<p>Tufts, sadly, remains not high on the preference list of top students for whom it competes. This creates an on-going issue for the admissions committee to manage, given Tufts concerns about its relatively low ranking in silly places like US News & World Report, where yield is an important variable in the calculation. It’s a weird vicious circle that Tufts has been in for years. </p>
<p>As to whether the Tufts Syndrome carries over to students and how they view their Tufts experience once there, I tend to agree with The OldProf --I imagine its pretty limited.</p>
<p>That link is fairly old, and I think a lot of what you said is addressed in other threads. I don’t see any evidence to back up your claims, either.</p>
<p>I agree that the chart and any inferences that can be made would be rather dated evidence. But if you consider Dartmouth, people would prefer to go to just about any other ivy than that one and didnt even make significant headway until the list got to Duke.</p>
<p>Frankly, that Tufts even made the list is fairly impressive in itself.</p>
<p>^^ The data is not that old and, I am quite sure, has not changed much in the last three years. Seventeen schools are compared in the table. As for Dartmouth, with the exception of 6 schools – HYP, MIT, Columbia and Brown, Dartmouth is chosen over every school at least 50% of the time, many over 75% of the time. The is no school Tufts bests.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, but it’s biased. Obviously if you compare higher ranked schools or schools that have the advantage of attracting in-state students to Tufts, you’ll get lower yields.</p>
<p>^ I agree with neethus1. It’s definitely biased and Tufts def has the advantage of great location and attracting instate students which lead to lower yields. Take WPI for an example: Because it’s too far from Boston, a lot of instate students don’t bother applying there.</p>
<p>I don’t think Tufts has a yield problem at all. A good yield for a highly-rated school is usually within 3-4 percent of one-third. Tufts is right in that range.
Ivy League schools, Stanford, and comparable small liberal arts college like Williams and Amherst do significantly better as a result not only of their uniformly accepted high quality but (and I do not mean this in a derogatory way at all) their “snob appeal,” i.e., the myopic view that the resume and network value of these schools beats any number of other factors. Their extraordinarily low admit rates and high yields are the exception, not the rule. By way of example, the University of Chicago, which is certainly the academic equal of, for example, Dartmouth and Columbia, accepts a higher percentage of students than Tufts and also has a yield within a few points of one-third. Northwestern, another fabulous school on that list, has admit and yield percentages that are almost identical to those of Tufts.
Frankly, I think it is extremely impressive that Tufts was measured against the other schools on that list, as they represent the finest universities in the United States. Tufts is obviously in great company.</p>
<p>thanks for that! i recently got a call from my interviewer, inviting me for this dinner and drinks he’s organised for the alumni and for the director of international affairs. Its on the 29th though.
bummer. decisions will be made by then.</p>