Ha ha! Midtown is still there. It’s a Christian Science church nearby, not Scientologists. They’re quite different. And it was built in 1894. They actually have a really cool Mapparium, which is a glass globe you can walk inside and see what the countries were back when they built it. We used to go there when the kids were little.
It does look like crime patterns differ between schools with mostly commuters, versus mostly residential students living off campus, versus students living on campus. Presumably, the latter means that student-committed crime (e.g. sexual assaults, liquor law violations) is more likely to happen on campus and be included.
Most students who fit that description and have the requisite stats are waitlisted, not rejected.
One of my son’s best friends applied to Clark ED and has been very happy there. And a prettty famous actor is a student there too. Neither would fit the description of “socially awkward”!
Temple University in Philadelphia (#115 in USN&WR National Universities) is a school that has gotten a lot more selective in recent years. When I was a kid it was a commuter school (as it was originally founded) and the go-to, affordable safety for a lot of students. I’m shocked at how many kids get rejected from there these days. They’ve really raised their status with their honors college and merit scholarships for high-stats students.
In that case you would never be able to attend a Boston Symphony or Boston Pops concert at Symphony Hall nor view the Monet’s at the Museum of Fine Arts since those institutions are adjacent to Northeastern.
Actually, I’m a rule breaker so I did see Monet exhibit at MFA way back when 
Symphony and Pops, not my bag then (or now). Of course, this was back in the dark ages and I attended a women’s college that was very strict (think dress code and curfew lol) and they “cautioned” us about all kinds of danger lurking the Boston back roads…
My daughter’s attending a regional university in Indiana - Ball State - and it surprised me to see that their admissions rate is actually 59%, lower than Indiana U-Bloomington’s actually. (same as Purdue’s though).
A friend of mine works at Ball, and I asked him about it - He said BSU is definitely trying to admit “better”, but fewer, students. If you just look at the undergrad enrollments for the past several years, you’ll see a significant drop every year. It went from close to 19k a few years ago, to less than 15k undergrads this past fall.
Then if you look at the scattergrams for accepted students, you see the stats for incoming freshmen steadily climb, Their ACT/SAT stats are still average for the average, 
- around 23-25, I think? But the average GPA is steadily climbing.
I can see why they might have a long, hard road to climb uphill, trying to compete with IU and Purdue (and Earlham and Butler and DePauw - not going to include Notre Dame, here, ND is uber-selective and no comparison here) for students with high test scores. I think that’s why they’re opting to stay in the Midwest Student Exchange list, to attract more OOS students.
But I’m wondering if they’ll reach a point when they opt of the exchange?
But that’ll be a while, as - again- they have to compete with Indiana and Purdue, mainly. I think they still have a reputation for being the fall-back for kids whose first choices are those other schools mentioned above, although that may not be the case anymore.
I find the whole rankings thing fascinating - simply because, yes, it’s so obviously skewed and easily “played”.
And so much of it is subjective.
It was a match school for me. You don’t always get into your match schools.
@Lindagaf I was joking around in post 56 
but . . . . anyone who has visited the neighborhood even once would know something is wrong there.
I don’t want to hijack the thread, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a neighborhood in any major city where you’d feel safer walking around (day or night). There were many follow up articles questioning Bus. Insider’s methodology - especially since schools like Columbia, NYU and USC didn’t even make the list, the latter in a neighborhood known to be a high crime area controlled by a gang affiliated with the Mexican drug mafia (google “Harpys USC”).
Part of the problem was that UCLA has its own PD which covers and reports crime from a much wider area covering millions of people as far away as San Bernardino, but has little to do with the campus or surrounding neighborhood.
Here’s the follow-up press release from UCLA.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/ucla-a-dangerous-campus-don-t-241068
The safety statistics don’t really seem to jive with what I think I know about schools. http://ope.ed.gov/campussafety/#/compare/details seems to show that Stanford is far worse per 1000 students than UCLA and even Berkeley in many categories. I would have no qualms with the safety of UCLA from what I’ve seen. Berkeley you just have to use a little common sense.
@1Dreamer are you saying that Columbia and NYU are in unsafe neighborhoods? That can’t be right. NYC is one of the top 10 safest cities in the world currently.
@Dustyfeathers, the East Village is quite safe these days. Morningside Heights has cleaned up but it use to be pretty bad.
For a large city like NYC (or LA), city-wide crime stats are near worthless. You really need to look neighborhood by neighborhood.
@Dustyfeathers I’m not attacking NYC, but the methodology used by Bus. Insider in coming up with their list was dubious at best, and there were some follow-up articles specifically mentioning the absence of NYU and Columbia (among others) and why that was. As large cities go, NYC is very safe these days and it’s one of my favorite cities in the world, but as neighborhoods go, it would be hard to find an area in any major city where you’re going to feel (and be) safer than Westwood or any of the surrounding neighborhoods within a few miles.
Remember that Stanford has a very large campus, and most Stanford students live on-campus. So would that cause certain types of student-related crime (e.g. sexual assaults at drunken parties) be classified as reportable on-campus crime at Stanford, but not necessarily at other schools where the venues of such crimes are more likely to be off-campus?
@soze - Sometimes looking a Naviance in relation to students from your school/school district is useless. I am about to cite anecdotal information, which I of course know is a no-no on CC, but here goes anyway.
