Please explain: BC #35, BU #57...?

astor
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:19:27 +0000

It depends on what scores you compare. If you compare BC’s SAT scores to BU’s CAS scores, they are very similar. The reason BU’s overall scores are lower is because BU has a College of General Studies, which admits students with lower stats into the “junior college” where they attend for 2 years before transferring to one of the full colleges of BU.

[Boston University Information Center](http://www.bu.edu/dbin/infocenter/content/index.php?pageid=909) those are the means, but you can see that the mean for CAS lies within the middle 50% of BC’s scores, so they are very similar (BC’s mean’s score seem to also lie within the median 50% so it’s a good estimate). BU’s College of Engineering has even higher stats than BU CAS since it’s much more competitive to get into ENG, but it’s not widely posted since CAS is a much larger school than ENG.

When it comes down to which school to attend, don’t base judgment solely on USNews Rankings. They aren’t ranked based off of quality of education, but rather endowments play a huge role in their rankings. Take for example BU’s medical school. They got quite a large sum of funding from NIH to build the bioterrorism facility, and their rankings rocketed up. Now that completion is getting closer, NIH funding is dwindling down and BU’s rankings is once again leveling out.

Base your school choice on your intended area of study. If you want to major in something that plays to BC’s strengths, by all means go there. But if you wanted to major in something like engineering, which BC does not have, then don’t let rankings of an entire university hold you back; heck if you’re so stuck on rankings, you’ll see individual colleges within a university are also ranked. Go to a large research school if research intrigues you…go to a small liberal arts school if you enjoy personal attention and small classes…etc.