When does an up & coming university finally become “elite”?

PickOne1
Wed, 26 Aug 2015 15:30:06 +0000

I am sure the average Chicagoland student would be ashamed to go to Brown and would be afraid that it would be confused with a certain package delivery company. They may not specifically choose it over Northwestern, but I bet they would get on the plane if they get admitted there and not at NW/UC/etc. I am guessing many choose Harvard over that Chicago school.

When there are hundreds of thousands of students, most or all highly accomplished, from all over the world clamoring to get into 20 schools with 1500 students admitted a year (total number of openings is thus 28,500 + 6000 at UCB), you got to pick something. Having 1500 premeds would make a horrifying student population, as would 1500 majority or URM or athletes or student council presidents or researchers or whatever. The big state schools with 30,000 students could possibly tolerate a weird year with 1000 art history majors and put those student council presidents into club president spots or something, but I bet, they don’t do that either. Flagships might be more about self-selection, but to be honest, sometimes that shows … like 1000 students in intro to comp sci or in the sort of vague student experience (other than football games which involves a really orchestrated attempt at putting together a top team) that one can often get there or in the engineering and pre-med weed out campaigns.

SATs are a lousy form of grading people since the content is too easy and you are also seeing massive correlation to multiple choice test taking skills rather than any real academic prowess. High schools vary from stellar hyper-competitive to tiny places where ability to do calc in 12th grade is really special. People lie about EC difficulty.