If you graduated college in the 90s/00s which schools shocked you with their change in status/competiveness?
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Anonymous
But a student with the same capabilities as you had back then would probably have a 4.6 and a 1500+. Grades and test scores are incredibly inflated now. |
Anonymous
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U Chicago
UGA UCLA |
Anonymous
I went to college in the mid-90s. Wash U was a good school back then. It was basically what it is now - a notch below the Ivies. Kids who really had to stretch for Penn or Cornell would not get in and end up at WashU. Which is still pretty impressive. It competed with the schools currently in its athletic conference - Emory, Rochester, Brandeis, etc. Vandy was always good but has also stepped up and become more national. It definitely had some kids from the north, but now draws a lot more. I know a few parents who would not have considered leaving the northeast corridor for college (these people are quite provincial) who are sending their kids to Vandy. |
Anonymous
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Test scores are definitely inflated. I got a 1400 and had very good grades and knew I would get into Ivies without much problem.
I also took four APs as a junior, which was not very common. I got a 4, 3, and 2 (didn't take the fourth test). I didn't think twice about reporting them as just taking that many tests as a junior was great, and the 2 was in BC Calc, which was extremely hard, especially for a junior. No one took AP as a sophomore. My kid goes to a private school with no AP and I am amazed at the number of APs at an early age at other schools. Kids today are definitely more motivated and smarter, but not that much smarter. They really should revise the SAT scoring. |
Anonymous
I’m starting to realize this is a big part of it. I also went to UVA, also probably 3.75 (from a private but not elite school) and a 1430. And nothing but summer jobs and (required) school sports and one or two clubs as ECs. DS wants to go to UVA and always says I wouldn’t get in today but I think PP is right that my stats would be higher today. Also I didn’t prep for the SAT and I only took it once and that was true for most of my friends as I recall. |
Anonymous
Kudos to NEU. It basically says NEU played by the rules fair and square (and made vast improvements) while others were cheating. "Meanwhile, other schools that couldn’t successfully game the system were trying to cheat their way to the top. In 2008, Baylor University told newly admitted students that they’d receive a $300 campus-bookstore credit if they retook their SATs, and $1,000 a year in student aid if the scores improved by more than 50 points. In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University, whose president shared Freeland’s rankings fixation, admitted the school misrepresented financial information and purposefully rated institutions low on the peer assessments. In 2011, Iona College officials admitted to misreporting acceptance rates, SAT scores, graduation rates, and alumni donation amounts over the course of a decade. In 2012, Claremont McKenna College copped to misreporting SAT scores for several years. Also in 2012, George Washington University admitted to inflating the percentage of students who graduated at the top of their high school classes, and Emory University said it had misreported high school GPAs for four years and SAT scores for nearly a dozen years." UCBerkeley and Columbia are some of the recent high profile examples. I almost think it's might be Emory haters who keep posting the article. |
Anonymous
| Villanova |
Anonymous
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Perhaps I am a bit slow, but someone recently pointed out to me that colleges don't take your best math and verbal scores on the SAT out of the goodness of their hearts to help applicants. It allows them to report the highest possible scores to make their rankings look better.
I wish these rankings would just go away. |
Anonymous
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UChicago
Vanderbilt Northwestern |
Anonymous
| Oberlin's acceptance rate in 1994 was 72% |
Anonymous
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Florida
USC Miami |
Anonymous
My HS valedictorian went there around then. Could have gone anywhere they wanted - incredible grades, test score, XCs. But felt most comfortable at Oberlin. Might have gotten some money to go there but probably could have gotten money a lot of places. |
Anonymous
| As an Atlanta native, I’m shocked at how competitive it is now to get into UGA. Was not like that at all back in the day. |
Anonymous
Where do your kids go to school that grades are inflated????? Not our experience at all. |
Anonymous
| At least for UC Santa Barbara, there's a solid reason that it became much more competitive. Before 1998 or so, it was an easy admit for pretty average kids. Then, in 1998 and 2000, it racked up some STEM Nobel prizes and gained a lot of attention in the Chemistry, materials, physics, and related engineering departments. Higher stats kids started applying and shutting out the lower stats ones in that 1998-2004 timeframe. |