Anonymous wrote:Wake Forest is barely "t50", somehow beat out by Rutgers. W&M has exactly the same entering class stats and %s as UVA yet is beat out by Virginia Tech on US News. Michigan State (no offense to Michigan State) is somehow t70 now. Did the average student at Rutgers suddenly become much smarter than the average Wake student? No. Is the average Virginia Tech student smarter than the average student at Tulane? No.
So-called "t50" schools with ranks that now reflect their ability to be large, pell-grant numbers, etc. will always be on the outside looking into the group of schools whose intellectual character remains clear to those who make any effort at all to look.
Wake being barely T50 sounds about right though.
I don’t have a view on the relative positions of the other schools you mentioned, but it’s odd to me that you focused exclusively on the smartness of average students. These are rankings of universities, not just an ordered list of the average undergraduate student’s metrics. There’s more to assessing a school than its incoming students’ test scores.