Of course it's not hard to understand the goals of the top kids. They're the same goals as hundreds of thousands of top students all across the country. And TJ students do well, but nobody should go to TJ with the expectation that they'll end up at the schools you laid out. From the 2023 class's senior issue (which someone upthread noted covers about 70% of the class), maybe 10% of the class goes to one of MIT (3), Stanford (1), Penn (5), Princeton (4), Columbia (1), Cornell (7), Harvard (5), UCB (3), JHU (4), CMU (9). That's a total of 42. Whereas 56 went to either Maryland (29), Purdue (17), or Michigan (10). A random TJ student is 33% more likely to end up at one of those three than the Ivy+ / T20 schools. And just looking at the top in-states — UVA (44), W&M (24), or VT (23) (total: 91) — the odds are >2x that a student will end up at a Virginia public than the schools above. Odds are better for Chicago (14) or Georgetown (8), but even adding those two together is still fewer students than to any one of the in-state flagships. None of that is intended to take away from TJ, or the students who go there. Every one of those schools above is solid, and every student can do great things there. The point really is for parents to adjust their expectations, and to understand that there are a number of great paths after TJ. |
As hard and as insane as this sounds, CMU is a backup even for CS for the top kids. CMU has been pretty generous in this regard. |
Hypsm is probably a bit easier from TJ but still very very hard UVA is harder from TJ |
Im sorry but what does that mean? |
The top TJ students are having an easier time getting admission to CMU. |
TJ class of 2025: 7 admits to Harvard and all 7 will be attending. |
There are not as many strong TJ students in 2025 as in 2024. But college admissions officers don't care about merit as much as they did before. You can see that female SJWs are rewarded but Asian male engineers are not. |
At just about every single school, engineering is the hardest major to get into. Regardless of who’s doing the applying, any engineer worth their salt should be able to do the math to show that rejection is the default outcome for all applicants. If that’s news to you, you’ve got some catching up to do. |
Not impressive. Maybe TJ isn't worth the hype. |
LOLOL engineering “rankings” are crap |
I agree - rankings are crap. But I can only assume that TJ students and their parents don't share that view. Take Purdue, for example. It's generally considered a top engineering school and currently ranks eighth for undergraduate and fifth for graduate engineering programs in the U.S. As one of the previous posters mentioned, it has had the highest number of Instagram admit posts for two years, with 19 admits in one year alone. So either TJ kids just love the flat cornfields of rural Indiana and the cultural hub that is West Lafayette, or they're attending Purdue because of its top engineering and other STEM rankings. I think the latter is true. |
I think Purdue is very affordable OOS. That probably has something to do with it. |
TJ is no different than a half dozen bay area public high schools. We all know the goals and aspirations to the parents which is top engineering combined with a 'prestige school'. |
Does anyone know why so few choose (or are accepted to?) GA Tech Engineering or CS? Is it mainly/partially because they don't usually give aid to OOS students and/or they started to limit CS majors? |
Nah, it's all about the ranking. |