I think you may be misunderstanding my suggestion. I am not suggesting colleges like Wake Forest or Kenyon are competing for every possible high need/high number college applicant. I am pointing out they only have the financial resources necessarily to compete for some, and that wealthier colleges like Duke have the financial resources to compete for more.
This is therefore a fundamental problem for Wake Forest when it comes to rankings adopting these measures as larger factors. And Kenyon too, which dropped from 31 to 39 in the US News LAC rankings after the methodology change.
Great research here. I might be willing to venture a small bet, without actually looking up their operating revenue reports, that the other private universities whose rankings fell most precipitously this year with the new methodology also rely on tuition for high percentages of overall revenues.
Tulane, Wake, Tufts, Villanova, Pepperdine, SMU all took steep drops. Commonalities: (1) all offer graduate programs but are not known as the sort of research powerhouses pulling in tons of federal grant money that the publics and super elites in the top 50 are, (2) none of them have anywhere near the $10B+ endowments that the other privates toward the top of the rankings- all possess, and (3) all of them are perceived as “rich kid schools,” where it’s always felt, at least anecdotally, as though there was an outsized percentage of full pay kids from 1%'er families*. If they’re all in a similar boat of just not being able to take as many Pell eligible students as they may like to, then it’s no wonder if they all got punched pretty hard by USNWR elevating stats relating to institutional missions of socioeconomic mobility.
Doesn’t mean anything in regards to the education each of them offer to students who end up at those universities, of course.
*Yes, I know the Ivies and Duke and most of the rest of the uberselective schools also share this well-earned stereotype, but with their giant endowments it doesn’t feel like there’s a leg up for kids who apply Early Decision as a signal to the school that they don’t care about financial aid packages. Princeton offering a free education to anyone from a family with income under $100k isn’t going to transform the campus into a majority middle class place overnight, but that sort of thing does have an impact on overall mix.
Of course if as an individual you cannot afford one of those colleges but can afford another good college and so choose that other good college instead, great, that is perfectly reasonable.
But you didn’t need US News to tell you to do that. You just needed to know your actual costs of attendance for comparison purpose.
So I am skeptical moving methodologies in this direction is actually going to provide meaningful help when it comes to college choice. Like, personally, I would prefer information about what different colleges offer, their pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, and so on independent from cost issues, and then I will use my own actual costs to decide what makes sense for me among the colleges I like for those other reasons.
Yeah, Duke was not actually the best example for this purpose. If you go back to that article about Freshman Pell share where Wake Forest had dropped from 14% to 10%, Princeton had gone up from 11% to 18%. Obviously this still doesn’t include 82% of the class at Princeton, but for sure one of the things it has been doing with its massive per capita endowment is compete very effectively for the low-to-middle income students it wants with incredibly generous need-based aid. And Wake Forest and similar schools cannot possibly outbid Princeton and similar schools when it comes to something like that.
And obviously it is not just Princeton. Yale went from 13% to 21%. Hopkins went from 12% to 20%. Even WUSTL went from 6% to 16%. WUSTL also just has a lot more money than Wake Forest. And there are a bunch of wealthy LACs in addition to these wealthy universities.
I think where the rankings hurt the schools is the future - you use it to mark your space in the echelon, in society - which is marketing for - and now kids want to come here.
Everyone knows - a great football coach is a great football coach - Nick Saban could have gone from 11-0 one year to 5-6, but he would still be a great football coach.
For those kids who excel at the schools listed - and I’ll add WUSTL and Vandy to this list - Tulane, Wake, Tufts, Villanova, Pepperdine, SMU - if they had the world class experiences and outcomes - they know - these schools are legit and nothing is different about them in 2024 vs. 2023.
But for the schools - for the kids building lists 3 and 5 and 10 years from now - perhaps that’s the danger of having a lower rank.
I think that is a very interesting question. Big picture, a lot of solid publics, and also colleges with more of an engineering and/or business focus, moved up. A lot of prominent but not super-wealthy privates, particularly those with less of an engineering and/or business focus, moved down.
But are these really the same markets anyway? Maybe, sometimes, but I am not sure a lot of people who, say, were not interested in being one of the 5% or so OOS students at Florida and instead were happy being full pay at NYU or Wake Forest instead are now going to change their minds about that because of US News.
But we shall see. And the one thing I do think could happen is maybe a few more Florida in-state kids will go with Florida instead of paying a lot more for NYU or whatever. Maybe.
I’m following this conversation with interest because I also have a high-achieving, Pell-eligible, genuinely low-income kid (visible minority) and I’m trying to game the heck out of the statistics to figure out what school might accept my high-school junior next year.
Questbridge’s results improved in 2023. They reported in December that 2,242 our of 6,683 National College Match finalists for 2023 had been “matched,” which is 33.55%. That left 4,441 finalists without a match going into the regular-decision round. In the past, Questbridge has reported/claimed that around 40 percent of the left-over finalists get accepted during the regular-decision round using their Questbridge application. So that would be another 1,776 out of the original pool of finalists who got accepted via Questbridge via R.D. in 2023, give or take. Add them together: between the matches and the RDs, approx. 4,018 finalists out of 6,683 were accepted one way or another via Questbridge in 2023. That’s a success rate of about 60 percent via the two routes.
I’m also thinking that Questbridge makes even more sense now for minority kids due to the affirmative-action situation.
