Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivies cheaper than some state schools

The issue isn't 3.5 at Yale vs. 3.7 at Princeton.

It's 4.0 at State U being a good bet for admission opportunity for grad school.

I'll use Duke law as an example. They have a hard cap of about 10% of the student being permitted to attend from Duke undergrad.

So, if you have your heart set on Duke Law and you go to Duke undergrad, you had better do better than those other 20 people who also are from Duke who want to go to Duke Law.

Whereas if you are me from State U with a 3.2 in engineering, they let you in because you had the highest LSAT score from State U who wanted to go to Duke so that they can establish "geographic diversity". About 50% of the class came from Harvard/Stanford/Dartmouth, etc, whereas about 50% of the class came from State U.

What we really need is a statistical analysis here, but we don't have enough data. We just have a few data points and conventional wisdom.

(I performed a wholesale Excel spreadsheet analysis on law school admission to determine where I needed to apply based on LSAT/GPA - using spreadsheets for calculation was one of the things I actually learned in engineering.)