In my opinion, acceptance rate is a an extremely deceptive and flawed metric, though of course it has some non-zero correlation to quality. Perhaps about as good as trying to judge how good a college quarterback is purely by completion percentage, paying no attention to anything else like yards, touchdowns, interceptions, quality of opposing defenses, strength of OL, receivers, running game, type of offense.

Just to take our local biases out of it for a moment, there is no way that the following two acceptance rates reflect the quality of schools' respective undergraduates, or of how challenging their coursework is:
Duke - 9.8%
Virginia - 29.9%

There could be many factors. Both are very good schools. Just as a stupid example, perhaps Duke just gets tons of extra applications from unqualified high school seniors who have listened to Dickie V too many times and want nothing more than to be a Cameron Crazy and storm the court after a Blue Devil win. Being a good school, Duke rightly rejects these unqualified applicants, making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive. Virginia would have rejected them too, but not as many of those same unqualified applicants were dying to storm the court after the Hoos win (though this year, that sounds just as fun!). Historically, similar things have happened for the L.A. schools - both are good but have often gotten larger numbers of unqualified applicants, who they rightly rejected, artificially making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive relative to say, Cal's.

Using average (or perhaps median) SAT or GPA, or perhaps some other such absolute measure (though even these can be problematic) seems better.

pingpong2;842467992 said:

---

Is that the percentiles for the combined score? IIRC USC lets students use the highest verbal/math/writing scores from across multiple sittings (thus inflating that number), whereas the UCs require you to submit the verbal/math/writing scores from the same sitting.

---

Are you suggesting that people have good verbal/math/writing days and bad verbal/math/writing days? I have good and bad hair days!!!

juarezbear;842468221 said:

---

Wrong again. The Big 10 has 3, and possibly 4 elite schools....NW, UM, UW, and possibly Purdue or Illinois for engineering. ACC Football has Duke, UVa, and UNC, plus ND for other sports. BC and The U are marginal. Pac 12 has the 4 California schools and UW. Colorado, Arizona, and Utah each has highly rated departments, then there's a steep drop off.

---

BC, for one, has improved due to having become a backup for those who don't make Ivies on the East Coast. As a consequence it has become like U$C---getting a lot of rejected 4.4 Ivies applying, thus increasing its difficulty in accessing.

OneKeg;842468265 said:

---

In my opinion, acceptance rate is a an extremely deceptive and flawed metric, though of course it has some non-zero correlation to quality. Perhaps about as good as trying to judge how good a college quarterback is purely by completion percentage, paying no attention to anything else like yards, touchdowns, interceptions, quality of opposing defenses, strength of OL, receivers, running game, type of offense.

Just to take our local biases out of it for a moment, there is no way that the following two acceptance rates reflect the quality of schools' respective undergraduates, or of how challenging their coursework is:
Duke - 9.8%
Virginia - 29.9%

There could be many factors. Both are very good schools. Just as a stupid example, perhaps Duke just gets tons of extra applications from unqualified high school seniors who have listened to Dickie V too many times and want nothing more than to be a Cameron Crazy and storm the court after a Blue Devil win. Being a good school, Duke rightly rejects these unqualified applicants, making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive. Virginia would have rejected them too, but not as many of those same unqualified applicants were dying to storm the court after the Hoos win (though this year, that sounds just as fun!). Historically, similar things have happened for the L.A. schools - both are good but have often gotten larger numbers of unqualified applicants, who they rightly rejected, artificially making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive relative to say, Cal's.

Using average (or perhaps median) SAT or GPA, or perhaps some other such absolute measure (though even these can be problematic) seems better.

---

I don't know about quality but perception here on the Northeast would put Duke well ahead of Virginia. Duke is basically considered fringe-Ivy in these parts and there is also a much stronger bias against state schools in the east. If you asked good students around here if you couldn't get into an Ivy League school where would you choose, Duke would probably be close to the #1 choice. Doesn't surprise me at all that Duke would get many more applications than Virginia (without factoring in basketball).

TheSouseFamily;842467998 said:

---

If you have a child that doesn't get into Arkansas, it's probably best for everyone involved to just put him or her down.

---

Souse, I checked 6 schools on your original list, and the data listed in your post was incorrect for all 6 of them. The schools I checked were Kansas, Michigan, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri. In every case, the official data as reported by the universities to U.S. News & World Report differed from what you got from that website.

