Reply to Would you take Tufts, Emory, Wash U over UVA?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Virginia &gt; W&M &gt; Tufts/Emory/WUSTL and it isn't even close.[/quote]

What is not close? W&M acceptance rate is in the mid 30's. [b]You're delusional to think it can compete with the others on student quality.[/b] Tufts is ranked lower than UVA so there's no good reason to pay more for it unless you want to do engineering. [/quote]

The OP was interested in law placement.  For the last two classes admitted at UVA Law, UVA placed 39 and W&M 22.  If you consider that UVA has 2.6X as many undergraduates, W&M placed more on a per capita basis at UVA Law than UVA.   And really, while law schools consider undergraduate school reputation, but they are going to look at direct measures of applicant quality.  The LSAC publishes average LSAT and GPA by institution.  In 2017 (the most recent year reported), UVA applicants had an average LSAT of 160.84 and GPA of 3.43.  W&M was slightly higher at 161.18 average LSAT and 3.44 average GPA.  In comparison, Emory was 160.64 and 3.51, Washington U was 164.05 and 3.65, and Tufts was 164.48 and 3.62.

I[b]f you are trying to reduce student quality to acceptance rate, you should also keep in mind that this would mean Northeastern University, with a 19% admission rate has superior student quality to UVA or W&M.  (They had 62,000 applications last year.)  Tufts acceptance rate is under 15%, so although you dismiss it as lower ranked, it is more selective as well by that metric.  It also has a middle 50% SAT of 1380 to 1530 vs UVA's 1330 to 1500.[/b]

The real question is, if you have the same stats (LSAT and GPA) coming out of these schools, does one give you a measurable leg up over the others?[/quote]

You cannot compare acceptance rates of privates to publics.  It doesn't work that way.  Public universities like UVA, UCLA, UCI, UC Santa Barbara, Berkeley, have very different missions than privates and serve different purposes.  The high schools in California and VA route the students most likely to be accepted to the most appropriate UC school, or in the case of Virginia, the most appropriate VA school.  Also, the SAT, ACT and GPA cut-offs are public knowledge so Virginia High school students and their counselors self-screen because they know it makes no sense to apply to UVA if not in the top ten percent of the classs.  Ergo, you can't compare percentage of selectivity of publics to privates because they receive completely different sets of applications from very different groups of students.  I think that's pretty obvious - it is at least to college counselors.[/quote]

If you read carefully what the PP wrote, they were sceptical that the 19% admission rate at Northeastern was actually evidence that Northeastern has superior student quality to UVA or W&M.   It is just evidence that the application denominator is relatively larger.  If you look in the common data set, which I'm not going to take the time to do, I suspect you'll find evidence supporting this.  Northeastern, while a good and up and coming school with an interesting system, is well known for adjusting all the dials to get it to climb the USNews rankings.  They looked to drive up applications, even for those people who are not admission targets (and this is one of real reason why you need to be wary of acceptance rates).  They have Spring admissions.  Spring admits don't count against USNews metrics.  They can put lower stat students in that category.  They do not require SATs for international students, which is again OK with USNews.  The president actually gave interviews where he talked about what they did to climb rankings.  And to your broader point, you can compare anything, even if it might not be a good metric. USNews, when they covered admission rates, put publics and privates together.   I believe they dropped admission rate, which is probably a good thing, since it is one of the levers largely used by privates to pull ahead.  Chicago went from close to 50% admission rate a generation ago to 7% today.  They deliberately tried to drive up applications.  [/quote]

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