There are only about 60 universities that are highly selective (admit less than 25% of applicants), out of 2500+ 4 year universities.
All of this fuss about college application insanity is just about this relative small handful of schools. The prestige-seeking herd is all chasing the same schools. They are the ones that are getting all of the applications.
The rest of the 2500+ schools are generally struggling for applicants. It is a strange dichotomy.
You see this when you have kids applying to schools. They will be wooed like they are 5-star D1 athletes by many of the less selective schools that are desperate for students. A lot of those schools won't be around in a decade as the number of college-aged kids shrinks.
All of the really smart kids that are being pushed out of the Ivy League, Near-Ivies, and Public Ivies, are winding up at places like GT, UGA, Florida, etc. And their rankings are ascending because of it.
It's purely a prestige-chasing thing. I know kids and families that have done it. It's crazy.
Cornell is very different from Columbia. Dartmouth is very different from U Penn. If you love Cornell and Dartmouth, you would certainly not love Columbia and UPenn. And vice versa.
If these were just schools in a random league and not the Ivy League, nobody would ever apply to all of them.
I just went through all of this with my daughter. She got accepted into her first choice - Michigan! We are excited about that.
But we feel bad about it at the same time. The application process is so opaque and insane that she felt she needed to apply to a dozen+ schools. That meant that she was taking slots away from kids at the schools she got accepted to, that she knew she would never attend if she got into Michigan. But she could not predict if she would get into Michigan or not, so she had to hedge.
And sure enough, as the acceptances, rejections, deferrals, and wait lists flowed in (she got multiple of each), we weren't sure if she applied to enough schools.
This is the exact phenomenon that is causing all these crazy admission numbers. And universities are doing nothing to curtail it because it makes their "selectivity" look better to have so many extra applications for their same limited number of slots.
The Ivy League and the "near Ivies" like Duke, Northwestern, etc. have become the domain of the very rich and the very poor. The middle class has been hollowed out of the top elite schools. They have stopped taking those kids.
All those shut-out smart middle class kids have to go somewhere, and they are going to schools like Texas, Maryland, Rutgers.
It is amazing to see schools that we used to make fun of academically show up in Top 50 college lists. FLORIDA STATE!! - the land of the Tuesday night block party - is now showing up on Top 50 lists.
It is NOT the Common App that has done this. It is Test Optional that has done this.
The Common App has been around for years, but it is only more recently that we have seen the incredible spike in college applications. That timeframe correlates directly with the move to Test Optional admissions.
In a world of prevalent high school grade inflation, your test scores would "tell on you". Your inflated 3.9 wasn't what it appeared. You knew that your relatively low national standardized test score would not stand up against legit competition at an elite school, so you didn't bother to apply.
That deterrent is gone. Kids with high GPA's - inflated or not - are now taking a shot at elite schools. Why not? There's nothing that will tell on you.
And the problem is compounding on itself. As more and more kids apply to elite schools, their acceptance rates are going way down. So kids feel they need to hedge, and apply to even more schools.
Yet it is still the same number of kids as ever that are applying. It's not like there has been a surge of new high school students. This is being caused by kids now submitting double-digit numbers of applications (both my kids), versus just the two or three that kids submitted in the past (me and my wife).
My wife and I could get away with just submitting two or three because it was very predictable back than what it took to get in where. My kids had to submit double-digit numbers of applications because it is now very unpredictable who gets in where and why.
A quarter billion dollars worth of coaching talent, Super Bowl and National Championship rings, and it means nothing at the moment . . . they are bickering like 12 year old's in the back seat of the car.
Even thought the college coaching path he took was far different, like Jim Harbaugh he was always destined to go back to the pros. He is where he was destined to be.
As a lifelong Vikings fan, I am over the moon at the prospect of JJ winning a Natty AND Super Bowl to my benefit. I will make a shrine to him right in the middle of my living room.
I like that Sherrone Moore observed in the Penn State game that Chop Robinson was going to go off, and switched to 9 on 7 offense which he knew that PSU could not stop.
Conversely . . . I hope that when he faces a team that can stone our running game, he is just as willing to pass 32 straight times if that's what it takes.
Noon games don't leave enough time for tailgating/pregaming. 3:30 games are the sweet spot.
Every big game should be a 3:30 game, IMO. Yes, even Ohio State. (The Harbaugh to Kolesar Ohio State game was a 3:30 game, among others. It is not unprecedented.)
