In order not to derail this thread further, I’ve started a new topic for people who want to continue the discussion of state flagships and which students get in and how the school’s rigor can advantage/disadvantage certain populations:
In the thread Is there grade inflation at your child’s high school? a discussion has arisen in posts #99-109 about how, depending on a state’s admission priorities, some applicants to their state flagships may be disadvantaged (whether they come from a school with more or less rigor).
Implied in that conversation is that some of a state’s schools are better than others, so for a worthy student who is disadvantaged by the high school they attend (due to higher or lower rigor) that the other state options are a significant downgrade. This, of course, is primarily only an issue at the most popular colleges in the country, as I strongly suspect that the majority of state flagships in the U.S. still accept the majority of their applicants.
To illustrate this, here is a list of the public schools ranked in the top 100 by USNWR, as my sense is that the majority of posters on CC would consider the T100 schools to be good schools. There are definite issues with rankings and their methodolog…