Leander - Ag said:
This is true. And the neighboring schools let everyone in. They are benefiting from Texas population growth, kids want to go to a known "brand" like OU even through the academics are weak.
Fairly similar situation at UGA. The lottery funded Hope and Zell Miller scholarships have made UGA really attractive to Georgia students. Less importantly, so has the football team's recent on-field success. Unlike in Texas, UGA and GA Tech (still a nerd school heavily focused on STEM fields) do not have automatic admits, other than valedictorian and salutatorian. Were it a true meritocracy, both schools would be full of North Atlanta suburban kids and a scattering of other kids from around the state. As it is, UGA in particular seems to try to "spread it around".
I know of a ton of kids whose parents paid way over $20,000/year to send their kids to private schools in Atlanta, only to have their kids rejected from the state's flagship university because their class rank wasn't as high as it would be had they attended a public school or a school in another part of the state. Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, FSU, and South Carolina (and to a lesser degree the Mississippi schools) sop up the ones who don't want to attend another state university and re-apply to UGA after the kids who had no business being accepted fail out. The HOPE scholarship, in addition to the growth of the Georgia population, has been a boon to these schools.
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