Record number of high schoolers swapping the Ivy League for the SEC thanks to sunshine, campus culture - The Times

[Anonymous]

I'm sure this impacts northern schools like Michigan, Mich State, Ohio State, Nebraska etc.

Auburn, Florida, Clemson, etc. are just as strong, if not stronger academically, as those schools and with much better weather you can see the trend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The entirety of the SEC minus Vanderbilt have fewer 1580+ SAT scorers than Harvard and Yale alone.

I dislike the SEC as much as the next guy/gal, but you are almost certainly wrong.

The total number of undergraduates in the 16-school SEC minus Vanderbilt is 538,000. The total number of undergraduates at Harvard and Yale is only 14,000 -- a whopping 38 times smaller. Since the 75th percentile SAT score of Harvard and Yale is 1580, there are approximately 3,500 1580+ scorers there. Thus, for the SEC minus Vanderbilt to match, they need to have 3,500 such scorers among 538,000, or equivalently 1 in 153.

As dumb as the SEC on average is, it almost certainly has 1 super smart student among every 153 who decides to attend an SEC school for various reasons such as wanting to stay home, taking advantage of full-ride merit scholarships (e.g., Florida's Benacquisto, Alabama's NMF, Texas A&M's National Scholars, UT Austin's Forty Acres), or taking advantage of auto-admit (e.g., UT Austin's 5% rule).

People forgot UT Austin and Florida are t30. They forgot TX/GA/FL have huge populations and their NMSF cutoffs are pretty respectable at 222/220/219, not much lower than NJ/MA/MD. With huge populations, even the tail of the Bell curve have many students.

[Anonymous]

I don't think Yale is suffering

But are kids choosing these schools over, say, BU? Sure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm sure this impacts northern schools like Michigan, Mich State, Ohio State, Nebraska etc.

Auburn, Florida, Clemson, etc. are just as strong, if not stronger academically, as those schools and with much better weather you can see the trend.

Clemson is not in the SEC. Florida is no match for Michigan. Auburn is much lower ranked than Ohio State and Michigan State. So you're wrong except for the weather part.

[Anonymous]

Plenty of kids at SEC schools who don’t fit the white/wealthy/Greek stereotype and who have high stats. Come down and visit and see for yourselves. The demographics/academic culture/expectations of the South are changing and its flagships reflect that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Swapping the Ivy League? That suggests they had a chance of admission in the first place.

Bwaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

I know. I love when I hear parents whose kids were not even close to required test scores, rigor/goa sat the reason their kids aren’t attending the 3-5% admit Ivies is because they like sunshine. So they go to the 50-85% acceptance rate instead.

This was all click bait. It became a thing when the T20s were next to impossible to get into.

Exactly. Live near Duke, even top students here want Ivies. They apply to Duke also, but it doesn’t have the same wow factor that colder climate applicants fawn over.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am so glad that my son wants no part in this. Sure, he likes to party, but he really wants to be involved in a community and not just constantly tailgate and spectate. He's applying to private schools in New England and couldn't be more excited.

I am so glad that my own son had the foresight to take his Ivy-lottery stats and leadership ability to a Southern school instead of the Amtrak Northeast corridor. ED and done and he managed to miss allll the pro-Hamas performative nonsense and the censorious classroom groupthink. His exit options are on par with the northeast schools he eschewed and he confirms that he has never performed a keg stand during college, contrary to what you all imagine

[Anonymous]

South is especially inviting to those endowed with lesser intellect

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How many more of these headlines do we need? It seems like the same story keeps getting recycled over and over.

It’s not a new trend, this has been snowballing for 20 years. Hope Hicks was raised in Greenwich and went to SMU in Dallas in 2006. At our children’s private high school, we noticed popular overachiever girls and boys suddenly going to Ole Miss, Georgia and Auburn back in 2014-2018. Vanderbilt and Duke are the hot colleges for seniors in the very top of the class.

Who wants their kids to be like Hope Hicks?

[Anonymous]

No one at our academically rigorous private in the DMV goes to Florida or Georgia. Kids from the bottom quarter of the class might go U of SC, Auburn, etc .. . But 10 years ago those kids were going to BU or Ohio State. They couldn’t get in there today.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Swapping the Ivy League? That suggests they had a chance of admission in the first place.

Bwaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

I know. I love when I hear parents whose kids were not even close to required test scores, rigor/goa sat the reason their kids aren’t attending the 3-5% admit Ivies is because they like sunshine. So they go to the 50-85% acceptance rate instead.

This was all click bait. It became a thing when the T20s were next to impossible to get into.

Exactly. Live near Duke, even top students here want Ivies. They apply to Duke also, but it doesn’t have the same wow factor that colder climate applicants fawn over.

That may just be the fact that Duke is too close to home. I live in the Pacific Northwest and Duke has the same if not more "wow factor" than any Ivy after HYP. My valedictorian kid is applying ED to Duke.

[Anonymous]

I see this as great news for kids applying to schools in the Northeast, because there will be less competition and crowding, but I am not seeing any evidence in that article that a bunch of kids are turning down Ivy+ spots for SEC schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How many more of these headlines do we need? It seems like the same story keeps getting recycled over and over.

and the actual statistics keep contradicting the stories. Nobody is swapping the Ivy league for the SEC. Nobody. Are the swapping a mid-level private in the Northeast for a lower-tier state SEC school? Sure.

[Anonymous]

Isn't Hope Hicks in jail?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't think Yale is suffering

But are kids choosing these schools over, say, BU? Sure.

sorry. also no. BU's admissions rate is lower and lower every year. ALmost single digits. More like people are SECs choosing over Karoline Leavitt's alma mater St Anselm's or over their non-flagship state school.