I see parallels between UTulsa and Northeastern. Both sought to raise their national profiles and become R1 universities and climb the rankings. It worked for Northeastern; it failed for UTulsa. Better leadership at Northeastern? Northeastern did it with only a fraction of the endowment per student compared to UTulsa. Of course, Tulsa is not Boston.
I was searching for something else and came across this article from last year on the UTulsa website. A puff piece that doesn’t match the information provided in the Chronicle article.
Part of it, is, at least historically, SMU (when it was “tonier” and Rice - those student fallbacks were a school like Tulsa - so while it’s focused on the Southwest states, it does make sense - how they spun that story.
I don’t have access to the Fiske Guide but someone noted recently that for Tulsa, it lists SMU and Rice as other schools applied to or whatever the actual question is.
So it makes sense their PR machine would work that way. But if a quarter of its students are NMSF or higher and I don’t know if it’ll be the same this year - but you’d assume a more national reach.
But no doubt Boston as a market is attractive - but location alone doesn’t create a shift like Northeastern has done. There’s got to be aggressive and proper decision making too.
Northeastern was already WAY bigger to begin with, and had a unique-ish co-op program going for it for 100 years. And as you say, Boston is no Tulsa. Northeastern also started on this path, what, 25 years ago?
Truthfully, until about 6 weeks ago, I didn’t know 1 single thing about the University of Tulsa, its size, or what it is known for, and I know more about colleges than 99.8% of Americans. If they are trying to be northeastern, they need to keep at it another 20 years and figure out how to make OK more attractive to more people in MORE areas that are full pay.
Also, I wonder how much the changing in ranking criteria matters here.
When Northeastern started playing ranking games, my recall is that “peer reputation” mattered a lot. They played a PR game and upped their reputation by convincing other schools they were impressive. I think they literally sent marketing materials. That was very cheap to play the game, at least it was WAY WAY cheaper than lots of scholarships, for example.
I don’t remember all the ways they initially did it, but lots have changed, and Tulsa (and others) are playing a different game regardless.
I think this is a major factor. My D26 is exactly the kind of kid that should find Tulsa appealing (wants small school w/ minimal Greek life, from a neighboring state, has stats to get a large merit scholarship), and we have visited campus twice. But man, living in Oklahoma is just a tough sell for her.
Not unique in having curricula built around co-ops. Drexel and Cincinnati also have that.
Tulsa may have been trying to follow the USC playbook by offering big NM-based scholarships to raise its student profile (USC’s NM-based scholarships are no longer as big since it has succeeded in becoming a desired school for many high end students, unlike a few decades ago). But it took more than a few years for that to work at USC.
I think one of the lessons is that there is no playbook. Every college needs to figure out what space it occupies in the marketplace and where the movement (if there’s going to be expansion, more funding for research, more star faculty, etc.) is likely or possible. Remember when NYU was a commuter school for kids too dumb to get into Fordham, Columbia or Hunter?
This is important to - because all the kids/adults that use US News by major, are also being fooled - by exactly what you just brought up - peer institutions, etc. There’s literally no data used in the major ranking, nor anything corporate related - those hiring.
Here’s their dept methodology so when you choose x school fit x major because US News says it great - not really. It’s well known and well thought of because society has taught us and we walk in with preconceived notions, true or not Yet schools at the top run with it.
“U.S. News sent peer assessment surveys to academics in each discipline asking them to rate the overall academic quality of other schools’ doctoral programs on a 5-point scale: 5 (outstanding), 4 (strong), 3 (good), 2 (adequate) or 1 (marginal). Those unfamiliar with a particular school’s programs were asked to select “don’t know.” Responses of “don’t know” counted neither for nor against a school.”
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that people are being “fooled”.
Professors at other institutions are going to rate Yale’s history department as outstanding because they’ve had students at their own institutions, working on a doctorate in history, who got a BA from Yale. And even if they can’t name every single professor in the department, they have read the work, or attended a symposium, or noticed who got a Pulitzer last year for a historical work. And over time- the perception (hey, Yale seems really strong in history) gets reinforced by reality (the students we’ve accepted from Yale for our doctoral program, over the last two decades have been outstanding).
