re: Off-season ranking of SEC schools in academics ....

It's so hard to take you seriously.
I honestly try; but you shite all over every single thread.
It's like a pathology or something with you.

Overall:

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#17 Vandy
#49 Florida
#60 Georgia
#69 Texas A&M
#86 Alabama
#91 Auburn
#97 Missouri
#101 Tennessee
#112 South Carolina
#119 Kentucky
#128 Arkansas
#135 LSU
#142 MSU
#150 Ole Miss

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Public:

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#14 Florida
#20 Georgia
#25 Texas A&M
#36 Alabama
#40 Auburn
#44 Missouri
#47 Tennessee
#55 South Carolina
#58 Kentucky
#63 Arkansas
#68 LSU
#73 MSU
#79 Ole Miss

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LINK

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I don't know why that one Aggie has little man syndrome. Even if A&M is somehow a better school than UGA(it isn't), the difference is pretty minimal and he's making his own school sound bad. We're both on the upper end of public schools and both solidly in a tier below the elite guys.

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Exactly. Dude needs to get a grip on reality. Hey, I didn't like making a post that has Florida above Georgia academically, but I can't deny that that is the consensus. So I dealt with it.

Aggie needs to learn, imo.

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So you can't make fun Florida St academics without making fun of half the dam SEC.

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So? Making fun of half the dam* SEC is what we do on here.

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I would take the opportunities the Aggie alumni base provides over UGA any day

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Not if you want to work in Atlanta. Or half a dozen other large Southern cities.

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1. Vanderbilt. It is what it is.
2. Florida. This hurts, but sometimes the truth does.
3. Georgia. 2 & 3 are pretty close, but both well behind Vandy.
4. Texas A&M. A solid fourth, too. After this it gets a bit murkier.
5. Alabama. An underrated academic institution, imo.
6. Auburn. Also underrated, usually by me when I get the chance. But not this time. War Eagles a solid #6 academically.
7. Missouri. Well in the middle of the pack. Nothing to be ashamed of.
8. Tennessee. See #7 above. Not too shabby for the Vols.
9. South Carolina. Starting to get a little shabby, but could be worse.
10. Kentucky. This is worse. Kentucky should do better, imo.
11. Arkansas. Finally found a way to beat LSU.
12. LSU. Finally found a way to lose to Arkansas.
13. Mississippi State. Gets a participant ribbon.
14. Ole Miss. U R Shame.

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Here is some tl;dr shite.

This is pretty much straight of US News, isn't it?

I've participated in some hiring committees as of late at UF and have worked and have friends from all over the US in academia. This is kind of based off that experience.

Top 4 look good. Vandy is Vandy, but the distance between Florida and Georgia is greater than Georgia and A&M. All three are within earshot of each other though, so chest thumping over college rankings between each should be kept to a minimum. All three are great institutions and would serve any student, undergrad or graduate, well if they chose to take advantage of the resources available at each. They are also the three public unis in the South that I think have the best chance of competing with some of the public academic powerhouses in the Midwest and on the East and West coast.

Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Tennessee all have some great programs, a few of which carry an excellent reputation nationwide. They may not be quite as solid across the board, but all have pretty good to excellent resources.

SCar is doing some interesting things and I think trending up in general. Their admissions are getting more selective from what I understand as more students are applying. That helps things too.

I'm not going to bag on LSU; I think one can get a good education at any of these schools, honestly. The only difference is the further up the list you go, the less effort a student will have to make to find that education among the programs and classes available to them. I think LSU looks about right where considering who is above.

I honestly know too little about Auburn to comment. The few people I've worked with from their were intelligent and affable, but I really don't know much about the place in comparison to the others.

Mississippi State and Ole Miss have been dealt a bad hand. There are good programs and professors at both, but due to legal reasons in Mississippi, they have very low admissions requirements. This affects statistics across the board for them, and I would imagine make trying to select a more academically accomplished student body difficult.

Ole Miss in particular seems to have a lot of students that either went there because they loved the school or because they couldn't get into the big SEC school in their own state so ended up in Oxford. I think that carries up to faculty hires as well because many PhDs don't look at either Ole Miss or MSU as the same caliber research institutions as say Georgia or Alabama. It's a crappy situation, and I'm not sure the federal government's hand in trying to guarantee diversity in Mississippi didn't hamstring ever having a really top-shelf public university there. I'm not saying there weren't serious barriers in Mississippi to integration, but in trying to overcome that, the national government undermined many of the tools the other 12 universities have help make their academics what they are.

At Ole Miss, admission requirements are:

"All students completing the CPC with a minimum 2.50 high school GPA on the CPC and a minimum score of 16 on the composite ACT (or 760 on the SAT critical reading/mathematics)" for a MS resident.

LINK

You'll find that to be the same at all public universities in Mississippi.

Comparatively, Florida and Georgia are ambiguous and almost byzantine with the way the weigh things. Georgia's requirements say GPA counts way more than test scores more than likely. I read where someone in admissions here at UF suggested to students that getting a patent (seriously) was a great way to stand out these days. They both are getting to play each applicant in the pool against the others and taking who they think is best out of each year's applicant pool based on whatever happens to be the focus that year. Mississippi schools can't do that. No one can tell me that it doesn't make a huge difference to the academics of a school from the bottom up when that happens.

Flip AU and UA, and I would agree.

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Forbes places a higher emphasis on student satisfaction(retention), alumni support, postgraduate success, student debt, etc

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Which is why I value the Forbes rankings more than USN.

The USN law rankings work the same way, emphasizing undergraduate GPA's, LSAT scores, # of applicants denied, etc.

SMU Admission Requirement: Can you afford to go here? Can you withstand the immediate stereotype? Do you want to be a..pony?