^^^It’s a pretty elite group of those who get admitted to the service academies. Ask any citizen. I think the threshold for “elite” is reached here without a doubt.
You should check your facts. Here are the SAT CR+M and ACT Composite middle 50% for the top publics, per US News:
UC Berkeley 1250-1500 / 29-34
UCLA 1190-1470 / 25-33
UVA 1250-1460 / 28-33
Michigan 1290-1500 / 29-33
UNC Chapel Hill 1200-1390 / 27-32
UNC Chapel Hill is the outlier in this group with by far the lowest 75th percentile SAT score, although its 25th percentile SAT is essentially the same as UCLA’s. UCLA also has the lowest 25th percentile ACT score by a wide margin. Michigan’s scores are roughly equal to UC Berkeley’s with Michigan higher in SAT 25th percentile and UC Berkeley a point higher on ACT 75th percentile—but since a 33 and a 34 ACT Composite are both 99th percentile, they’re essentially the same score. You can make a similar argument with respect to the SAT 75th percentile scores: the College Board says any CR+M score in the range of 1450-1510 is 99th percentile, so you could say UC Berkeley, UCLA, UVA, and Michigan are essentially the same at the 75th percentile level in both SAT and ACT, with UNC-Chapel Hill’s 75th percentile score lagging just a tad at the 97th percentile level—still, not too shabby.
It’s at the 25th percentile median that real differences appear. The SAT percentile ranks are as follows:
Michigan 1290 = 90th percentile
UC Berkeley 1250 = 86th percentile
UVA 1250= 86th percentile
UNC Chapel Hill 1200 = 81st percentile
UCLA 1190 = 80th percentile
And for the ACT 25th percentile medians:
Michigan 29 = 92nd percentile
UC Berkeley 29 = 92nd percentile
UVA 28 = 89th percentile
UNC Chapel Hill 27 = 86th percentile
UCLA 25 = 79th percentile
These are quite significant differences at the 25th percentile median. At that level UCLA has the weakest students in this group, not one of the strongest. The title for strongest goes to Michigan and UC Berkeley, arguably in that order.
I don’t want to get drawn too deeply into a serious discussion on the titular subject of the post, because I think (or at least hope) the intent was to be a bit tounge in cheek, but really the question is what is “elite”. To me, the ability to lead, inspire, sacrifice, shoulder responsibility and accept consequences, all things West Point and Annapolis have been teaching their grads for centuries, is far more valuable to both the individual and society at large than whether that kid got a 720 or a 750 on their SAT verbal score.
Any list that doesn’t have Michigan at the top is rubbish. 
Go Blue!
^^I think that top spot is reserved for UC, Berkeley. Go Golden Bears!
You mean lists of schools that lose to Ohio State every year, right?
The only test-optional school on tk’s list is Wesleyan and it requires all matriculating first-years to submit their scores regardless of whether they were submitted with their applications. They are posted on their common data set for the incoming Fall class. The irony is that average SAT/ACT scores at Wesleyan have increased since they went test-optional.
“The title for strongest goes to Michigan and UC Berkeley, arguably in that order.”
First, everyone knows that UVA is the best of this bunch. Wa-hoo-wa!!
With that out of the way, the thing you need to account for with the public ivies is that their stats get influenced significantly by the in-state vs. out-of state dynamic. Private schools don’t have that characteristic.
UM is approaching 50/50. So it has the most higher stat OOS kids in its data set. So its overall numbers improve. UNC, in contrast, is 81/19, which means they have the least OOS stats in its data set. UVA is in the middle – 67/33.
My impression is that, for an OOS applicant, UM is probably the easiest of the three to get into. Even though it has higher overall stats.
UCB and UCLA have their own quirks. Since they used to be very high in-state but now rapidly moving to bigger OOS and intl enrollments. And since the CA population is so big, the IS pool for those schools is very big/strong/deep.
Cutting through it all, I’d go with how USNWR has it – UCB first of that bunch.
@circuitrider I had in mind Bowdoin which has been test optional for a while
@northwesty Can I like your post more than once?
If there’s a difference between Michigan and UVA in “ease of OOS admission,” it’s negligible. Michigan’s overall admit rate in 2016 was essentially the same as UVA’s, Michigan at 28.6% and UVA 28.9%. UVA reported their 2016 OOS admit rate at 23.7%.
Michigan reported an OOS admit rate of 24.5% for the same period.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/admissions-reviews-more-55000-applications-fall
In-state admit rates were also almost identical, UVA at 41.3%, Michigan at 42.4%.