For example, University of Michigan's Fall 2013 acceptance rate was 33.3%, not 36.5%. University of Arkansas had a Fall 2013 acceptance rate of 58.6%, not 99.5%. According to the correct US News data, the University of Arkansas has lower acceptance rates than 6 out of 12 Pac-12 schools, and higher average ACT scores than 5 out of 12 Pac-12 schools. They may be inbred hicks down there, but those inbred hicks are apparently on par with our Cougars, Sun Devils, Beavers, Ducks, Buffaloes, and Wildcats.

If you have a child that doesn't get into Arkansas, maybe you should have them apply to Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State, or Colorado as a backup plan. Ouch

BearBoarBlarney;842468337 said:

---

Souse, I checked 6 schools on your original list, and the data listed in your post was incorrect for all 6 of them. The schools I checked were Kansas, Michigan, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Missouri. In every case, the official data as reported by the universities to U.S. News & World Report differed from what you got from that website.

For example, University of Michigan's Fall 2013 acceptance rate was 33.3%, not 36.5%. University of Arkansas had a Fall 2013 acceptance rate of 58.6%, not 99.5%. According to the correct US News data, the University of Arkansas has lower acceptance rates than 6 out of 12 Pac-12 schools, and higher average ACT scores than 5 out of 12 Pac-12 schools. They may be inbred hicks down there, but those inbred hicks are apparently on par with our Cougars, Sun Devils, Beavers, Ducks, Buffaloes, and Wildcats.

If you have a child that doesn't get into Arkansas, maybe you should have them apply to Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington State, or Colorado as a backup plan. Ouch

---

BBB, thanks for your due diligence. Here is the link to the site that we were looking at when we got the data. http://collegeacceptancerates.com/college-acceptance-rates-sec-southeastern-conference/. As you can see, it shows Arky at 99.5% acceptance. Not sure why there is such a discrepancy between the two sources. I suspect that there are different scoring mechanisms that could explain the difference of a couple of points with a school like Michigan but as for a 40 point difference as is the case with Arkansas, I obviously cannot explain that. The hyperlinks for each school appear link to the US News site, but when I tried that with Arkansas, it doesn't link to the score. Strange...so that may very well be an error on the site.

defiantly interesting info

dajo9;842468330 said:

---

I don't know about quality but perception here on the Northeast would put Duke well ahead of Virginia. Duke is basically considered fringe-Ivy in these parts and there is also a much stronger bias against state schools in the east. If you asked good students around here if you couldn't get into an Ivy League school where would you choose, Duke would probably be close to the #1 choice. Doesn't surprise me at all that Duke would get many more applications than Virginia (without factoring in basketball).

---

FWIW, average SAT at Virginia for the class of 2019 was 1976. Average SAT at Duke was 2043. (Cal average SAT was 2005)

Source: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1090

Yeah, below is the link to the Arkansas data I got straight off the US News website.

Obviously, no one thinks of the University of Arkansas (or Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, etc.) as any great shakes, but the fact remains that a school like Arky is very equivalent to the bottom half of the Pac-12.

I don't care about any of these so-so schools, I just dislike seeing completely erroneous data like I saw from that bogus website you cited.

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-arkansas-1108

TheSouseFamily;842468348 said:

---

FWIW, average SAT at Virginia for the class of 2019 was 1976. Average SAT at Duke was 2043. (Cal average SAT was 2005)

Source: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg01_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=1090

---

Nope, Cal average SAT was 2077 for Fall 2013, and it was 2071 for the Fall 2014. Fall 2015 data is not yet available.

Not sure if you got these SAT stats from the same bogus website as was used for the acceptance rates.

Here's the links:
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/04/18/campus-announces-2013-14-freshman-admissions-decisions/

http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses/berkeley/freshman-profile/

BearBoarBlarney;842468350 said:

---

Yeah, below is the link to the Arkansas data I got straight off the US News website.

Obviously, no one thinks of the University of Arkansas (or Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, etc.) as any great shakes, but the fact remains that a school like Arky is very equivalent to the bottom half of the Pac-12.

I don't care about any of these so-so schools, I just dislike seeing completely erroneous data like I saw from that bogus website you cited.