That is what made JJ so valuable. The coaches knew that when we eventually came up short trying to run into stacked boxes, JJ would bail us out with a key pass under pressure. He did it over and over against OSU, Alabama, and Washington.
That will be sorely missed. To the point where we will have to be more open this year to stay out of those situations. The current QBs aren't there yet to be able to do that repeatedly. TD drives with multiple 3rd and longs are not in the cards this year.
Orji is clearly a talent, but he can't quite put a bunch of good throws together to complete a drive down the field. There is still a hiccup every few throws that will kill a drive. He's not a starting QB until he can get that fixed.
Big drop off after Orji and Warren, and we don't really even know how high up the food chain those two guys are. Would like to be able to see Tuttle right now.
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As a DB, FWIW.
"reigning FBS national champions"
I like the sound of that.
There are only about 60 universities that are highly selective (admit less than 25% of applicants), out of 2500+ 4 year universities.
All of this fuss about college application insanity is just about this relative small handful of schools. The prestige-seeking herd is all chasing the same schools. They are the ones that are getting all of the applications.
The rest of the 2500+ schools are generally struggling for applicants. It is a strange dichotomy.
You see this when you have kids applying to schools. They will be wooed like they are 5-star D1 athletes by many of the less selective schools that are desperate for students. A lot of those schools won't be around in a decade as the number of college-aged kids shrinks.
A lot of kids that used to go to Ivy League schools. Seriously.
Michigan has become the safety school for every Ivy League wannabe.
All of the really smart kids that are being pushed out of the Ivy League, Near-Ivies, and Public Ivies, are winding up at places like GT, UGA, Florida, etc. And their rankings are ascending because of it.
And employers are taking notice:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawhitford/2024/04/29/exclusive-employers-are-souring-on-ivy-league-grads-while-these-20-new-ivies-ascend/?sh=77811a1b5585
Employers are more and more choosing these smart, hard-working, ambitious kids over the entitled kids from Ivy League-type schools.
What constitutes an "elite" school is shifting.
It's purely a prestige-chasing thing. I know kids and families that have done it. It's crazy.
Cornell is very different from Columbia. Dartmouth is very different from U Penn. If you love Cornell and Dartmouth, you would certainly not love Columbia and UPenn. And vice versa.
If these were just schools in a random league and not the Ivy League, nobody would ever apply to all of them.
Maybe he was looking at the ED acceptance rates. UPenn's ED rate was 19% a few years ago, for example. But not anymore.
The fee is even higher for the top schools that are scooping up all the applications.
Not soon enough.
I just went through all of this with my daughter. She got accepted into her first choice - Michigan! We are excited about that.
But we feel bad about it at the same time. The application process is so opaque and insane that she felt she needed to apply to a dozen+ schools. That meant that she was taking slots away from kids at the schools she got accepted to, that she knew she would never attend if she got into Michigan. But she could not predict if she would get into Michigan or not, so she had to hedge.
And sure enough, as the acceptances, rejections, deferrals, and wait lists flowed in (she got multiple of each), we weren't sure if she applied to enough schools.
This is the exact phenomenon that is causing all these crazy admission numbers. And universities are doing nothing to curtail it because it makes their "selectivity" look better to have so many extra applications for their same limited number of slots.
They absolutely are.
The Ivy League and the "near Ivies" like Duke, Northwestern, etc. have become the domain of the very rich and the very poor. The middle class has been hollowed out of the top elite schools. They have stopped taking those kids.
All those shut-out smart middle class kids have to go somewhere, and they are going to schools like Texas, Maryland, Rutgers.
It is amazing to see schools that we used to make fun of academically show up in Top 50 college lists. FLORIDA STATE!! - the land of the Tuesday night block party - is now showing up on Top 50 lists.
It is NOT the Common App that has done this. It is Test Optional that has done this.
The Common App has been around for years, but it is only more recently that we have seen the incredible spike in college applications. That timeframe correlates directly with the move to Test Optional admissions.
In a world of prevalent high school grade inflation, your test scores would "tell on you". Your inflated 3.9 wasn't what it appeared. You knew that your relatively low national standardized test score would not stand up against legit competition at an elite school, so you didn't bother to apply.
That deterrent is gone. Kids with high GPA's - inflated or not - are now taking a shot at elite schools. Why not? There's nothing that will tell on you.
And the problem is compounding on itself. As more and more kids apply to elite schools, their acceptance rates are going way down. So kids feel they need to hedge, and apply to even more schools.
