Why is the UW ranked so high internationally but low nationally?

lyndak
Wed, 05 Mar 2014 19:45:33 +0000

I’m seriously confused.

The University of Washington is my state university (the one where EVERYONE applies to no matter what) and to my knowledge, it’s not that hard to get into. About half of my high school’s senior class (~130 students) is usually always accepted, and a little less than 1/4 (~70) end up going to this school each year.

With that being said, it’s acceptance rate is also over 50% and it’s not regarded as a prestigious university AT ALL. In fact, the mentality of my school is that UW should be the back up school. No one celebrates getting into UW, no huge Facebook status is posted, and it’s just not a big deal.

My question is (partly due to my experience): How is it possible that national lists put UW somewhere in between top 50-60 on their college rankings list while international lists puts the school at top 30? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. I’m talking 3.4, 3.5 students that are accepted to this university. I know these aren’t extremely low GPAs, but for a school that is ranked TOP 30 IN THE WORLD, is this normal?

It’s ranked higher than schools such as WashU, Brown, Rice, USC, and for a few lists it’s higher than Johns Hopkins! That’s impossible. How can that even be? These schools are amazing schools that are ranked much, much higher on national lists than the UW is.

On a side note: I applied to the UW and would really like to go there. However, I was accepted to NYU and must confirm my decision by March 11. If I accept their decision, I need to withdraw all apps, etc by this date which means I don’t get to wait and find out if I got into UW.

I’m not going to choose based on the ranking, however… This question is just something I’m curious about because it seems really illogical to me.

Can anyone explain this?