I’m surprised they changed the ranking criteria so much that Wake fell 18 places this year. The upside is that it might be easier to get admitted in 2024.
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Hard to say - it’s still a school of those who can afford it and with a great name. There are several schools in this boat of - they’ve now gone from one level to another - if you really believe that.
I could see it not being good for admissions - but over time - not right away.
It will take a few years of people subbing in others instead of them.
At the same time, many of those that surpassed them are large publics and in theory it should be a different audience.
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If a kid was looking at, say, the U of Washington and Wake Forest… my advice would be the same this year as it was last year: fit and finances. The schools haven’t changed much, if at all, from one year to the next. It’s the ranking formula that changed…
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Pure speculation on my part, but if you were the kind of kid who picked out Wake because it has a great reputation for undergraduate education, and legitimately had it high on your list in a way you could demonstrate to Wake, I am not sure this is going to do much to change your mind about any of that. And those are the kids Wake was inclined to admit.
If you were the kind of kid who applied to Wake because it was ranked pretty high and you needed some less reachy schools but still wanted to be somewhere on the East Coast, maybe this will affect your reasoning. But those are the kids Wake was really trying to identify and avoid admitting.
So . . . I am not sure this will make much difference to many individual kids, even if say the application volume goes down a bit and the admit rate goes up a bit. But to the extent a few people of the second kind were basically fooling Wake into believing they were people of the first kind, and to the extent some of them now don’t bother–maybe it will help a little for people who were legit in the first group all alone.
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Agreed - as noted different audiences - but not everyone is as reasonable. But hopefully they are because while school selection can never be perfect, it’s dumb to go to a school that clearly wouldn’t be right for someone.
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its ridiculous that wake could fall by 18 places in a year… it is not the school that has changed it is clearly the formula for ranking that values public institutions and disvalues private universities with small classes. all part of the agenda toward diversity rather than true excellence.
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So diversity and true excellence are mutually exclusive?
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not at all- but the issue is that us news seems to value one over the other. no longer valuing small class sizes, alumni giving or tenured professors reduces the quality of small, private schoolt
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Where is all the outrange on the other rankings. They died a quick death 
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Actually, it does not. USNWR in fact has no ability to reduce (or improve) the quality of any school.
Believe it or not, Wake Forest has the same quality this week as it had last week.
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actually! it does reduce the quality as people (unfortunately) do take stock from the rankings and seeing public universities all shoot up, while the private schools drop makes this clear
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My son got into a good flagship state school as well as a comparable private school (not Wake). In the end, we couldn’t justify the 200k more for an equal school with similar earnings potential. We would have paid the 200k for a Duke, Stanford, or Ivy because those colleges do increase lifetime earnings on average.
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Cannot emphasize this point enough. If the extra 200K will be in any way a stretch for a student or family (needing to take on educational debt, going into retirement savings, deferring other important financial goals), the vast majority of students in this category will be better served by going to their state school. We sent one child to Wake and two other children to one of our state universities and can say with certitude that all three children received comparable education, support and services, with our sons at state university receiving better career planning support than our daughter at Wake.
At the end of the day our daughter is fine (killing it in her career at the #1 firm in her field, engaged to a great guy she met at Wake), but her initial career success was largely through our family connections, and we were fortunate not to have to make financial sacrifices to send her to Wake.
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I find rankings as useless as an inflatable dart board.
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This sucks. As a Wake alum who chose Wake over Michigan, this stuff kind of makes me wish I had gone to Michigan.
I realize this is one ranking, and rankings, in general, are mostly subjective and the product of ego games, but this still sucks.
Hopefully, Wake can get back to its rightful place as a top 30 undergrad institution.
But you are right this is just an ego game!
Like, the value of your actual education has not changed. I actually doubt that among anyone who matters, the perceived value of your education has changed.
So the only reason I can see why you would even care is that it would make you feel better if Wake Forest was ranked higher by this particular magazine. But that is a game you can simply decide not to play, and nothing bad will happen to you if you don’t play.
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You’re right! And my education at Wake, and my career since, has been fantastic. My Wake experience and degree have served me well. I’m grateful.
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I suppose it’s just a bit annoying to see Michigan and Wake seemingly going in different directions, in terms of rankings. I paid a lot to go to Wake, and while I understand it IS just an ego thing, I struggled with choosing between Wake and Michigan, so I guess this just makes it a bit more personal for me.
But, I digress. Both are fantastic universities. I just want Wake to get the recognition it deserves.
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The state schools that focus on stem that have big engineering programs especially level 1 research schools are skyrocketing in the rankings. Smaller, private schools that do not focus on engineering or stem will likely struggle with these new rankings. Wake also got dinged for lack of economic diversity and lack of first GEN students. Although they said in a statement they were not going to chase rankings, they created a separate EA for first students. A move in the right direction for sure.
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If it helps at all, I applied to Michigan and almost went there for college, but my S24 applied to Wake Forest and not Michigan at all. And I fully supported that decision because he is really prioritizing things like teaching excellence and exploratory curriculums where he will be able to find what really makes sense for him. He visited UVA just to see if that might appeal to him at all, but nope, he just doesn’t want that sort of big public experience.
And I had a lot of friends go to Michigan, and in retrospect I think I kinda dodged a bullet. Not that it isn’t a great research university, but some of them did feel like they were just a number, some did ultimately not love their major, and so on.
So these rankings are really de-emphasizing things I very much care about. And I personally agree it is maybe not great from the perspective of helping kids making college choices that is happening. But I suspect this will maybe get pulled back a bit as more people start understanding those same points.
Interestingly, I think of my friends who went to Michigan for college and actually were pretty happy with that choice, most of them were engineers. As one close friend put it, he wanted to go somewhere with the biggest and best toys to play with (I also had a close friend go to Michigan for law who loved that, but that is VERY different from college).
So I actually think it is a good thing to communicate to engineering kids specifically that these public engineering powerhouses are well worth considering regardless of where they fall in some generic rankings.
But then that is totally irrelevant to a kid like mine who has zero interest in engineering.
So . . . generic rankings are just a bad idea. Different colleges make the most sense for different kids.
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