<p>1) “While there are just as many “smart” people at UM…” </p>
<p>No: “…just as many…” is not consistent with the numbers which I posted above, which are easily verified using the common data sets from Michigan et.al. Given Michigan’s large size there are demostrably <em>more</em> students with elite schools and perfect or near perfect GPAs at Michigan than at any of the Ivy League schools…so “just as many” is – however unintentionally – a misleading way to frame the discussion.</p>
<p>2) “there are way more “less qualified” students at UM because it is so large in comparison.” </p>
<p>The foregoing statement is accurate but not completely dispositive: while it is true that Michigan has less qualified students that an elite school might not accept, that is not the way to make the comparison. In effect, the question is what happens if you pair off the two sets? For each Cornell student you’d pair off a Michigan student. When you have run out of Cornell students, there are still many “elite” Michigan students waiting for a match. So UM both has less qualified students, but that ignores the fact that Michigan also has many more highly qualified students. So if you want to slack off and compete with the lower tail you can do so; if you want to compete against well qualified students in the upper tail, you can do that as well. The point is that given Michigan’s size, you will be sitting in classes with a number of students with whom you will directly compete against to earn your grades;</p>
<p>3) “When these “less qualified” students apply to medical school from UM they will bring down the overall percentage of applicants from UM who are accepted.” </p>
<p>This is statistically true, but somewhat irrelevant. I don’t know the figures but if Princeton sends 90% of, purely for example, 300 students to medical school, one can argue that there are 270 Princeton matriculants. If UM sends 60% of 700 students or 420 matriculants, does any one of the 420 Michigan matriculants care about the lower tail? In other words, if we are not worshipping the statistic for its own sake, would you rather attend a medical school from an undergraduate class with a higher or lower matriculation rate into medical school? It shouldn’t matter due to the ecological fallacy: it doesn’t matter what the ambient set (your class) achieves, the only thing that counts for a potential matriculant is that they personally be above the cutoff for matriculating. If you are a matriculant from Princeton or from UM, I seriously doubt that you care what the total population acceptance rate is from your undergraduate institution.</p>