Moreover, you’re going to have to work really, really hard to find someone in academia who actually “knows stuff” (not the guy at your dry cleaners who thinks anyone who doesn’t study nursing or accounting is an idiot) who is going to say “Yale’s history department is mediocre”.
The Caveat Emptor warning comes into play when a student (or family) doesn’t actually “value” the academic reputation. They want the kid’s ticket punched– a Bachelor’s degree in something or other- and they want the kid to meet “people like us” to launch into the adulthood they aspire to for their kid. So maybe Yale is the wrong place for the kid. Majoring in history there (or another 25 things) is going to be a HELLUVA lot of work if all the kid wants to do is to join a frat or secret society and play beer pong. So do your homework. Make sure the “reputation” is aligned with what your kid actually wants out of his or her education.
Don’t go to Swarthmore if the kid wants to phone it in. The place has an excellent reputation for academic rigor- and it is well deserved. If you aren’t looking for rigor, it’s the wrong place.
why I said “ish” — coops are not very common. there are a few obviously. “ish” may have been doing too much heavy listing.
I think the coop thing used to be seen as a negative - like a trade school. No school consider it a point of pride. That is the northeastern’s doing IMO.
Yes and no. Even the Profs have those schools embedded in their pre belief - it’s a societal norm. They likely wished they had gone to the top schools.
They are not there day after day.
Personally, I’d want metrics is solely the point. But US News has made itself the standard.
That’s why we saw schools get defensive the other year when they changed the methodology. Wake, Tulane, Wash U didn’t go from good to not as good overnight. Unless you put all your faith in US News…then they did.
What do the students who got admitted with the biggest hook boosts (e.g. huge development relation) do? The same can be said at any college that has a “highly rigorous” reputation, but where some students get admitted with major hook boosts.
I mean, I’ve been tapped to fill out some of these surveys, and I’m in a program without a graduate degree—heck, for my field (linguistics), we don’t have an undergrad degree, and we barely have a minor, and so I’m not going to have a student with an undergrad degree from Yale or anywhere else in my classes.
And so yeah, the obvious ones are going to be highly ranked (Penn, Stanford, MIT, Washington, OSU), but what about what one might call the not-so-obvious tier (which, for linguistics, includes Michigan State and, yes, Yale)? Or what about the places that are really amazingly top-tier for a student who is interested in one specific subfield but maybe not as much for the discipline in its entire breadth (like Harvard and Hofstra)? And what about the programs that have a good undergrad reputation but don’t have the research intensity of a PhD-granting program (e.g., BYU and Macalester and FIU) or that have some spectacular faculty but don’t really have a lot of them so if one or two people leave it’s gonna be difficult (like UAF or Pitzer)? And on what basis am I giving these judgments, anyway?
I know you want metrics. But you want who graduated from which major earning how much money after five years. And when folks explain to you that in Classics- for example- this is a terrible metric of educational quality- you respond that you don’t know ANYONE who has ever studied Classics, so your point still stands.
Families will use whichever metrics are meaningful to THEM. And if a family in California knows nothing about Middlebury or Williams- two schools that the HS guidance counselor has suggested exploring- knowing their “rank”, however specious you believe it to be, is a helpful starting point. Not the be-all and end-all. But certainly learning that “reputationally” these are solid academic institutions- is a helpful way to begin.
We help kids find colleges with no snow, lots of snow, no humidity, tons of humidity, many frats, no frats. Certainly a metric which “kinda sorta” gets at actual academics shouldn’t get shunted away. Kid- you want Econ? You can study it at virtually every college in America. But Econ at U Chicago, MIT, Berkeley is substantively different from econ at some other institutions. You say you don’t care? Terrific. You don’t want a program that will require you to take Calculus? Terrific. You only want a program which will give you credit for the AP Stats course you took in HS? Terrific. Different strokes for different folks. But studying econ in a quantitatively rigorous manner, learning to manipulate and then interpret huge datasets (US census data, employment tax information for France from the launch of the Euro to today, GDP for the EU since Brexit) is a very different experience than learning the content rich/analytically poor version of econ taught at some colleges. And leads to different outcomes, even if those outcomes don’t result in a bigger salary after however many years.
And if “reputation” helps a family suss that out- seems like a useful tool to me.