<p>For the poster who keeps begging to stop using the word “marginal”, sorry. For the applicants to highly selective schools, the students are marginal.</p>
<p>" Marginal: close to the lower limit of qualification, acceptability, or function : barely exceeding the minimum requirements"</p>
<p>Once you get your knickers untwisted, you’ll realize that these poor, unnamed, down-trodden applicants haven’t been condemned as human beings. Just their scores.</p>
<p>I was just struck about the talk about how hard it was to gain admission to the UC system contrasted with how low some of the SAT scores were.</p>
<p>Take UC Irvine. A well-respected school, considered very selective. However, its SAT lower quartile is in the 62nd percentile. Without getting into an argument over US News’ rankings, UCI is a top 50 school. Ranked right about Tulane. </p>
<p>No applicant to Tulane would be admitted with an SAT score of 1070. However, 25% of the population of UCI has a score that low.</p>
<p>So for marginal students, most of the selective public universities are attainable. </p>
<p>For marginal students, the same can’t be said of like-ranked private schools.</p>