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/university-of-arkansas-1108

---

Of the six schools you mentioned, Arkansas appears to simply be mistake. For the other five schools, they are all within 5 points of the US News numbers which could be accounted for by fall/spring fluctuations. Not quite sure that makes the site "bogus".

The thing about college admissions stats is that there is so much data out there, much of it erroneous.

The Arkansas statistic had to be a mistake, because the site was off by 41%. The others were much closer, I agree.

I think we can all agree that USC's acceptance rate is in no small measure positively impacted by how difficult it has become to get admitted into Cal and Ucla. :p

OneKeg;842468265 said:

---

In my opinion, acceptance rate is a an extremely deceptive and flawed metric, though of course it has some non-zero correlation to quality. Perhaps about as good as trying to judge how good a college quarterback is purely by completion percentage, paying no attention to anything else like yards, touchdowns, interceptions, quality of opposing defenses, strength of OL, receivers, running game, type of offense.

Just to take our local biases out of it for a moment, there is no way that the following two acceptance rates reflect the quality of schools' respective undergraduates, or of how challenging their coursework is:
Duke - 9.8%
Virginia - 29.9%

There could be many factors. Both are very good schools. Just as a stupid example, perhaps Duke just gets tons of extra applications from unqualified high school seniors who have listened to Dickie V too many times and want nothing more than to be a Cameron Crazy and storm the court after a Blue Devil win. Being a good school, Duke rightly rejects these unqualified applicants, making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive. Virginia would have rejected them too, but not as many of those same unqualified applicants were dying to storm the court after the Hoos win (though this year, that sounds just as fun!). Historically, similar things have happened for the L.A. schools - both are good but have often gotten larger numbers of unqualified applicants, who they rightly rejected, artificially making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive relative to say, Cal's.

Using average (or perhaps median) SAT or GPA, or perhaps some other such absolute measure (though even these can be problematic) seems better.

---

Many high quality public university (Cal, UCLA, UVa) suffer from the general public's bias for "private" vs "public" despite the fact that so many public univerities are more highly valued by academics.
General public (especially the wealthy) prefer(s) private clubs to public clubs, private golf courses to public golf courses, private airplanes to public airplanes, private buses to public busses, etc.
They are "exclusive" therefore imbuing the participants with "exclusive" or "VIP" status.
After all being private allows the institution to keep out the poor and unwashed and the rest of the riff-raff. Of course you can't allow your darling child to mix with the hoi polloi who don't know the important things such as which wine to serve with which entree.

OneKeg;842468265 said:

---

In my opinion, acceptance rate is a an extremely deceptive and flawed metric, though of course it has some non-zero correlation to quality. Perhaps about as good as trying to judge how good a college quarterback is purely by completion percentage, paying no attention to anything else like yards, touchdowns, interceptions, quality of opposing defenses, strength of OL, receivers, running game, type of offense.

Just to take our local biases out of it for a moment, there is no way that the following two acceptance rates reflect the quality of schools' respective undergraduates, or of how challenging their coursework is:
Duke - 9.8%
Virginia - 29.9%

There could be many factors. Both are very good schools. Just as a stupid example, perhaps Duke just gets tons of extra applications from unqualified high school seniors who have listened to Dickie V too many times and want nothing more than to be a Cameron Crazy and storm the court after a Blue Devil win. Being a good school, Duke rightly rejects these unqualified applicants, making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive. Virginia would have rejected them too, but not as many of those same unqualified applicants were dying to storm the court after the Hoos win (though this year, that sounds just as fun!). Historically, similar things have happened for the L.A. schools - both are good but have often gotten larger numbers of unqualified applicants, who they rightly rejected, artificially making their acceptance rate appear more exclusive relative to say, Cal's.

Using average (or perhaps median) SAT or GPA, or perhaps some other such absolute measure (though even these can be problematic) seems better.

---

One of best friends is an alumni interviewer for Duke. UVa undergrad, retired CEO, lives in a North Carolina beach town. Alumni interviewers don't receive any information on grades and scores. My buddy claims most applicants are sharp, personable, and can think on the feet. He said roughly 25% don't have it, even if siblings and/or parents are Ivy/Duke/UVa/Carolina grads. Anecdotally he claims about 25% end up at Duke, a third at Ivies or LSJU, and the rest get denied. Duke does get a disproportionate amount of applicants from NC and VA, but they also aren't overwhelmed with applications so they can still interview most applicants.

