Should Tufts be Ranked Higher?

Colleges & Universities Tufts University
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Not doubting the numbers but I doubt they tell the real story as colleges get pretty creative in how these are determined. I do know, anecdotally, that UF has huge classes in popular subjects / majors. As an example, the business school, which is quite popular, has a large percentage (not a class or two) of the first two years of required major courses (accounting, finance, etc) online (pre-covid). Some of them are offered as a choice of live vs online and others are offered exclusively online. When we toured and met with the head of student affairs within the business school, he showed us a lecture classroom. It was beautiful and full of tech / modern. He said most kids choose to view the class live online vs. live in the classroom. The classroom seated about 75. The enrollment for a typical first or second yr class was several hundred. He said, the really involved students tend to come to the live in person class, and to ensure they have a seat, they get there early. That was a big turnoff for our kid. Have also been told by multiple students that going to office hours is not necessarily a 1:1 thing. In some cases, there are so many kids looking for office hour type help that they hold it in a lecture room to accommodate the group.

I have heard that engineering is not nearly as crowded or online, but they put a chunk of kids through the Santa Fe program (there are threads dedicated to this under the UF link). That’s an interesting way to lessen the demand of resources on campus. I imagine It also lowers the student / teacher ratio as those kids aren’t technically taking engineering classes at UF for a year or two but they graduate with a UF degree. Understand it’s a very good program but I don’t think it’s reflected in the student:prof.

Please understand, I’m not knocking UF at all, just providing some context to the numbers. Simply demonstrates the need to go far beyond the rankings and see for yourself what’s really going on.

We’ve been to both W&M and UF several times. Live in FL and know many many kids who go there. They seem to be happy which is great! That said, after visiting both, you would never confuse the two. They are extremely different on so many levels. Not better or worse, just different. Can’t possibly imagine a kid being happy at both.

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144

My D’s friend had perfect stats and great ECs and still had college rejections. Perfect stats don’t guarantee admission. There were two perfect stats students in her school alone.

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I have a friend who’s daughter had a 36 ACT, which is more or less equivalent to SAT 1600, and was a straight A student with good ECs. She was turned down or waitlisted by Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Williams, Pomona, and Amherst, at one of which she was a legacy. She did get into 2 Top 20 national universities and 3 Top 20 national LACs as well as a bunch of other very good schools. These kids are rare, but not as rare as you might think.

It’s hard to imagine just how insane this has gotten, just how much of a lottery it has become. When Harvard is getting close to 60,000 applicants and is only accepting 2000 and Stanford almost 50,000 applicants for 2000+ acceptances, the odds are astronomical. And when those 2000 are reduced by spots given to athletes & other special talents, high qualified URMs, and favored legacies + other big donors, the odds become even longer. Then, think about who’s in that pool of 50-60,000 applicants. With a small number of exceptions, kids don’t even think about applying to these elite schools unless they’re top, top applicants to begin with. Someone literally has a better chance of being struck by lightning than of getting into one of the top 5 national U’s and too 5 national LAC’s. And the odds don’t go up very much as you go down the list.

This was the whole point of the Newsweek article, “The New Ivies” - and that was 15 years ago. Since the ‘80’s and ‘9o’s, the Harvards of the world went from accepting 10-15% of their applicants to 3-5% more recently. HS graduated were at their lowest number in 30 years back in the ‘90’s but then came the 2nd baby boom in the 21st century and the number of spots in elite colleges were increasing very little if at all.

Newsweek’s point was that the kinds of kids who were going to HYPSM in the past but couldn’t get in any more we’re now going somewhere else. The schools that were getting the overflow now had student bodies every bit as elite as the very top tier used to have.

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:face_with_monocle: Gotta track that down.

The premise seems spot on.

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Well, a student who gets upset (and angry ) at being rejected when she/he is tops in a high school class and top scores in favor of a student who is much or notably lower academically has every right to feel upset of ‘cheated’. There is a big difference between a 3.6 and a 3.9 or 4.0, and requires much more sacrifice on the part of the student. I would not hold that distress against a student who saw such an admissions practice.

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Of course rejections sting and a top stat teen is going to be hurt. I think the point is that the competitiveness of admissions and holistic approach is not a secret. Disappointment is a rational response. Surprise is not. Nor is blaming the other student who did get in.

I’ve looked at a lot of scatterplots for my kid’s school. The highest stats kids are less likely to get admitted to most T-20-ish schools than the kids a smidge lower. Other things clearly matter. My sense is there is a threshold expectation, but above that, diminishing returns for grades and scores.

Eta: Stanford’s median SAT is 1470. Tufts is 1465. Perfection is clearly not expected. Stanford could fill a class with near perfect scores if they wanted to. They don’t. Applicants should be taking note of that and manage their expectations and lives accordingly.

