Michigan State Honors Program vs. University of Michigan

[goldenboy8784]

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@Alexandre

That is not significantly lower than the 32 ACT mean for admitted Engineering students. As you aptly point out, many of those admitted with higher ACT scores end up choosing schools like Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford, but there is not that much of a drop.

Alexandre, there’s a pretty large difference between an ACT score of 30 and an ACT score of 32, especially when it is spread out over an entire university as large as Michigan. Michigan shares very little overlap with the 4 universities you mentioned; almost no one applied to HYPSM and Michigan unless they reside in the Wolverine State. Penn, Cornell, and Northwestern are the three elite private schools that Michigan shares a majority of its cross admits with. It also competes with Illinois, Boston College, USC, NYU, Tulane, and UMiami among other good schools.</p>

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@Alexandre

The two years he spent studying at Stanford did not magically transform Larry Page from nothing to the co-owner of Google.

[Google</a> Timeline](<a href=“http://www.history-timelines.org.uk/events-timelines/18-google-timeline.htm]Google”>http://www.history-timelines.org.uk/events-timelines/18-google-timeline.htm)</p>

<p>Actually, it essentially did. Google was born after Brin and Page were doing a joint research project on the Stanford Digitial Library Project. The founder of Sun Microsystems actually gave these two entrepreneurs their initial funding and then later the VCs KPCB & Sequoia Capital gave a much larger chunk of money to help Google open shop.</p>

<p>Only at Stanford can you be in such close access to angel investors and VCs who are willing to fund and take a risk on promising new ventures like Google.</p>

<p>Although Michigan is essentially as good as Stanford in Engineering, it doesn’t enjoy the same benefit of location. If Brin and Page did their PhD studies in Ann Arbor or Urbana Champaign, its hard to imagine that Google would exist today.</p>