re: Informative read about Auburn from the Wall Street Journal $$$

An Auburn education is in demand based on 2023 application numbers for the Freshman class, which Auburn reported as 48,000, with 20,000 early acceptance admissions, yielding a Freshman class of 7271 per the Institutional Research Office. The early acceptance group had an average ACT score of 28.2 and GPA of 4.2. Not bad for the 48th ranked public university. Based on these stats, I don't see Auburn reducing the cost of an Auburn education any time soon.

I'm curious why the WSJ selected Auburn for their deep dive article. It is not obvious based on the authors' academic backgrounds, with the lead author coming out of Stanford and Columbia, the second author out of UT-Arlington, and the third author from Ball State. I could not find the academic information on the fourth author. The latter two authors apparently did the graphics for the article.