quote:
The reason they don't get in is not because UGA is a prestigious university. You UGA imbeciles are the only ones who seem to believe it.

Take the highest ranked kid from a Georgia high school that didn't get into UGA, put them in Birmingham with the same GPA, SAT, etc. they get into UGA

Yes, they do. UGA tries to help their neighboring states who aren't as qualified.

Where you're mistaken is thinking UGA isn't an academically prestigious university. It is now due to the quality of students.

They got there in a somewhat unique way though. The hope scholarship (as well as other scholarships that came in the same time to incentivize the highest academically achieving students to stay in state) made it so that for smart students who weren't smart enough to get full rides to prestigious out of state schools, UGA became a better option due to financial reasons... so they went to UGA.

This then increased UGA's academic student profile and more professors of note came to UGA. At this point I attended UGA... and had professors who had previously taught at Ivy League schools and other big name places (Duke, Stanford, etc) who had been lured to UGA.

This then further increased the lure of UGA to academically successful UGA students. In addition to being cheap/free... it was also a really good school. So UGA got MORE of those applicants. This pattern of reinforcement has continued to the point that the in-state applicant pool is exceptional.

Now UGA does make spaces for out of state applicants and for applicants from more rural counties. Someone can get in from a rural UGA county or from out of state much easier than from Atlanta, because the applicant pool from the populous counties in UGA is so exceptional. To get a full ride from out of state at UGA... you have to be on par with those who get them from Ivy league schools. But if you're out of state and are willing to foot the bill yourself, you can be more like a rural county UGA applicant.

What you need to understand is that because the bulk of UGA's student body comes from the cream of the Metro Atlanta schools... that makes UGA academically prestigious. We're getting brilliant students that way.

When I got accepted in '96, I had a 1500 SAT score and was a national merit scholar. I could have been accepted to almost any university... but I wasn't going to get a free ride to top schools. So I chose UGA. I ended up making more than my tuition, room and board cost throug scholarships (I made about 250 a quarter when I started, then when UGA switched to semesters about 500 a semester afterwards... not a ton, but a nice bonus).

Would I have gone to UGA pre-hope scholarship? Probably not. I'd probably have gone to UNC or UVA (the other two schools I was seriously looking at along with UGA). But due to HOPE, UGA had already climbed to be in the same general area as those two schools academically, and it was free. But the impact of HOPE on students like me are why UGA is such a great university now in terms of academics. Getting top students from an area as populous as Metro Atlanta will do that.

It doesn't work as well in less populous states. South Carolina has tried with their "LIFE" scholarship... but they don't have a city like Atlanta with a hugely populated metro area pumping out the same level of high quality students.