(...) compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.
I don't know if this is how things work in the US, but in Poland we have the same phenomenon at our best universities. The cause of it here is that university gets paid for every student they take in, so they often offer twice as many places as they have capacity to handle, and drop half of the students after first year.
With Waterloo, it's more a matter of the school recognizing that the people who will do well in their "prestige" programs (mathematics and computer science, in particular) are not necessarily the same people who excel in getting secondary school marks. I know that my marks (apart from mathematics and sciences) would have precluded me from, say, advanced janitorial training at any respectable institution, but between the math marks (and the contest scores - Waterloo develops and sponsors a number of math contests for Ontario secondary school students), getting accepted to Waterloo's Mathematics Department wasn't a problem (ugh - almost forty years ago now, when co-op was optional and new), where Laurentian was. (For anyone interested, Laurentian University was known for nursing and a unique sports administration program that combined a BComm with athletics, kinesiology and a few other sports-related disciplines. Apart from that, it was known as "the university that had to let you in when nobody else would". It wouldn't let me in.)
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I don't know if this is how things work in the US, but in Poland we have the same phenomenon at our best universities. The cause of it here is that university gets paid for every student they take in, so they often offer twice as many places as they have capacity to handle, and drop half of the students after first year.
With Waterloo, it's more a matter of the school recognizing that the people who will do well in their "prestige" programs (mathematics and computer science, in particular) are not necessarily the same people who excel in getting secondary school marks. I know that my marks (apart from mathematics and sciences) would have precluded me from, say, advanced janitorial training at any respectable institution, but between the math marks (and the contest scores - Waterloo develops and sponsors a number of math contests for Ontario secondary school students), getting accepted to Waterloo's Mathematics Department wasn't a problem (ugh - almost forty years ago now, when co-op was optional and new), where Laurentian was. (For anyone interested, Laurentian University was known for nursing and a unique sports administration program that combined a BComm with athletics, kinesiology and a few other sports-related disciplines. Apart from that, it was known as "the university that had to let you in when nobody else would". It wouldn't let me in.)