interestingguy

Plenty of Nobel Laureates graduated from regional schools. For an undergraduate institution with a heavy emphasis in the "life sciences," why no Biology or Chemistry Nobels???


At least you're honest. Very few WUSTL apologists admit this.


Rationalize much??? Except for HYP, all US News top 15 schools were at one time or another regional schools. They justifiably attained their positions in higher education by producing results, not by operating behind "smoke and mirrors." Seriously, no school does it quite like WUSTL. You must be so proud of your school's Machiavellian machinations.

IBclass06

1. Chemistry isn't a life science.

2. There is no Nobel Prize in biology.

3. WUStL has produced Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, and physiology/medicine.

Masra91

This time I would disagree - of the top 15 schools on US News and World Report, seven (including HYP) are Ivies. If you're considering those as regional schools then I guess we have different definitions of that term. If for no other reason than (especially considering the more recent history) the label Ivy League alone carries more clout than specific school names often, I would say that they have never been 'regional' in status. I could agree. however, that CalTech and Stanford stand out, they were regional universities too. In this case I would contend that these universities were regional in an area of massive population growth and a vacuum of higher education - causing the need for that to be filled. WashU, for example, had to compete with UChicago and Northwestern - while WashU was catering to working mothers and steel mill workers at night, the University of Chicago was being founded, funded, and touted by John D. Rockefeller who, at the time (pre Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States), was the richest and most influential man in the nation (if not the world).

Moreover, all of these universities have been highly ranked and well respected for a long period of time. No other University in the top 20 has had a rise as meteoric as wustl's - if they have risen in the last half century at all. In fact as argued by people in this thread, and (among others) the admissions office at wustl - fame begets fame. It creates a status quo where breaking in is much more difficult. This can be easily illustrated by a study from Cornell University which showed that the quality of applicants (in GPA, SAT, etc) rose and fell with their ranking. The other universities rose to preeminence at a time when this so called "smoke and mirrors" tactic wouldn't even have effected change. There was no US News and World Report ranking before 1983. The only game they had to play was one of legacy and tradition. Harvard and Ivies received the best and brightest by virtue of their fathers and grandfathers. WashU had no such system to boost its start; it had to steal them with free trips, information booklets, and scholarships - lots of scholarships.

I am not Washington University apologist. I simply do not see anything Machiavellian about giving spots at a University to students who actually want them. They aren't letting in 3.0 GPA kids (that would hurt their rating even more than a low yield). They aren't ignoring the SAT or the ACT. They are simply looking at a student who has a 35 and a 4.0 who also applied EA to Yale and saying - wow, this kid turned down our free visit. Why don't we let in the 3.85 GPA and 32 who we deferred from ED, at least she wants to be here. Remember that if they were turning out all the qualified applicants, they would suffer on criterion 3 of the Rankings Methodology (selectivity) as it is judged by GPA, ACT, and SAT.

P.S. the methodology of the US News and World Report lists the most important individual thing as the peer assessment (25%). Why would the Provost, President, and dean of Harvard, Yale, and all the other schools say such great things if it's simply a wealthy university with a bad case of the Tufts.

original501

they sent me stiff in the mail...
reminds me of u chicago...
agree with the effecinve marketing scheme

EmilySpinach

What kind of stiff?

interestingguy

1. Exactly where do I state that chemistry is a "life science"??? I was merely expressing surprise that an undergraduate institution whose primary strength is the "life sciences" has never produced an organic or bio-chemist worthy of the Nobel in Chemistry.

2. I meant physiology. My mistake.

3.

interestingguy

WUSTL's admissions practices are Machiavellian because they lack transparency. On purpose, WUSTL fails to disclose the number of applicants it waitlists annually. Based on anecdotal evidence alone, the number waitlisted far exceeds the number accepted. WUSTL can fully determine applicants' intentions to enroll simply by asking them whether or not they'd accept an offer off the waitlist. This violates the original intent of the waitlist (which is to manage hard-to-predict yield) and goes far beyond requesting "demonstrated interest."


