(01-08-2018 11:58 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(01-08-2018 04:32 PM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

(01-08-2018 12:09 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  All of the MAC schools serve as overflow for the B1G, the strongest public university conference.

For instance the thing in SE Michigan for years was that if you couldn't get into the University of Michigan you would then go to Eastern Michigan. The same kind of kid from the same kind of neighborhood could be found in both schools.

What? No.

"Dad, my dreams of an Engineering degree at Michigan have been dashed so I'm hitting up EMU" has rarely been uttered, at least not un-ironically.

I assure you MAC schools are not filled with Big Ten overflow unless the idea of overflow is the same reason I didn't get into Harvard even though I sent in an application

And I am very proud NIU alumni who was accepted to a number of Big Ten schools.

B1G schools are not that hard to get into, with a couple of exceptions. Twenty years ago they were not hard at all really.

It is B1G overflow, meaning largely the same socionomic status. There are students that will pick a Miami or Kent State MAC school over a B1G for the location, feel of the campus. Maybe they are from Columbus and want to get away from the Ohio State hype. They might be doing it to try something different than what their parents did.

MAC schools are alternate major state schools. Horizon League is commuter schools. Akron and Toledo are borderline. They are mid tier urban schools like Memphis or ODU. The other 10 universities in the MAC have quality reputations in the region.

Fraternity culture, student life on MAC campuses is comparable to a P5 university. College town environments. These are university communities that you can sell and build enthusiasm around.

"Overflow" probably isn't the correct word - while there are certainly individuals that pick their in-state MAC school over their in-state Big Ten school, that's generally a very large exception as shown by cross-admit statistics (just as there might be people that pick their in-state non-Northwestern Big Ten school over an Ivy League school but that's also a large exception). The main conflict that you see is generally if there's a choice between an in-state MAC school or an out-of-state Big Ten school since there's a significant cost difference and it's a calculation about whether the ROI for a higher-ranked school is there. Where I live in Illinois, more high school grads actually end up going to Iowa, Indiana, Purdue, Wisconsin and often Michigan on a year-over-year basis today compared to NIU despite the higher out-of-state tuition. Illinois State and UIC are the schools that generally compete for the #2 spot for in-state public matriculation after UIUC now (although Iowa is actually almost always the biggest overall draw after UIUC and our local community college with Indiana close behind). UIC has been taking a lot more kids that would have gone to NIU or the other in-state directional schools in the past since living in the West Loop neighborhood has gone from being a detriment 20 years ago to a huge selling point today. It also doesn't help that state university funding in the State of Illinois is particularly horrible (to say the least) and, while the University of Illinois and Illinois State systems have been negatively impacted, those systems also have larger endowments and corporate support to cushion the blow better while the other in-state schools are hurting much more. (Note that this isn't a good thing at all speaking as an Illinois resident. We need all of our public universities to be good in-state options.)

The primary exception that I see in the MAC is Miami since it has a fairly high academic ranking along with a pretty distinct culture (e.g. a preppy New England private school vibe despite being a Midwestern public university). They're very competitive with the Big Ten schools in cross-admits since there's no perception of an academic trade-off and the campus culture is offering something legitimately different. Indeed, in my Chicago suburb, more kids actually ended up at Miami from the high school Class of 2016 than they did at NIU (despite NIU being an in-state school only an hour away). That really isn't about the Big Ten vs. MAC, but rather Miami offers a truly unique environment with the requisite academic reputation (whereas a lot of non-flagships, whether fair or not, are treated as and look like backup versions of their respective flagships). That's what I believe all colleges are going to need going forward to be competitive as US high school grad numbers are heading downward for the foreseeable future.