Whats up With Emory?

bernie12
Sat, 02 Jan 2016 20:54:53 +0000

@mclovin64 Yes, it is lower than most of its peers (I would say anything ranked higher than 15). It performs worse than others (okay, GeorgeTown would be the closest app. number wise) admissions wise likely due to marketing and definitely because of the financial aid wars which Emory currently loses. You can “buy” student preference. So I think when it comes to 15-25 schools, most students view it as on par, but they aren’t going to seriously consider it unless Emory shells out at least as much aid as those schools (and this just makes sense and has little to do with prestige or perceived academic quality. It’s simply “okay, these are all good, but who is going to make it most affordable?”.

Also, it is typical for enrolled stats to be lower than admitted stats, including the GPA. Some schools slide even further down especially on the scores. They employ a super ambitious “admit extremely high” scheme and then those who get into a more prestigious school go elsewhere unless offered really compelling aid packages (need or merit) so often the 25% at such schools slide more than Emory’s. So it really has to do with the school’s selection scheme. I’m thinking that Emory, last year, could have gotten on this train to success (as did Georgetown like 2 years ago) and start just admitting higher in the first place banking on students getting denied from peer schools. Vanderbilt and WUSTL basically took this route (except they started admitting REALLY high. Like the bottom quartile for RD admits starts at like 1500 and then enrollees look more like the much fewer ED admits whose bottom quartile is more like 1400-1410. I would guess that this scheme banks on those in the lower 1400s and in the 1300s to either get lower financial aid packages from other schools or to simply be denied or waitlisted elsewhere. Furthermore, they likely know that the others will be snatched away by higher prestige schools that cross-admit them, they just have a high threshold to begin with so that they are left with super high stats. HYPM can probably admit at that level and then bank on yielding students on par with that level, so they don’t have to really start at a 1500 bottom-quartile and let it drop. They just start at 1400-1430 or whatever, and let the chips fall). So the slide you see in stats is not uncommon and should be judged with more nuance. The fact is, stats. wise, Emory has yet to aim that high in the first place. And knowing its position in the financial aid wars, it still continues to air on the cautious side. It’s one of the reasons that there is apparently a scholarship fund (I think that a fund needs to be made to make the need-based aid more robust for middle-ranges personally) to eventually deal with the issue of being unable to successfully “buy” higher stats students like many non-Ivy peers.