My D16 applied, and was accepted, to 3 schools that NO ONE (well according to Naviance anyway) from her school has ever applied to…Baldwin Wallace, College of Wooster and Quinnipiac. We have diligently kept up with the reporting/record keeping in Naviance, always advising of which admission cycle she applied in, if she withdrew apps, if she was waitlisted, denied or accepted. To date there is NOTHING showing that she applied or was accepted to those schools on the Naviance university landing page, although her stats (which have a very unique footprint, so we know it is her) have populated some of the other schools where she applied and was accepted, like Purdue, Pitt and Drexel, where a few students from her school apply every year.
I honestly haven’t found Naviance to be a helpful tool with regard to statistics from her particular HS and given that it is not showing anything for several of D16’s schools I don’t exactly trust it as being an accurate reflection of where her school district/school cohorts are applying and being accepted. When I asked about the discrepancy in reporting with the HS I was told that they don’t know how Naviance actually tracks the info and “Those are not schools that our students (in Texas) would normally apply to, so it really doesn’t matter”. Really? It mattered to us. It just may matter to some other student at some point, particularly because the vast majority of our students apply in-state and those of us applying out of state really are on our own to figure out the common app and finding schools that are a good fit etc. because the academic counselors are concentrating on in-state.
Naviance may do a good job with the top 50 USNWR schools but, to me, it seems to drop the ball with “middle tier” schools.
@PurpleTitan I’ve lived in nyc for a long, long time. I’m familiar with the neighborhoods you’ve mentioned. I agree that they are pretty safe. The city is safe in most places, despite how it’s portrayed on Lw and Order every night. And most places in the City “used to be pretty bad”. As I said, it’s a top 10 safe city in the world currently.
@labegg I know our HS won’t input the stats from a kid who is the only applicant to a given school in order to protect the kid’s privacy. Is that perhaps what’s going on?
Are all SAT and ACT scores put into Naviance? What if a student got a 26 ACT score but a 2250 SAT score? Naviance may show that he was accepted at a selective school with a 26 ACT while in fact it was the 2250 SAT that got him admitted.
^^ I wonder if that is the case with ours. I’ll see scattergrams that do not match up with the number of reported/accepted/enrolled students. In low number scenarios it is often only showing the child enrolled or admitted but not those denied which absolutely drives me nuts.
I’ve been surprised how selective UW (Washington has gotten). Really shocked with some local kids results, one who was WL at Harvard (and one other ivy but I can’t recall which one lol!), accepted at Notre Dame and a half tuition scholarship to USC did not get direct admit to UW Engineering and another one accepted at what I would have thought (locally) was a much more competitive LAC versus a non impacted major application was WL at UW. And these are kids with alleged instate (and alumni) advantage.
I suppose it’s just as well S17 has zero interest in attending but it does make me feel like I didn’t appreciate my school enough when I was there
This. I looked at Naviance pretty frequently when I applied to schools last year. According to my high school’s Naviance and based solely on my GPA and SAT combination, I should have easily gotten admitted into the likes of UMass Amherst, Binghamton, and Clark (which had admitted students with lower GPAs in past years), but had no business getting into the school I eventually chose. Well, look how that turned out.
According to my high school’s Naviance, I was the first student to ever apply to Pitt-Johnstown (branch campus). At the conclusion of the app season, the “Overlap” section was populated with all five of the other schools I was accepted into. But strangely, Rutgers New Brunswick (my state flagship) was also included despite the fact that I never actually sent an application there. Weird.
In a similar vein, I was only my high school’s third-ever applicant to Stetson, a small school in Florida (the other two graduated when I was a freshman; all of us were accepted, but chose to go elsewhere. It ended my app season in third place). My stats had populated the “Graph” and “School Stats” sections immediately after I had updated the system with my acceptance. However, if you’re referring to the “Application History” section on the main page, that will only be updated in the summer after your D graduates.
Quinnipiac wound up being my second choice school. Good on your daughter for getting accepted. And who knows, she may end up blazing a trail for future applicants from her high school (if she enrolled there). I know that in my case, from 2013-2015 only one student from each class had chosen my school (technically two from 2013, but one had to drop out for personal reasons). Now, all of a sudden, two kids in the class of 2016 are coming to my school. It’s very interesting - you never know if you made a positive impact on the younger grades until you see how many people end up following you to your college in subsequent years (assuming said college isn’t a popular destination from your HS to begin with).
As far as “middle tier” (which I guess I am counting as anything below #50ish on USNWR ranked “national universities”) schools that are harder to get it than others…I am often surprised at difficulty in admissions for PItt, Syracuse, Penn State (although it is ranked #47) and Ohio State, U of Miami, Clemson, Tulane (although that is ranked 4, perception is that is not exactly top tier although that may be a regional bias).
Here is a question…would you consider a school “middle -tier” if it is ranked in the top 10 as a regional school?
As the parent of a very average, unhooked, class of '16 student, who concentrated on “middle tier” schools and had a very successful admissions season. I was amazed that she was accepted at several middle tier school where she was clearly in the 25ish percentile when I saw students with much better stats turn up denials. The only things that I have walked away from this round of the college admissions game with, that I will be pass on to my D18, are 1. Colleges want to see a student that has challenged themselves (academically and extra-curricularly) even if their gap and test scores aren’t spectacular. 2. Schools want to know that you want them and that they aren’t the back up plan or the crazy reach. They want to know that if you are offered a slot there is a better than good chance that you will say yes. 3. Forget about the prestige and the rank and concentrate on finding a school that is a good fit for YOU.