Whats up With Emory?

bernie12
Mon, 04 Jan 2016 16:03:26 +0000

A) That is a lot of schools…I hope they all have a legit reason you applied or some over-reaching similarities other than them being rated highly.

@mclovin94 I don’t see why it matters, but okay. Because it wasn’t doing extremely well in terms of their metrics…eventually they changed the metrics and certain things counted more and I think it was an area where Emory wasn’t doing that well. Also, the admissions thing (the selectivity being lower than peers) was bound to catch up to it. Again, US News doesn’t really rank academic quality (it ranks things it believes are associated with it, but let’s be real here, if Cambridge and Oxford were ranked by the US, they would be at a disadvantage versus schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and perhaps many other elites because they are so large in comparison to most top American Universities. In addition to that, their admissions scheme is equivalent to replacing SAT’s w/IB or AP success as they rely on A-level performance in conjunction with a serious interview system that more so tests the students in their area of interest than is a mere metric to screen for “personality”) and actually can be quite sensitive to those metrics. Like I believe Emory’s score remained the same from what I remember, but if other schools keep jacking up their SAT’s every year and it doesn’t, they are eventually going to have a higher score and thus Emory will drop if it refuses to play that game or just doesn’t do it well for some reason. Emory’s drop in the rankings reflects more so what it isn’t and has not traditionally been doing than what it was doing. The ranking basically says: “Emory must participate in the admissions rat-race and should market more heavily to get its name known by counselors and peer institutions”, that sounds like a very perverse incentive to me that got Emory in trouble in the first place (where it pretended to participate in it).

Instead of worrying so much about USNWR ratings and issues of prestige, I would be hitting up departmental websites of interests, looking at programmatic options, and curricular offerings, or looking at the content of student publications to actually check if these schools are legit places you would want to be (or just visiting the campuses to feel them out). Pick the school that does what you like well. The rankings don’t really tell much about that and beyond a certain point is just honestly splitting hairs, much like some (ok, most) elite school’s admissions tactics. Profiles of each applicant can be nearly identical, but most ain’t getting in. One usually cannot say that a student who got into one is more deserving (more lucky is probably the word) than the one who was equally qualified but denied. This is kind of like when you try to compare privates like Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, GeorgeTown, and Notre Dame which are so different yet so similar reputation wise that to focus on reputation and rating differences is honestly just wasting tons of time. As in, you cannot really say that any of these places are overall better than each other. They have similar reputations with academics and completely different strengths in terms of graduate and undergraduate education. For example, in terms of highly populated majors, Emory and Rice look very different from the other 3 (though GeorgeTown and Emory look a little a like given the amount of students who want something political science or business related) which suggests that the student bodies are into different things.