re: Aggie Academics - not so great after all - Vandy represents

The AAU is literally a Frat/Country Club. You have to be voted in by membership and MANY members have just been "in the club" for 80 years and have long since lost their academic prowess. The AAU really didn't vote in new members for decades and thus A&M didn't get in until 2001 in spite of the fact that A&M is an elite research spending school. The AAU is very East Coast/Midwest oriented because those were most of the big research universities back when it was founded. They also discount Ag research almost completely which is BS imo.

Now that the SEC has 4 AAU schools it should be able to get more members. Georgia seems most likely to be next with GTech as a sponsor as well but Georgia suffers from not being a huge research spend school and not having an on campus Med School. Auburn and Bama are next on deck.

BTW, this is also a big reason why if the SEC expands again they will move heaven and earth to get North Carolina and might even take UVA or Va Tech. UVA and UNC are Top 5 Public schools and they have serious pull in the AAU. Brush it off all you want but AAU membership can mean tens of millions of dollars per year in research spending and there is nothing a University President would want to add to their resume more than having their school attain membership during their tenure. They have their little egg head club meetings that academics love. Loftin mentioned multiple times his relationship with Bernie Manchin from UF at AAU meetings helped a great deal with the SEC transition.

In terms of this ranking btw it seems to be heavily weighted toward small private schools that will always win on stuff like class size and graduation rates over large public schools. It's just a completely different dynamic that really doesn't have much to do with true quality of education. GPA inflation at those schools is just ridiculous as well. I remember a story of a guy that was a Stanford grad with a 2.9 GPA that tried to get in to a top law school but was rejected. Why? A 2.9 at Stanford put him in the bottom 2% of his class, essentially a "B" is failing. By comparison at A&M the 50th percentile was a 2.5 GPA (this was when I was in school, may have changed since then slightly).