OT: NY Times: 59% pick SMU over TCU

[Dukie]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014 ... g=0#s=1190

But outcome is reversed against Baylor, and don't look at the UT result. Other schools had too small a sample size to include.

[East Coast Mustang]

Texas result isn't surprising when you factor in tuition.

Baylor is also cheaper but gosh, you get what you pay for. With that said, all of my daughters will be attending Baylor.

[ReedFrawg]

As long as its not in football I am fine with it!

[leopold]

Actually, it's probably football that kept it that close. Athletics has a HUGE impact on whether students want to go to a school or not.

Had a buddy I was a freshman at SMU with who wanted to go to Northwestern. Well, this was a year after the 1995 season where they turned it around in football and went to the Rose Bowl, leading to, according to my buddy, applications jumping 300% after the season. He believed he would have been accepted the year prior, but didn't quite make it that year.

Take away the football team, and what do you have? ADD a football team to SMU and you have a juggernaught.

[Mustangs_Maroons]

this is meaningless in this case, since we're talking about a sample size of less than 20 students. It's also not very telling in the sense that it doesn't take into account the students that never applied to either. For instance, the top 25% of the students in our SAT range would likely never consider tcu - see the stats, that is why we're 100 to 120 points higher on average.

I got into ND and NYU Stern back in the day, only applied to SMU in TX, and never even considered tcu. Didn't like the big public school environment, and would never have been to waco if it wasn't to travel down south to austin or houston.

While interesting, for our case against most texas schools, this is not very relevant.

[NewAgeMustange]

I was looking at google trends for SMU, (once you take out that one in Asia) you can see the spikes in searches for SMU right around when we won our first bowl game. Add in the other Universities and it starts to get a little dicey, but we are on trend to beat TCU for this month

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q= ... =US&cmpt=q

[gostangs]

yeah - not too hard to figure at similar cost why anyone who got admitted to SMU and TCU ends up at SMU.

Baylor will cut out 70% of your tuition if you can fog a mirror - so that is also not apples to apples. No idea why you would send your kids to Baylor if they can also get into SMU other than cost - and even then some things are worth the premium

[tristatecoog]

Duke does very well in these comparisons. It beats out much of the Ivy League.

Not much to read into the Baylor overlap. Of the 14 using this software that applied to SMU and Baylor, eight picked BU and six chose SMU. Cost, location and religious affiliation are big factors.

TCU overlaps most with Baylor, SMU and SDSU. They must have a decent California population. 54% of those that overlap with SDSU pick the Aztecs.

USC overlaps most with UCLA (59% choose), Cal (67%), UCI (16%), UCSD (32%) and NYU (23%). Of the seven that overlap with SMU, six chose the Trojans. No overlap with Baylor or TCU.

65% of applicants that overlap between UT and A&M choose the Horns.

[StallionsModelT]

TCU and Baylor are not academic peers to SMU. Period.

[Mustangs_Maroons]

We have some overlap in some candidates to tcu because we're both private schools in the metroplex, but academically, they are not our peer inasmuch as we cannot claim to be an academic peer to ice. Yes, are there some overlaps to candidates, of course. There will always be some overlaps and instances when students choose schools over others. Rice for instance, doesn't have a business UG, and that appeals to many candidates that want to study that. Location always plays a factor. For instance, someone that is in our 25/50th percentile that gets into smu and also tcu, maybe in their 75th percentile and gets a nice schollie. Of course they would go there. But, holding all things constant, top-caliber students know this, and it is at why the top 25%/ top 33% of our classes we have students that are much stronger than they do.

In the case of baylor, i feel they are a better academic school than tcu, but are not our academic peer either. they do get some top students that go there for religious reasons. I knew two girls in my HS who were among of the top of the class with me and both went to baylor because they were hard-core baptists and wanted to attend baylor in large part because of that. I don't think we have many people that want to come to smu for religous reasons because of our methodist name.

[tristatecoog]

Baylor is a core religious institution. It's not like Harding, where Ken Starr went to college, but it's more religiously oriented than SMU, TCU or even Aggy, which has a big conservative halo as well. Of our east TX high school class, a generation ago, the majority of the top 10 went to Baylor or Aggy. Baylor is cheaper than TCU and SMU and has less of a country club reputation. [No one went to SMU or TCU to my knowledge. No Rice or fancy out of state schools either.]

In TX major metro areas, there may be more inclination to go to another large metro area for college, like the USC and NYU overlap. I think people would be surprised at what an academic and social gem SMU is and that the cost may be a lot less than they think.

[StallionsModelT]

People take the country club stereotype way out of context. Its a relatively small school so its easier to spot the rich kids. I came from a lower middle class family and never once did I feel like I was dropped into some bizarre world of wealth. Were there rich kids? Yeah. Were there poor kids? Yeah. Who cares? I was treated well despite being poor East Texas white trash

[78pony]

Same boat as you SMT. I got lucky because my dad worked for the school. What a great deal for family that was. My daughter who graduated in '10 says that some +70% of all SMU students are now on some sort of financial aid. I wonder what that percentage was in the mid 70's?

[LA_Mustang]

I was raised in a middle class, single parent household. Grants and loans got me through SMU. BTW, I wouldn't take a dollar loan to attend TCU because that would be a dollar wasted. F TCU.

[tristatecoog]

LA, where else did you apply and why SMU?