Given that WUSTL refuses to submit admissions data to the CDS, we have no way to verify that the scores reported to US News are accurate. Considering WUSTL's relatively low yield rate, I highly suspect that the scores represent those of admitted vs. enrolled students. Usually a low-yield school such as WUSTL has trouble keeping its highest scoring admittees because they have other (more attractive) options available to them.


Because WUSTL has the lowest peer assessment (PA) score of any US News top 15 school, other presidents, provosts and deans are not really saying "such great things" about your school.

IBclass06

WUStL does fill out a CDS as well as release information to IPEDS. It simply chooses (like Penn and lately Princeton) not to make its CDS public.

Only so many students can enroll in the Ivies. There are quite a few high-scoring applicants.

interestingguy

...which is why there is no way for us (or, for that matter, US News) to verify its admissions data.

count.olaf

Quote:
some top firms do confirm at wustl.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "confirm."

I meant "recruit," I have no idea why I wrote "confirm" but it wasn't that hard to infer what I meant. There may not be a lot of prestigious financial institution that recruit at WUSTL but there are many well known companies in the other industries that recruit at WUSTL as well. Also, don't try to turn #1 MBA feeder school into a bad thing, practically only Wharton graduates can advance further than people from other schools with only an undergraduate degree. In fact, a majority of Wharton graduates still pursue to get MBA like any other business undergrad student.

vbball90

Wash U has had several nobel prize winners: WU Libraries: Washington University's Nobel Prize Winners.

Douglas North ('93 prize, economics) still teaches here now

InterestingGuy, although WUSTL doesn't release the CDS to the public (as others have just brought up), they must release those relevant numbers to IPDES, which is under the purview of the US Dept of Education. To be an accredited university, you must provide certain data to the government and accrediting agencies. So, while you don't know the data, the appropriate people do. It is incorrect for you to assume that numbers are innacurate because YOU don't know them. you haven't even said who you even are.

wait-listing students has no material bearing on a school's USnews ranking. someone posted a detailed analysis of this on one of the boards earlier this year (i think). basically, the proof was that admissions rates factor in little enough as it is, and WUSTL would basically have had to fill their entire class with wait-list acceptees to significantly improve their acceptance selectivity. by all accounts of people on this boards who have asked the admissions office, it seems that they have accepted about 100 kids from the waitlist in recent years. the size of it doesn't matter. while they surely may have a very large wait list, if they're not accepting many kids from it, it doesn't matter.

somewhere on the CC forums, a website that lists the rankings of each school over the years in US NEWS was posted. over the past several years, wash u had not moved by more than a couple of spots. i remember that Penn improved by +10 spots over the past decade or 15 years, and some other schools have also climbed. are you also flaming on penn's boards??

and, so what if a school does increase their standings? isn't upward momentum a good thing? while the weights that USnews puts on their metrics can be questionable, the items themselves can be thought of as reasonably good indicators of things that affect a university's quality/resources/opportunities (things like faculty financial resources, freshman retention rates, academic profile of freshmen). i applaud a school like Penn and Wash U for improving on important things like those measures.

and what is this garbage about "gaming the rankings"? can someone please tell me how exactly a college goes about doing this? how does one forge a freshman retention rate? how does one forge faculty resources? how does one forge average class sizes? how does one forge 4-year graduation rates? how does one forge the amount of students in the top 10% of the class? everyone seems to be thinking that "gaming the rankings" exclusively applies to admissions-related things, when in reality the acceptance rate itself comprises 1.5% of the total ranking.

in my opinion, schools like princeton/yale/penn are more "regional" schools than Wash U is.... that is, if you define "regional" by where the students come from. a true regional university, in the most ideal sense of the term, will almost exclusively have kids from its own state, and most of the rest from surrounding areas.