68great;842468392 said:

---

Many high quality public university (Cal, UCLA, UVa) suffer from the general public's bias for "private" vs "public" despite the fact that so many public univerities are more highly valued by academics.
General public (especially the wealthy) prefer(s) private clubs to public clubs, private golf courses to public golf courses, private airplanes to public airplanes, private buses to public busses, etc.
They are "exclusive" therefore imbuing the participants with "exclusive" or "VIP" status.
After all being private allows the institution to keep out the poor and unwashed and the rest of the riff-raff. Of course you can't allow your darling child to mix with the hoi polloi who don't know the important things such as which wine to serve with which entree.

---

Wealth envy.

77Bear;842468470 said:

---

Wealth envy.

---

No it is not wealth envy (assuming you comment is not facetious) since I make a very good income as a lawyer.

What I hate is the fact that wealthy people are given a lot of credit (and I do not mean financial credit) that they do not deserve simply because they are wealthy. They take advantage of the various "private" perks as if it were there due and just recognition of their "specialness" and the "specialness" of their children when compared to the common man or woman. Therefore their kids cannot go to a "public" institution. Therefore the criteria for reports such as USN&WR are skewed to favor the private institutions.

[U]Pac-12[/U]

Arizona State - 87.9%

Would like to see the transcripts of the 12.1% who weren't admitted to ASU

[U]SEC[/U]

Arkansas - 99.5%

LOL!

Another interesting factor which I read a couple years ago, some schools (many privates) count unfinished apps in their acceptance rates. Guaranteed rejections, obviously. Many don't. Need to find that.

Acceptance rate at places like USC are going down because the supply of top 40 colleges is limited, while the general population (demand) has been going up steadily. As well, a lot of the new/immigrant population is more culturally motivated to attend good colleges, so the admissions landscape is more competitive.

1_B_T_F;842468275 said:

---

Are you suggesting that people have good verbal/math/writing days and bad verbal/math/writing days? I have good and bad hair days!!!

---

Some people have good verbal/math/writing days. You don't need to worry about them.

BowDowntoWashington;842468495 said:

---

[U]Pac-12[/U]

Arizona State - 87.9%

Would like to see the transcripts of the 12.1% who weren't admitted to ASU

[U]SEC[/U]

Arkansas - 99.5%

LOL!

---

What I find amusing is that the "University" of Washington has a 55.2% acceptance rate and the "University" of Arkansas has a 58.6% acceptance rate. Washington has an ACT average score of 27, Arkansas has an average of 26. I always thought mutts were much smarter than hogs, but the data suggests otherwise.

Take heart though. You guys are way smarter than your pals out on the Palouse (low bar).

BearBoarBlarney;842468536 said:

---

Take heart though. You guys are way smarter than your pals out on the Palouse (low bar).

---

Marginally smarter yet far less classier.

ducky23;842468550 said:

---

Marginally smarter yet far less classier.

---

Comment posterized - for commenting on somebody else's intelligence while making a grammatical error

dajo9;842468579 said:

---

Comment posterized - for commenting on somebody else's intelligence while making a grammatical error

---

Oops!

Haha

BearBoarBlarney;842468536 said:

---

What I find amusing is that the "University" of Washington has a 55.2% acceptance rate and the "University" of Arkansas has a 58.6% acceptance rate. Washington has an ACT average score of 27, Arkansas has an average of 26. I always thought mutts were much smarter than hogs, but the data suggests otherwise.

Take heart though. You guys are way smarter than your pals out on the Palouse (low bar).

---

I find it very hard to believe that the average ACT at Arky is 26.

BearDevil;842468468 said:

---

One of best friends is an alumni interviewer for Duke. UVa undergrad, retired CEO, lives in a North Carolina beach town. Alumni interviewers don't receive any information on grades and scores. My buddy claims most applicants are sharp, personable, and can think on the feet. He said roughly 25% don't have it, even if siblings and/or parents are Ivy/Duke/UVa/Carolina grads. Anecdotally he claims about 25% end up at Duke, a third at Ivies or LSJU, and the rest get denied. Duke does get a disproportionate amount of applicants from NC and VA, but they also aren't overwhelmed with applications so they can still interview most applicants.