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I can’t find it - I just looked for it - but when we were researching colleges Brown had a chart of admission rate by ACT. If you had a perfect ACT, only like 17 or 20% - something like that - got in. Surely many of those students had a perfect GPA. It wasn’t correlated. There’s so many factors likely involved beyond the ECs, essays, interviews (maybe someone comes off as elitist) - maybe geography, background, income or first generation, maybe something in an essay popped. Of the millions of high school graduates, many will have these insane stats and many are applying for spots at the same schools. Schools are trying to assemble a diverse campus - diversity beyond race, religion, everything - so if there are many similar type students, they have to pick and choose which, in aggregate, make up the student body they want.

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And in the real world, it’s not necessarily (or even generally) the smartest or Xest who advances. It’s the ones that are smart enough and bring many other things to the table. They become leaders.

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This also applies to a segment like sports that some students try to equate with the enrollment process in the sense that the “best” or “highest measurable” advances. NFL teams often get it wrong by choosing the fastest wide receiver out of college - it turns out his hands aren’t good and he doesn’t like to get hit. MLB teams routinely discover that pitcher that throws the hardest can’t hit the strike zone enough to be effective. The golfer that can drive the ball the furthest doesn’t always win the tournament, just as the tennis player who can serve the hardest doesn’t have a chance against Nadal. Life is more nuanced than that.

A test score or GPA is but one facet of a student applicant. Yeah, pitchers need to be able to throw hard, but once you hit a certain m.p.h. other factors become more important than additional speed. Similarly, once you hit a certain GPA/test score, piling on another 50 points doesn’t determine you’re a more suitable applicant than another applicant.

@Pandaboy1 take this scenario into consideration: StudiousBoy has a 3.7gpa and scores 1380 on the SAT in May. He’s unhappy with his score and feels it may hold him back from getting into his dream college. So he does a lot of test prep over the summer, takes the test again, and increases his superscore to 1520 in September, four months after his 1380 sitting. Is it realistic to assume StudiousBoy is a vastly more capable student than he was 4 months earlier, or is it reasonable to assume he is exactly the same student he was when he scored a 1380? And if it is the latter, doesn’t it make sense that if two different students score 1380 and 1520 that the 1380 student might be just as capable a student as the 1520 student?

Colleges know the gamesmanship associated with test scores - they know a higher score doesn’t always indicate a more capable applicant - they know more goes into creating a vibrant desirable academic campus than a test score. That’s why selective universities with low admission rates utilize more than GPA/TestScores to decide who is admitted.

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MY friend (valedictorian and perfect SAT) was rejected by U Chicago & MIT but made Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Caltech & Stanford.

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This seems like UF’s creative way to keep its OOS tuition among the lowest in the Top 20 public universities, along with Purdue. If my S22 is admitted, the key would be honors college which seems to provide a traditional college experience. After that, one has to explore how many courses are online or even in Gainesville.

Tufts is a very different experience but also much more costly for upper-middle income.

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Here it is:

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Coincidentally, I gave my nephew and a couple of his friends an “assignment” as they didn’t have a lot of Naviance points for various schools they’re considering. Using admitsee data, I asked them to record acceptance rates for various applicants of other “T40” schools who got into X school. For example, 58% of the people got into Tufts from among those who applied to Stanford. If you take the average Tuft admit rate for all “T40” schools, it is about 50.3%. That’s the “base score” where lower is more selective. The next step is to adjust that score by answering the opposite question: average admit rate at other T40s among Tufts admits. Overall, Tufts admits are accepted about 3.3 pts below the rest of the top 40 on the same metric.

Adjusted score for Tufts = 50.3% + 3.3% = 53.6%. This is a fairly crude method, but the advantage of limiting the acceptance comparisons to a pool of competitive applicants who are personally and publicly disclosing results far outweighs the limitations. Top 25 results, btw:

Yale 11.1%, Princeton 12.7%, Harvard 14.4%, Stanford 14.8%, MIT 18.1%

Columbia 25.6%, Brown 29.9%, Penn 39.9%, Chicago 42.6%, Dartmouth 43.5%

Duke 45.3%, Northwestern 52.5%, Tufts 53.6%, JHU 54.9%, WashU 59.9%

Cornell 60.0%, Rice 61.0%, Georgetown 64.6%, Vanderbilt 67.4%, Berkeley 70.3%

Notre Dame 72.3%, CMU 77.9%, UVA 78.5%, UCLA 78.7%, USC 82.9%.

Note: Data spans nearly a decade Among all of these schools, USC appears to be on the greatest upward trend, so they may be “underrated” here.

For anyone wondering, 3 points to having them do this:

  1. to show them how blurred the lines are. Columbia admits get rejected by Vandy and vice versa.
  2. to allow them to estimate where they may be competitive based upon schools they better understand.
  3. to discourage acceptance rate as proxy for selectivity. Acceptance rate tells you nothing about the quality of the applicant pool at any school. Lesser “known” schools may have far fewer easy rejections because people who have no business applying to those schools do not know about them. See Tufts/WashU vs. Vandy for example. Functionally, they’re equally selective.

