide a better education on account of having to deal with a wider range of preparation levels (albeit with decidedly mixed results).[/li]
[li]Admissions profiles can absolutely be affected by the average quality of regional school districts feeding said university, which notably says nothing about the actual intelligence level of a student. All it says is that they came from a place with school districts. Maybe they were from a poor area. Maybe they were the son or daughter of a farmer out in the sticks. This says nothing about their intelligence or potential as a student and collaborator.[/li][/ol]
There are some wonderful reasons to choose Maryland over Purdue. There are also some great ones to choose Purdue over Maryland. The average test scores of admitted freshman shouldn’t be one of those reasons.