look at these geographic distributions:
Penn: Penn Admissions: Incoming Class Profile
Yale:http://www.yale.edu/oir/book_numbers...en_1975_98.pdf (somewhat out of date, but i couldn't find any other recent data)
Cornell: http://dpb.cornell.edu/documents/1000415.pdf
Dartmouth: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~oir/pdfs/Admissions.pdf
Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-pr..._Geography.pdf (40% in state!!)
Princeton: Number of Students in the Class of 2013 by Geographic Region
Vanderbilt has 1,072 undergraduates from Tennessee out of 6,800 (from its website)


from one of Wash U's newspapers about the freshmen this year: "More than 60 percent of the students come from more than 500 miles away". Record: Trustees hear reports on admissions, construction, financial issues and new scholarship initiative

The fact that Wash U has fewer than 40% of students from its geographic area is something that none of the east coast schools can say. if Wash U were to take 60 or 70% of the class from within geographic area, then its yield would likely be much higher. however, Wash U clearly wants to maintain a national reputation, so it has a much higher ladder to climb to take kids from the east coast who typically wind up staying closer to home.

i think whenever you look into colleges and who they accept, you really do need to look at where the students come from. it is much more common for kids to want to stay at universities closer to home than go 500+ miles away. Wash U must be accepting comparatively more kids from other areas of the country and having to suffer through a lower yield from these kids. the yield is probably gradually getting higher for these kids as wash u maintains the more national reputation that it now has, but i assume that the yield is lower for those kids than from kids from surrounding states.

fallenchemist

I just popped in here after not looking at the Wash U forum for some time. Interestingguy clearly has a bizarre hatred of Wash U that appears borderline psychotic. So many non sequiters and irrational statements, it would be hard to know where to start, but here are a few:

1. The Nobel Prize argument: First of all, the Nobel prizes in the sciences are given for major achievements in research or theoretical breakthroughs, usually after many years of work. I would defy you to correlate where a person went as an undergraduate and the subsequent winning (or lack thereof) of a Nobel prize with the quality of an undergraduate education at a university. There were Nobel Prize winners in the sciences that went to very non-selective state schools as undergraduates, such as North Dakota. Are you going to argue that because of that those schools must be better than Wash U? Ridiculous. And when you say you are clearly saying that chemistry is a life science, since that was the category you presented as the subject to which these two disciplines are related. Read your own sentence.

2. This whole argument about regional institutions versus national ones is a bit off also. It is only in the last few decades that much easier access to rapid travel has transformed local or regional institutions into far more national ones. Even the Ivies had most of their students from New England and/or mid-Atlantic states for many decades, both because of travel and because that is where most of the population, and certainly the money, was. Silly argument.

3. The statement Wow. Hardly know how to reply to such a misguided statement. WUSTL is top 15 out of thousands of accredited universities, incredible acceptance rates to grad schools, med schools, etc., and has a devoted alumni network. By your reasoning, a high school student that comes in 12th in the nation in an academic competition, gets into great universities, and has people saying lauditory things about him, but maybe not quite a much as a dozen or so other kids, isn't very smart.

Look, you don't like Wash U. We get it. Now get a life. Personally I think the USNWR rankings are totally bogus as a concept. So many flaws in their methodology one can write a book on it (and people probably have). But that doesn't excuse your sloppy thinking, imprecise and fallacious arguments, and flailing at a school that must have wounded you somehow. Stop being so pathetic.

interestingguy

I don't know if North Dakota has actually produced Nobel Laureates, but I am willing to concede that WUSTL is a better school than UND.


WUSTL still has merely a regional reputation, if that. That's why your board of trustees voted to change your school's name from "Washington University" to "Washington University in St. Louis." Because nobody knew where or what it was.


WUSTL is only "top 15" according to US News. No other reputable rankings (WSJ Feeder Schools, Revealed Preferences, Times-QS, Shanghai Jiao Tong's ARWU, etc.) put WUSTL anywhere near the top 15.


Only US News says that WUSTL "comes in 12th in the nation."


...which makes WUSTL's #12 ranking bogus as well.

interestingguy

I did. Can you read this?


Listen, given that WUSTL is only good for the "life sciences," if I were you, I'd argue that not only chemistry but also computer science and political science were "life sciences" too.

interestingguy