@skieurope : Here is what you need to see and it does not match the speculation made above my post, please see these files for the information on the “enrolled” student body at every unit of Emory (academic profiles):
http://opb.emory.edu/data/factbook/
Your only conclusion should be
a)Emory is a normal school in that enrollees have lower stats than admits
b)SAT differential between Emory and Oxford is irrelevant
c)GPA differential is actually much more noticeable (3.55 vs. 3.72 is certainly a bigger difference than 1336/1600 and 1365/1600 SAT…which is less than hair splitting)
d)Emory GPAs, assuming college board data is correct (it puts Emory at the bottom of its private peers by a bit SAT wise, so I am inclined to trust the GPA) would suggest that many students yielded are typically yielded from fairly competitive high schools (lower GPA brackets correspond to higher class-rank than even some “near peers”)
Regardless, there is currently no inflation. It is the same as every school (where you can typically only find enrolled data in a CDS if offered). Admit high, enroll lower. Nothing is new. Emory actually just admits much lower than most its peers (perhaps because stats whoring schools without a matching reputation don’t do too hot beyond admissions and Dean Latting, Dean of admissions, knows it) perhaps because it knows that it is futile to admit too high.
As for Emory being “up and coming”…well so are many peers. Emory just is much less aggressive (and let us be honest, even effective) at marketing and uses different admissions and recruitment strategies than some of the currently more popular peers. Input metrics make Emory look weaker than these schools on paper, but Emory is a little better than them or generally on par in terms of consistency of outputs (major post-grad scholarships, top grad and prof. school placement, etc). While I do not consider Emory to be quite a hidden gem, its admissions/incoming stats lead people to forget or ignore what I just mention. Instead the assumption is that Emory’s students must be “worse” than the ones at those peers, but things like course enrollment data (say for courses targeted at those freshmen coming in with AP credits or more advanced backgrounds), reveal this to be untrue, perhaps that the student body is more diverse or generally takes multiple choice tests worse, but again, hopefully, most college tests for most students are not only multiple choice, so differences between high scoring student bodies should not be predicted by differences in the scores but by other things (like depth of extracurricular activities, “well-rounded” versus “pointed” students. Emory airs on the more “pointed” side which may be why it can outperform versus an SAT prediction. At Emory, people are super serious about their supposedly already decided career goals or academic passions).