Yet it is still the same number of kids as ever that are applying. It's not like there has been a surge of new high school students. This is being caused by kids now submitting double-digit numbers of applications (both my kids), versus just the two or three that kids submitted in the past (me and my wife).
My wife and I could get away with just submitting two or three because it was very predictable back than what it took to get in where. My kids had to submit double-digit numbers of applications because it is now very unpredictable who gets in where and why.
"GOT A WIIIDE OPEN RECEIVER!!"
His VLogs were awesome. Made me feel like I was there on the team.
From one of the comments:
"dont care Im saying it... Im not pumped about this 3* with the number of spots left in the class."
Well, that was, um, wrong.
Highly underrated Portal grab.
BLAKE THE GREATest.
We are blessed that he came back and finished business.
This is hilarious.
A quarter billion dollars worth of coaching talent, Super Bowl and National Championship rings, and it means nothing at the moment . . . they are bickering like 12 year old's in the back seat of the car.
Even thought the college coaching path he took was far different, like Jim Harbaugh he was always destined to go back to the pros. He is where he was destined to be.
Let's win this one . . .
As a lifelong Vikings fan, I am over the moon at the prospect of JJ winning a Natty AND Super Bowl to my benefit. I will make a shrine to him right in the middle of my living room.
I like the result, but those were the most drab, sterile, antiseptic games of the year. There was just no environment.
It's football. Weather is part of the game.
I like that Sherrone Moore observed in the Penn State game that Chop Robinson was going to go off, and switched to 9 on 7 offense which he knew that PSU could not stop.
Conversely . . . I hope that when he faces a team that can stone our running game, he is just as willing to pass 32 straight times if that's what it takes.
We were so damned blessed to have JJ as our QB and team leader.
You've never asked for a raise at work? This is how these guys ask for a raise.
I doubt that that decision was made yet for all but a few players.
Arrogant me: Cool. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Regular me: This seems like it could be a good move for those particular schools.
I suspect that Jim Harbaugh is totally absorbed in everything he does.
Their's was just a 7 on 7 drill prancing around in the sunshine. Michigan's was an actual game with real hitting.
The two programs were indeed true to who they really are.
How so? We have a great night game record. It's a significant advantage that we could use.
Noon games don't leave enough time for tailgating/pregaming. 3:30 games are the sweet spot.
Every big game should be a 3:30 game, IMO. Yes, even Ohio State. (The Harbaugh to Kolesar Ohio State game was a 3:30 game, among others. It is not unprecedented.)
Fox has Klatt. Therefore is does not suck.
Is every game on Fox a noon game? Is every game on CBS a 3:30 game? Is every game on NBC a night game? Is that how it works?
Bo: "Toe meets leather at one o'clock. You want to take pictures, come on down."
May he always have it. A badge of honor forever.
He's not polarly wrong. Warren has a strong arm and can throw the ball on a rope. Not every player is a Milton "cannon".
That is what made JJ so valuable. The coaches knew that when we eventually came up short trying to run into stacked boxes, JJ would bail us out with a key pass under pressure. He did it over and over against OSU, Alabama, and Washington.
That will be sorely missed. To the point where we will have to be more open this year to stay out of those situations. The current QBs aren't there yet to be able to do that repeatedly. TD drives with multiple 3rd and longs are not in the cards this year.
Harbaugh loved to hand the postgame interviews off to his players, but the sideline reporters all hated that. Now he's started a trend.
Yeah, I'm going to be scouring the internet to see what that was about . . .
Orji is clearly a talent, but he can't quite put a bunch of good throws together to complete a drive down the field. There is still a hiccup every few throws that will kill a drive. He's not a starting QB until he can get that fixed.
And Gus was in the house, he presented the rings in the morning.
Michigan's fortunes changed when those guys started doing our broadcasts. I'm just saying.
I honestly am surprised that nobody got significantly hurt. They were hitting for real.
More than anything, I'm glad it's over.
We just need a long jump ball guy.
Yeah, this QB room needs as many passing reps as they can get.
This is practice for the coaches too. I hope they come up with better 4th down calls than that.
Fingers crossed.
We're not talking enough about Davis Warren, y'all.
He does not look ready, and it does not look like a thing that will just magically solve itself in 4 months.
Big drop off after Orji and Warren, and we don't really even know how high up the food chain those two guys are. Would like to be able to see Tuttle right now.