The level of marketing from Tulane this year vs 4 yrs ago with my older daughter is not to be believed. They are pushing hard.
“Great alternative to the high stat student not interested in or getting into other Top 25 colleges” ??? @socaldad2002
From an unscientific standpoint: The only school which many Northwestern University students wish that they had been admitted to seems to be Stanford University.
Northwestern University is a Top 10 National University (US News #9 if I recall correctly) with the ninth largest endowment in the nation and an admit rate of well under 10% (about 8.6%). (Lots of 9s = #9, 9th, & 9%.)
Northwestern’s overlap schools are: Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, UPenn, Princeton and, to a lesser extent, WashUStL & Duke.
The campus is beautiful & the setting on the shores of Lake Michigan is spectacular.
The upscale suburban Evanston Campus vibe is serious, but friendly. Slightly more grad students (over 9,000) than undergrads (about 8,200) on the Evanston campus. Lots of very small classes.
Northwestern University’s Chicago campus (law & med schools) has one of the best settings in the entire nation in a very upscale area of Chicago across from the shores of Lake Michigan.
In Southern California:
Tons of kids going to CU Boulder, UW and Oregon. Tulane had an uptick a few years ago when some very social kids from our school went there. Their siblings followed a couple of years later so it stayed on the radar. I didn’t think about it until @socaldad2002 mentioned it but they are all Jewish. On a similar note, TCU is very popular with the Christian kids.
Fordham does a tremendous amount of marketing and has a high acceptance rate from our HS but very few kids apply.
In our area, Northwestern has always been one of the elusive elite colleges. Kids visit and love it but very few get accepted.
@lkg4answers : Slight correction to your post above = CU-Boulder. CSU is Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Very different atmospheres.
For anyone who has never been to Boulder, Colorado (home of CU = the University of Colorado), it is breathtakingly beautiful. Very upscale. Also, great sidetrips to some of the world’s best ski resorts & best ski towns. Gorgeous scenic mountain & mountain pass drive from Boulder to Blackhawk = a thriving casino town in the middle of nowhere with a beautiful mountain setting. But, Blackhawk is all casinos–about 18 of them in this tiny mountain resort town.
Thanks, I made the correction. I’m in CA and my fingers default to typing CSU/UC. 
My original post was hoping to move beyond the Northwestern type schools. Indiana Perdue and South Carolina. Tulane. Colby. College of Charleston are great examples.
These are top schools of course. But to me it was more about the level of times you see it mentioned here or in your schools or students friends etc. as opposed to the past.
Pittsburgh is a other great example in my area. It seems to me that that the great students who used to look at perhaps, Syracuse, now apply to Pitt as well and maybe even moreso.
This whole thing was meant to be anecdotal. Lol.
It also coincides well with the new president removing the Dean of Admissions and replacing him with someone whose background was in in admissions marketing. The new Dean of Admissions took office during the summer before the application rates shot up.
A copy of the final 3 sentences in Colby’s text on the Common App is below. I expect other highly selective private colleges will also have a strong increase in applications, if they implemented all of the policies below, while supporting the Common App.
At under 10% acceptance rate last year, in terms of selectivity, Colby has become a “Northwestern type school”.
@privatebanker: Agree that Pitt, College of Charleston, Colby are hot now. Recently hot schools–and maybe still–were/are Alabama, South Carolina & ASU.
I like Colby, but I do not view it as a “Northwestern type school”. Colby does a lot to pump up the number of applications which results in a lower admit rate. No app fee, no required standardized test scores, & no extra supplements combined with new facilities makes me want to apply. Is there an age limit ?
It needs to be said again - a school’s acceptance rate does not necessary mean a school is good or not. It just means that more kids applied. Sometimes that is only because of intense marketing or lower barriers to apply. Georgetown is a great example of a top school that does not feel the need to pursue more applications because its pool is already of the highest caliber. Because of all of the required custom essays they actually make it more difficult for applicants. The result is they get kids that really want to be there.
@doschicos I totally agree. Especially in New England. Colby is always popular among Prep schools and privates, especially. It’s a Nescac, gorgeous and selective.
I wouldn’t say it has the same ongoing national constituency as northwestern year in and year out, I don’t think that’s debatable.
Perhaps Colby dipped a few years a s is coming back to normal levels.
I also hope it’s clear my point is we are certainly discussing “top” schools.
My focus was more about the level of mentions and popularity at this moment in time.
I just hear Colby being mentioned a bit more outside of the normal circles and geography this year.
