a 3 ranking gain isn’t particularly significant. Caltech’s been as high as #1 on US News and was around 10 or so last time I checked. This doesn’t mean Caltech’s experienced a significantl drop in quality. All it means is that the criteria US News originally used to rank the schools have changed (and they tweak the criteria with almost every ranking.)
If you want to look at schools with big changes, look at Chicago. However, Chicago’s notorious for playing the rankings game to boost its placement. Chicago hasn’t experienced a significant increase in quality, and neither has JHU.
The acceptance rate of every top university has also decreased. JHU is not unique in this regard.
I don’t particularly keep up with average SAT scores, but I would think that other top universities’ averages have increased as well.
Maintaining a small undergraduate population isn’t a feat. A university can only educate so many students. And hence, it needs to adjust its acceptance rate when its matriculation rate is too high. This screwed over UCLA a few years ago. It’s matriculation was significantly higher than expected because Berkeley rejected a lot of students that year. And so, those rejected students enrolled at UCLA. So the universities need to be careful to not overenroll themselves. If they don’t, they’ll be scrambling at the last minute trying to get resources for the extra students attending their universities.
3 billion’s kind of low in the endowment game. I think Harvard has +30B; The University of Texas (system) has like $25B; Yale and Stanford have like $20B; Michigan and MIT have like $10B, etc. $3B’s not really in the same league with the others.
Probably in a similar place to where it is now: It’ll be a highly respected university in the east coast that’s strong in the health sciences.