I always thought that graduation rates, more than most other factors, might be dragging Tulane down. Since Katrina, Tulane took a real hit on 6 year graduation rates, and USNWR values this pretty highly. I forget the exact percentage it plays into the final calculation, but unlike admission rate (1.25%) it is significant. Much more than 1.25%. Northwesty analyzes this quite well in this thread that NJDad68 recalled: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tulane-university/1684431-rankings-p1.html Katrina was in 2005, so any class that entered in the couple of years before that took a hit on graduation rates as people decided to transfer rather than stick it out, and even the next class or two probably suffered to some extent. As USNWR says, this years rankings take into account the classes that began in 2004-2007. In Tulane’s case, the 2005 cohort was not just bad, it was an N/A. It really hurt. Anyway, the 2007 cohort was 76%. But we can now see the 6 year rates improving dramatically. The 2008 cohort, which will be counted in the rankings coming up, was 83%. It will be interesting to see what kind of difference that makes, and of course if Tulane sees similar improvements in the next 2-3 years as the 2005-7 numbers fade away, the impact should be significant.
Another factor that is heavily weighted is peer assessment. This could still be Katrina affected, because so much of the publicity at that time was about Tulane closing (it was only closed for a semester, which was a miracle in itself, but there were an amazing number of people that thought the school was still closed 2 years later. There just wasn’t the same kind of national publicity about it reopening so quickly). Also, there was a lot of sturm and drang, especially within academia, when Tulane closed several departments completely such as civil, mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science. They also closed a number of Ph.D. programs. I think this probably hit Tulane hard in the PR sense, although for undergraduates not in those majors the reorganization has proven to be a serious improvement in their experience, since there are more resources for the remaining programs and more focus on them as well.
Also along similar psychological lines, Tulane is a great research institution but in many areas is far more undergraduate oriented than graduate school centric. That would be in contrast to most of the top 50 schools on the list. I think that despite the fact that this USNWR survey is supposed to be an assessment of undergraduate reputation, I would be shocked if the people doing the assessment are able to separate out one from the other. And as I think nearly everyone that has gone to graduate school would tell you (not med, law or MBA but graduate school. Those are professional schools), undergrad and grad school are totally different. Like night and day. So I think that Tulane might suffer to some degree in this category, more than I think an objective and honest assessment of the undergraduate experience would indicate that it should.
It’s a bit odd, because Tulane undergrads do spectacularly when applying to the top grad schools (and professional schools) precisely because they have such a strong undergraduate experience, especially with a great many of them doing high level research and a thesis. There is a bit of a disconnect there, but nonetheless I think it exists when these people fill out the surveys. Also these surveys have been shown to have regional biases, and Tulane’s relatively isolated location (relative to other major schools that is) is certainly a contrast to the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic and California. Obviously there are other schools that are also a bit alone out there, such as Michigan, but its sheer size and the amount of publicity it gets both academically and non-academically easily overcomes that. Plus of course UM has extensive graduate programs in virtually every field.
Then you get into factors like the endowment, which is healthy at Tulane (about $1 billion) compared to national averages but is well short of schools like WUSTL, Duke, Vandy, so on and so forth. The very schools it should be somewhat closer to in the rankings. I won’t go into all the issues associated with getting the endowment up. Naturally the school is trying to do exactly that. But it is a factor, although again I am being lazy and not looking up the exact weighting USNWR gives to that.
So, my apologies for the dissertation. You got me thinking about this in some detail after not thinking about it so much for awhile. The bottom line is, rankings be damned, Tulane is not just surviving but thriving. And while there is a human side that likes the affirmation that seeing a better ranking would (falsely) give, we have to hold on to the logic and experience that tells us that these rankings are, in fact, just so much nonsense that really tell students little about what it is to be an undergraduate at Harvard vs. Notre Dame vs. UC-Irvine vs. Tulane vs. Alabama vs. you name the school. Unless, by some miracle, your own personal value system exactly or nearly matches the way USNWR looks at the world of undergraduate institutions. I would hope no one is that shallow.
Whew!
b**