I was hoping that the thread wouldn’t devolve into how popular usc Notre dame uva UCLA and NYU are really popular this year type of thing.
Tulane is the quintessential “hot” school. University of Wisconsin seems to get more popular every year–it has so much going for it and seems like the preferred “safety school” for high stat kids. CalPoly San Luis Obispo is a really hot school in California–even though it’s a CSU, it can be harder to get into than some of the UCs, especially engineering (plus great location). I hear buzz about Colorado College–interesting alternative approach. University of Washington and even University of British Columbia are becoming popular options as the top UCs admissions rate become increasingly elite.
It our east coast private school: Tulane, WashU, Michigan, Wisconsin. Not really Northeastern at all. LACs have always been popular. Sudden interest in 7 Sisters and women applying to service academies.
Large, highly ranked NJ public - outside of the top prestige schools, Penn State always has 20-30 kids attend. Last year, for the first time, we had more go to Rutgers than Penn State. 199 kids out of about 425 applied to Rutgers.
I agree with previous poster that even more affluent families are looking at price. Rowan last year had double digits for the time I can remember.
Out of state, U of Del remains big. U of Miami and Clemson are also hot in her school.
Several students from our public high school attend NEU each year, and the merit aid is usually quite high. We know students who have been accepted to ivies, but ended up at NEU because the offer was too good to pass up. It’s definitely a hot destination for our high school.
Perhaps the high merit aid is why Northeastern received a C+ in the recent Forbes rating on financial health? That low rating certainly makes me pause.
@ProfSD That C+ rating is a combination of factors that don’t really speak to financial health in this combination, one of them indeed being that they offer merit. If you look at the methodology with Northeastern in mind:
- Endowment per student (15%) - With Northeastern's rise over the past decades, the endowment is lower than similarly ranked schools. Still, the school has had no issue building plenty of new facilities and hiring lots of professors.
- Yield (10%) - Since Northeastern is used as a safety by many ivy hopefuls, its yield is lower than many schools near it (which leads into #3)
- Percent of Students getting grants (7.5%) - Since Northeastern is used as a safety, they use merit to attract top students. The methodology implies this is bad for financial health but it seems to be more relevant for colleges struggling to fill their class, not a school with an 18% acceptance rate.
Most of the rest of the ranking is done with spending/student in various forms, which is indeed lower for Northeastern but hasn’t stopped many positive improvements around campus and within departments it seems.
The indicators they use I think likely work well for schools with lower rankings/high acceptance rates, but not for top schools. I think its also just that the factors on their own are weak indicators, and multiple weak indicators together can result in a weak rating even if there are reasons beyond finances for each individually. Some other notable low ranks I wouldn’t put stock in that give merit:
Tulane: B
Santa Clara: B
University of Miami: B-
RIT: B-
Fordham: C-
I would bet most everything I have that all of those schools stay open and thriving over the next few decades.
Tech schools seem to be commonly given low rankings as Stevens, Pratt, and Rose Hulman are all given B’s/C’s as well.
Hot schools here include Clemson, Elon, U South Carolina, College of Charleston, and Pitt.
UGA
After watching several “Decision Day” videos on YouTube (I did it so that you don’t have to!), here were some interesting takeaways (NOTE: Schools were public and from PA and NJ, some videos for MD, SC, NC–essentially, the mid-Atlantic, which yielded the most interesting results).
My earlier comment about FL schools being hot (pardon the pun) is confirmed. And it’s not so much UF or FSU. Nope. UCF. Nova Southeastern. Palm Beach Atlantic. Basically, any school in FL.
West Virginia University appeared a lot. This surprised me. Not a lot of kids in any given year, but always one or two in every class every year.
Alabama. Not a lot of kids, but always one or two in every class every year.
Virginia Tech is big. For VA residents, it has essentially become the realistic, attainable flagship since UVA and W & M are tough, tough admits. But VT is popular for OOS applicants as well.
Elon, Northeastern, College of Charleston, yep, yep, yep.
U of Maryland. Decent amount of kids going there.
CA decision day videos? All UC and CSU schools, which I totally get, but ZZZzzzzzz. Same for Texas. Quite literally almost no TX HS students leave the state (imagine a nightmare in which a thousand seventeen-year-olds tell you that they are attending Texas A&M or Texas Tech or Texas State or Texas Lutheran or North Texas or U of Texas-Austin to–wait for it–study biology). Again, I get it. Both states have so many schools that why would one look OOS? But this is why the mid-Atlantic states produced more interesting results (and made for more interesting viewing).
@hapworth. lol.