2010 US News undergrad rankings?

starburyknicks2004-2005
Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:21:33 +0000

I think Fordham’s acceptance rate fell to 46.6% from 42%. Also construction has no tangible or direct influence or rankings; it may help us in an indirect way in the long run with recruiting more students. A good sports program also helps a team in an indirect way. If we improve our sports programs and make it to national tournaments year after year, more people hear about Fordham. A lot of people outside the east coast, let alone New York, have not heard of Fordham. If you look at some of our peer schools around our ranking (Syracuse, Uconn, Rutgers), we have a better student body than these schools. However, the reputation of these schools far exceeds Fordham’s IMO. So, I think for the time being, 61 is fitting. I think building and improving sports programs takes years so it is not a viable route for us to improve Fordham’s reputation in the short term so it should solely be done for the purposes of us getting better in sports and being able to compete in order to improve school spirit and morale.

A better way of getting our name out in the short term would be throwing A LOT more money into marketing and PR. Fordham needs to become a brand like NYU and needs to be marketed to a lot more households. Fordham also needs to become a top choice for many students and not just a safety to NYU (if you look at Fordham’s profile for the class of 2012, Fordham had to accept 11,075 students to fill out a class of 1,871 (that is a yield rate of only 17%). The only reason Fordham accepts so many students is because they know a lot of the students will turn the school down for either NYU/ivy or other financially viable alternative like Baruch. The total number of applications were 23,761 - we need to get that up to around 25,000 and accept only 9,000 (acceptance rate of 36%). So let’s say if they need to fill out a class with 1,800 students (they are looking at a yield rate of about 20% which is very achievable). Also, pump more money into scholarships so that you are not losing out on students that have scored 1350 and above on the SAT (the mid to high 1300 students are very critical for us and Fordham needs to make every effort to retain these students). I myself scored a 1350 but was only offered $4,200 a year in scholarships (I did have only a B+ school average). I could have turned the school down with no other forms of financial aid but I ended up attending the school because it was close to home and the campus/academics were good.

What bothers me is that even in NY, there are some students that have never heard of Fordham or do not know much at all about the school and view it in the same light as other lower tier NYC schools such as Baruch, Pace, St. Johns, etc. So what it often comes down to for these students is, why should I attend Fordham and dish out $25,000-$50,000 (depending on AID), when I can attend a CUNY/SUNY for less than $10,000 a year? I attended a public high school in Queens, NY and graduated in the class of 2005 with more than 900 students. There were only about ten other stuents that applied (compared to the hundreds that applied to NYU, CUNY, SUNY) and only one other students along with me attended the school. We had more students attending Columbia and Cornell than Fordham (think about that statistic given the selectivity of those two schools and we were not the smartest school). I think a good percentage of our draw from the NY area comes from catholic/private schools that know and appreciate how good Fordham is. Hopefully, we can spread this to all of the schools in NY and every state.

The only we we can offer more scholarships and increase marketing is through more donations from our alumni (ALOT more) and better appropriation of funds. They need to find a way to double the scholarships that they give out if they want a better student body, which can only help us out in the long term. In the next three to five years, our avg SAT avg no matter what needs to go up to 1300 and the acceptance rate needs to dip below 40% for us to even be looked with any type of seriousness as a good academic school (thereby also increasing Peer Assessment scores which weigh 40% into US news). This is the only we can even dream about sniffing the top 40-50. Just my humble opinion.