The biggest difference is that Michigan gets far more OOS applications—about 44,541 in 2016 out of a total applicant pool of 55,504. In contrast, UVA’s total applicant pool was just 32,377. Assuming at least half of those were in-state, that means UVA’s OOS applicant pool was somewhere in the vicinity of 1/3 the size of Michigan’s.
UC Berkeley’s standardized test score averages are very misleading. Berkeley wants the top performing students from all over California, including the poor areas. To do that, it emphasizes grades and class rigor vis a vis the rest of your high school far more than test scores. A full 98% of the entering class at Berkeley was in the top ten percent of their graduating class in high school (and the other 2% are the recruited athletes). At UVA that figure is 89%. At UNC that figure is only 77%. Michigan doesn’t report it.
California is so huge that it produces far more high school valedictorians than there are spots in the Berkeley entering class. The standardized test score average is pulled down by the thousands of valedictorians from poor areas where test scores are lower and the students can’t afford private test prep classes. Those students are smart as hell and hardworking, but they usually don’t have the same SATs as a better prepped kid with more money.
As a result of all this, the typical upper middle class suburban kid or prep school kid reading College Confidential needs to know that Berkeley is far, far harder to get into than its elite public school rivals like Michigan and UVa, even for Californians. You have to be the top of your class whereever you went to high school, or forget it.
I personally know a student from our California prep school who was rejected from Berkeley who is going to Stanford, one who was rejected from Berkeley and is going to UChicago, one who was rejected from Berkeley who is going to Brown, and one who was rejected from Berkeley who is going to Columbia. These are students with 34 ACTs and 1550 SATs and so on. Only 3 or 4 kids got into Berkeley this year from our school, but at least a third of the class is going to elite schools that have higher average test scores than Berkeley.
I personally know a student from a well known California prep school who was rejected from Berkeley who is now attending Harvard. (This Golden Bear was crushed, my S was not.)
@crimsonmom2019 I’ve known many students over the years who were rejected by Berkeley as well as Georgetown but accepted by Harvard, Columbia or Princeton. Not really surprising as the UCs and Georgetown place a lot of store in your “index” number and on stats.
I like an “elite” list that is so long it runs off the page.
Berkeley has its haters but Stanford and MIT both assert that Berkeley is its main competition for top students.
“If there’s a difference between Michigan and UVA in “ease of OOS admission,” it’s negligible. Michigan’s overall admit rate in 2016 was essentially the same as UVA’s, Michigan at 28.6% and UVA 28.9%. UVA reported their 2016 OOS admit rate at 23.7%.”
BC – Anecdotally, I still see more kids around where I live who do better in admissions at UMich than UVA, like accepted at UM and deferred/denied at UVA. I don’t see many of the opposite. But you are probably right that the gap between those two has been narrowed a lot.
I’d speculate that is because UM’s OOS percentage keeps going up. In 2012, UM’s frosh class was 57% in-state; 2016 it was 51%. That’s a big move.
So my guess is that UM crossed a tipping point on the IS/OOS balance and is starting to experience that virtuous admissions cycle that the fancy privates have – more OOS students means higher stats; higher stats means the school is perceived as more desire-able; which drives an increase in applications; which drives down the admit rate; which makes the school look more desire-able; which brings more applications; and so on. Since UVA’s OOS percentage is capped at one-third, UM’s OOS characteristics might overtake UVA sometime soon if UM’s OOS percentage continues to grow.
Because of its mandated 82/18 split, UNC-CH is probably the toughest OOS admit (even though 82/18 means UNC has the lowest overall stats). Because of the size/strength of its in-state pool, by some measures UCB is slightly easier to get into OOS vs. IS, which means that UCB is probably the toughest in-state admit of the bunch.
The public ivies are an odd group of schools on this stuff.
@ThankYouforHelp many schools don’t report class rank any more, so top 10% can get a bit misleading when only 30% or so of students may have a rank. Likewise, way back when, there used to be one valedictorian and one salutatorian. Now I’ve seen some graduating classes where it looks like they have 30 or so listed. There aren’t many stats that shouldn’t have some sort of asterisk next to it.
^^A lot of public high schools have caught on that colleges want vals and sals and that students need awards as a way to distinguish themselves or to tell their story about their specific interests. I think the private schools have been slower to catch on with their “prize days.” Our school is just starting to offer multiple prizes for the same award and many more runners up than ever before.
I am not a math whiz, but I don;t get this at all. Can you explain?