So Questbridge seems very worth it. Especially since the finalists are free to apply via Common App to other, non-QB schools if they go to the R.D. round.
Now I just have to see if my kid gets accepted for Questbridge in the first place!!!
And that’s the other thing about Questbridge acceptance rates…when we’re talking about 33 or 25%, we’re talking about the kids who get chosen as finalists, which is already a very selective process. I think Questbridge is an amazing and important program…but it’s definitely not just an automatic full ride for high stats low income kids.
Exactly…and most of those who become finalists have EFC/SAI of zero (and SAIs now go to -1500, so I expect we will see finalist admit rate differences between SAI of zero and -1500 too).
I don’t think race is part of QB’s selection criteria to move to finalist. I expect there are more Pell eligible college applicants that are White/Asian than URM, but haven never seen the breakdown of QB by race. I know we can’t talk about race on CC outside of the race thread, but my point is that colleges can use QB more as a proxy for limited-income students than for URMs.
Obviously a dramatic fall is due to newer Woke criteria. Diversity is always good for schools but counting how many minorities rather than focusing on how minorities feel at a particular school is myopic. My high school was “diverse” but the black kids and white kids tended to self segregate. I’d rather my black kids have an environment where they are in a distinct minority but the “culture” of the student body didn’t focus on ethic background than at a college where the minorities mainly hung out with the same ethnic group.
Just for the record, the US News rankings do not have a measure of ethnic diversity.
Without seeing all the unlocked scores this is a bit speculative, but Wake Forest appears to have not done well in the measures involving Pell Grant recipients and first-gens (2024 rankings), and was not helped much by dropping FGs and just looking at PGs (2025 rankings).
Incidentally, Wake Forest actually got more applications last cycle (18735) than it did the prior cycle (17500), before the US News rankings drop. But apparently the acceptance rate was the same (22%), which may imply Wake Forest was expecting a slight yield decrease (it was 36.7% the prior cycle). I have not seen that number yet, however, for the latest cycle.
In your opinion, are the types of students who apply to Wake also applying to the big southern state flagships and are many of them likely to choose the latter because of the sports, vibe, etc. Or are they applicants who would apply to mostly private schools like Emory or Tulane. Hard to generalize, I know, just trying to get an idea about the kind of kids who end up choosing Wake over others.
But my S24 applied to Wake without that being true, though, because he was not interested in large publics generally, and not any school that felt too Southern to him either. So, like, he visited then scratched UVA from his list, but liked William & Mary and Wake. But otherwise none of his schools were that far south.
A close friend’s D24 is actually at Wake after applying ED2. She was more interested in publics and I believe her favorite was actually Michigan, but she did not get in EA. She was also looking mostly northern–I remember her liking Miami (OH) for example.
My point is just I think Wake has an appeal that can crossover to kids who are not necessarily looking for the Big Southern experience. But I am sure it can also appeal to kids who are considering that. So a sort of crossroads in that sense.
Fwiw in my sample of 2 kids admitted two years ago, DS chose UF over Wake. He applied bc it had some of the feeling of the large publics he liked but in the end, he wanted the large public. A friend’s daughter got into Wake and UF (and a bunch of other places, including St Andrews) and she chose Wake. My DD has now applied ED to Wake. If she doesn’t get in, her list is mostly mid-size privates that balance liberal arts and business options. This is my long way of saying I think Wake can wind up on kids’ lists for different reasons bc it straddles some vibes. Not sure how it’s trending these days but anecdotally it doesn’t seem less popular in the NE.
Btw, UF’s entering class is now 20% OOS, and both my son and the friend were OOS, tho with family connections to Florida (DS got grandparent tuition waiver). DS has a big group of friends at UF from the NE and none of them had Florida family connections.
By the way, both of these kids really fit a profile. Both good students, sporty, social, kinda preppy, parents all have postgrad degrees and value education . . . very much a recipe for considering Wake in my circles.
In fact, Wake is the only visit where we actually randomly ran into a friend of S24, an older kid who had been on one of his teams.
So I guess my point is it isn’t very exceptional to be looking at Wake in my circles if you fit a certain profile. Of course Duke is the same, and UNC too.
Whereas I don’t actually know anyone who applied to, say, UGA. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen anywhere in my community, but if so I didn’t know about it. But I do think a lot of the kids up here have a sort of mental zone that extends down to NC, but no farther.
All this was really apparent when we visited Wake, incidentally. I don’t think we visited another school where the information session seemed to have so many kids who seemed to fit a certain type. But they were clearly from all over, NC itself, farther South, North, Californians, and so on.
In that sense I think it is very much a national school, but also has a strong brand that attracts kids of certain types. And I am sure there is still plenty of diversity in a variety of ways, but that particular appeal was very apparent (and included my S24).
I could see northern kids applying to WF and big southern schools, but I’d say in-state and surround the crossover is more privates, and preferred by kids that don’t want a large state school experience.
Yeah, I think the medium size, the focus on undergrad education, developing close professor relationships . . . all that is a big part of the Wake pitch. But it also has real sports.
Again, I can see that overlapping with people who apply to various publics, indeed I know it does, and they won’t always pick Wake.
But given all that, it is also going to be on lists of kids applying to, say, mixes of private universities and LACs, maybe few if any publics.