re: What % of LSU students are equally as intelligent as the average Ivy League student?

My son will be a freshman at LSU this fall, honors college. Initially he wanted to go for a top 20 school however the cost would be way too high. Cost is a gliding scale based on need. He did however apply to and got into Rice and Georgia Tech but the cost would have been over 100k.

He did receive full cost of attendance from LSU so it was a no brainer. As someone else mentioned, come out of undergrad with no debt then off to grad or med school

I believe the average ACT for honors college is a 32 so there’s plenty of smart kids

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Admissions to Ivy League is based on wealth more than intelligence. Prestige and legacy.

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First you copied and pasted an excerpt saying that the kids from the top 1% incomes are 77x more likely to be accepted by an Ivy League school than kids from the bottom 20%.

Then you asked how many people are in each category. Which is an asinine question to begin with because one is, by definition, 20% of the population and the other is 1% of the population. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you know what “quintile” means. In which case - perhaps you were pointing out that the top 1% is (obviously) a smaller subset of the population.

Here’s the thing though - that’s also asinine because the phrase “77x more likely” already takes the differences in population size into account.

So, whatever.. let’s get to the meat of your assertion. I found the executive summary you copied and pasted that “77x more likely” line from. You know what else it says?

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Second, children from low- and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges.

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The authors say this in an effort to point out that these schools are not over-accepting low-income students. But the inverse is also true - if they were under-accepting low-income students, then you would expect the small number of low-income students to out-perform their wealthy peers (because their wealthy peers only got in because of money, not ability).

In fact, the actual report that you cited states the following:

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The small gap in earnings outcomes between students from high- vs. low-income families within each college shows that most colleges successfully “level the playing field” across students with different socioeconomic backgrounds, either because they select children of relatively uniform ability or because they provide greater value-added for children from low-income families (Dale and Krueger 2002).

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That degree from Brown didn’t help Booby Jindal anymore than if he would’ve gone to LSU.

They are just diploma factories like most schools.

LSU has top notch students/alumni, so do Ivy League schools