---

Just to be clear (which you may have already gotten), in no way was I calling Duke a bad school in my post. In fact, I was calling Duke a good school. I just don't think it's *that* much better a school than Virginia as the huge disparity in acceptance rates might indicate (10% vs. 30%). Obviously, I could be wrong.

I will say that if Duke's acceptance rate is less than 10% and truly 25% of those your friend interviews go to Duke, then perhaps he's not seeing the larger pool of unqualified applicants because they have already been auto-screened out by the time it gets to him?

juarezbear;842468656 said:

---

I find it very hard to believe that the average ACT at Arky is 26.

---

To be perfectly honest, so did I. But a quick google of "University of Washington average ACT" and "University of Arkansas average ACT" brings up these statistics from multiple sources, including Arkansas' own official website.

Frankly, I was pretty surprised that Arkansas is middle-of-the-pack for its average ACT scores when compared with the other 13 SEC schools.

OneKeg;842468835 said:

---

In fact, I was calling Duke a good school. I just don't think it's *that* much better a school than Virginia as the huge disparity in acceptance rates might indicate (10% vs. 30%).

---

I don't think of Duke as a better school than UVa. I just regard Duke as being a higher ranked school in the flawed US News & World Report undergraduate rankings -- rankings which include a bevy of private school fluff factors like "alumni giving rate" and "freshmen retention rate."

From personal experience, I do regard Duke as being a school that graduates pompous windbags, but admittedly that is based on a sample size of just the 4 Dookies I have had the misfortune to work with or for.

Duke's a great place to play lacrosse.

For many people the top private schools are cheaper than the top public schools. I was admitted to Duke for both college and law school and in both cases received grants that made it cheaper than out of state tuition than UCs but more than in-state. With the massive increase in both in-state and out of state tuitions, the reality is that for many applicants places like Duke are cheaper than Cal. I know some people who went to USC over UCLA law for the same reason.

I'm guessing the privates have the financial aid formula down to a science. I know when I was applying to different schools back in early 80s, Georgetown was one that accepted me and they had everything already laid out and ready to go as far as financial aid. Ultimately I went to ucla where it was you figure it out, then come to the financial aid office with the paperwork.

BearBoarBlarney;842468879 said:

---

I don't think of Duke as a better school than UVa. I just regard Duke as being a higher ranked school in the flawed US News & World Report undergraduate rankings -- rankings which include a bevy of private school fluff factors like "alumni giving rate" and "freshmen retention rate."

From personal experience, I do regard Duke as being a school that graduates pompous windbags, but admittedly that is based on a sample size of just the 4 Dookies I have had the misfortune to work with or for.

---

I always find the "Duke arrogance" narrative to be amusing and a bit intellectually lazy, usually espoused by people who have never met anyone from the school, been to Durham or know anything about Duke outside of a sports context. Having degrees from both Cal and Duke, I think there's far more in common among the students of both schools than there are differences and smart people anywhere are always perceived to be arrogant. However, if I had to rate both schools on a "My worldview is superior to your worldview" scale, Cal students win that going away.

TheSouseFamily;842468911 said:

---

I always find the "Duke arrogance" narrative to be amusing and a bit intellectually lazy, usually espoused by people who have never met anyone from the school, been to Durham or know anything about Duke outside of a sports context. Having degrees from both Cal and Duke, I think there's far more in common among the students of both schools than there are differences and smart people anywhere are always perceived to be arrogant. However, if I had to rate both schools on a "My worldview is superior to your worldview" scale, Cal students win that going away.

---

Well I watched a tv show yesterday that told me Christian Laettner was arrogant - therefore all Duke people are arrogant. Life is simple.

BearBoarBlarney;842468879 said:

---

I don't think of Duke as a better school than UVa. I just regard Duke as being a higher ranked school in the flawed US News & World Report undergraduate rankings -- rankings which include a bevy of private school fluff factors like "alumni giving rate" and "freshmen retention rate."

From personal experience, I do regard Duke as being a school that graduates pompous windbags, but admittedly that is based on a sample size of just the 4 Dookies I have had the misfortune to work with or for.

---

Except Duke is way more difficult to get into as an undergrad and generally has stronger grad programs, a way more distinguished faculty and much greater prestige domestically and internationally?