This doesn’t answer the question of Tufts ranking, but I do think it suggests Tufts is more selective than a 2D scatter of test scores vs acceptance rates compared to other schools would suggest.

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very interesting experiment

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I think it more or less lines up with perceptions. Tufts is clearly the biggest surprise. The data came from plots like this:

Tufts acceptance rates for schools were consistently lower among applicants accepted to other T40s than I would have expected anyway.

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That’s great! And thanks for the link
I will pass it along to my brother who is a rising senior.

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Yeah, those bubble charts are definitely interesting and useful, although I misstated the data earlier before editing. I should have said, of the 828 Stanford applicants, of which 28.1% were admitted, a subset of 56 also applied to Tufts. The admit rate of this subset to Tufts was 58.9%.

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Keep in mind that colleges and universities compile comparison lists for a broad range of benchmarking purposes, very little of which has to do with undergraduate education or selectivity. We’re talking about things like endowment/financial resources, undergrad/grad enrollment numbers, existence of certain professional schools, etc. In Tufts case, part of the problem is that most colleges and universities tend to compare within their university membership/classification. Private AAU members tend to compare vs. other private AAU members, and until recently Tufts was a Carnegie Tier 1 research school but not an AAU member. There’s the odd exception, like Columbia comparing itself to Tufts, but not vice versa, but that doesn’t say much about comparing undergrad education/selectivity/prestige. A good example where there is a lot of mutual comparison ID between two schools: Northwestern and WashU. In addition to being mutual “peers”, both schools identified the following common peers, who have in turn also identified both of these schools. These are the latest IPEDs comparisons groups rather than the dated chart from the article:

Brandeis, Brown, CMU, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Princeton, Rice, UChicago, Rochester, USC, Vanderbilt. All very good schools, but there’s a fairly wide range of undergrad selectivity/perceived value here.

WashU is also mutually paired with Tulane and Case Western while NU is mutual peers with BU and NYU. WashU identified BU and NYU but neither school returned the favor. The same thing happened with Tulane and Case Western for NU. Both NU and WashU were snubbed by schools with a lower overall undergrad reputation in all 4 cases. It’s a good illustration of schools tracking different things when they assemble benchmarking peers.

With admission to the AAU, Tufts will likely see themselves mutually compared with more of these schools in the future.

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They will - particularly for elite banking, consulting, private equity, and the like. NYU Stern is an uncontested target school. Check out what communities like WSO say.

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In the overwhelming majority of fields, they are going to focus on the applicant – not the name of the school they attended. Employers are far more likely to focus on things like how closely the applicant’s work experience and college major/experience matches with the position they want to fill.

For example, the employer survey at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf compares responses from ~700 employers who hire new college grads. When evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions, from most to least important the average ranking was as follows. Experience in a work environment was by far the most important criteria on average, in all surveyed industries. College reputation was the least important criteria overall, although there were a few exceptions employers. For example, 2% more employers said they were far more likely to consider a grad from a elite college than a national known college, and 1% said they were far less likely to consider the elite college kid than the nationally known college kid.

  1. Internships
  2. Employment during college
  3. College major
  4. Volunteer experience
  5. Extracurricular activities
  6. Relevance of coursework
  7. College GPA
  8. College Reputation

Wall Street “elite” banking is one of the few exception industries that seems to emphasize college name. There are a variety of reasons for this, which go beyond the scope of the thread. There are also many industries in which they may place little emphasis on college name, but will recruit at a specific list of colleges where they are most likely to find employees that will fill the positions at a reasonable recruiting cost, rather than just randomly selecting colleges for recruiting. This does not mean the employer always favors recruiting at Stern over BC or Tufts. Instead it depends on a variety of different factors like what position they are trying to fill, employer’s location, and employer’s past history with the different colleges. Most colleges provide information about which companies recruit at the college and employment results for graduates.

An example career fair employer list for Tufts is at https://students.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/2016%20Career%20Fair%20Employer%20List%20-%20Job%20Type%20(3).pdf . The page at https://careers.tufts.edu/resources/2020-employment-destination-outcomes-by-major/ lists employment destinations by major among Tufts grads.

For example, among CS majors it looks like the most common employers were:

  1. Google – 7 students
  2. AB Initio – 6 students
  3. Microsoft – 5 students

Among economics majors, the most common employers were:

  1. Wayfair – 5 students
  2. JP Morgan – 3 students
  3. Fidelity / Morgan Stanley – 2 students

Among biology majors, the most common were:

  1. Mass General Hospital – 6 students
  2. Tufts Medical Center - 4 students
  3. Boston Children’s / Bringham Women’s – 3 students
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