To BYU or Not To BYU?

If you yawned when you received your BYU acceptance letter, this page is for you.

Especially if you're struggling to decide whether to attend BYU or a top-ranked university.  

Many high-achieving students hesitate to come to BYU because they fear they will not feel challenged at a school where the average ACT score is a 29.  Despite that average score, there are actually plenty of super-intelligent students at BYU, and the classes (by and large) are still challenging for this group of kids. If you isolated the top fourth of the students at BYU, you would likely find that their test score distribution resembles that of an Ivy League School (ACT 25th-75th percentile = 31-34).  BYU is actually the destination for several of the brightest high school students in the nation.

Several students have turned down Yale, MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, and other top colleges to enroll at BYU. Some of them receive some sort of recognition after choosing BYU, but most do not.  They are among the 75% of students that routinely enroll at BYU after being admitted.

Telling friends, teachers, and relatives "I'll be attending BYU" can be a very difficult thing for highly-accomplished students to do. Heck, choosing some obscure religious university in Utah over UC Berkeley, Stanford or Yale (that's how people may view your decision) hardly reflects what you have accomplished.  If you've distinguished yourself as one of the world's top high school students, that distinction would be most apparent if you branded yourself with the name of one of the world's top-ranked universities.  If you were to say, "I am going to Harvard," or "I am a Harvard student," people instantly realize that you are a top-notch, incredibly gifted individual.  By associating yourself with a prestigious institution, you build up your own reputation.

But studies show that students who turn down top-ranked schools to attend lesser-known universities end up being just as successful in life as their counterparts at prestigious universities.  Basically, your ability to succeed depends most on what you do in college, and not where you go to college.  And you can accomplish a lot through BYU: Each year, several BYU students get accepted to top graduate programs at the likes of Harvard, Yale, UPenn, Columbia, Stanford and Dartmouth, to name a few.  BYU students have won Rhodes Scholarships and several other prestigious scholarships.  Whatever you might accomplish elsewhere, you can accomplish if you apply yourself at BYU.  And it might even be easier (see below.)

Here are some of the reasons why highly-accomplished students decide to attend BYU:

Cost.

Even though top-ranked schools give substantial financial aid, their students still end up paying tens of thousands of dollars each year.  Because roughly 3/4 of the cost of a BYU education is subsidized by the LDS church, your education will end up costing much less.  Even before you account for your BYU scholarship, you're getting a good deal.

Research Opportunities.

It is very common for BYU students to participate in undergraduate research with their instructors.  Several students co-publish papers with their professors.  BYU students can get involved in the research scene as early as freshman year if they are assertive.

Easier to distinguish yourself academically at BYU.

Think about this: At Harvard, 75% of the student body scored in the 99th percentile on their SAT and/or ACT tests.  Other prestigious colleges boast similar statistics.  Even though you may be a super genius, you would be competing with dozens of other super geniuses in your classes at a top-ranked university, and it's unlikely you would outperform them all.  This is especially true when you consider the pervasive cheating that occurs at most of the nation's college campuses. (Guess which university in Utah frequently gets top marks for its low incidence of cheating?) When it comes time to apply for graduate school, graduate scholarships, or jobs, odds are that there will be another student from your prestigious university - with better credentials than you - who may get the admissions offer, scholarship, or job that you're trying to win.

At BYU (or any other moderately competitive university), highly-talented students can more easily set themselves apart from their peers when they rank at the top of their classes and take advantage of their school's opportunities for select students.

Good lookin' Mormons.

If you type "why are" into google, the first auto-suggestion is "Why are Mormons so hot?" Yep...  There's a reason for that.  Students who are in the market for a relationship (or one of those eternal companion things), and often find BYU's student body to be pretty appealing.