The article is paywalled, but you can create a free account.
The article examines how and why in the past 20 years Northeastern University has flourished while Syracuse University has floundered.
“In August, a front-page Wall Street Journal article on Syracuse’s struggles described a university trying to keep up with New York, Boston, and Northeastern Universities. A week later, a Harvard Business School case study landed in my inbox explaining how Northeastern went from a commuter school in the early 2000s to the university Syracuse is now chasing. Read back-to-back, the pieces tell the story of two universities whose leaders made very different bets at the start of this century. More than two decades later, Northeastern is playing offense, adding campuses in far-flung cities and seeing enrollment gains in an increasingly winner-take-all era for higher education. Meanwhile, Syracuse is playing defense, cutting programs and trying to persuade more of the students it admits to enroll.”
I like how he author refers to Northeastern “reverse engineering the rankings” as opposed to the more derogatory “gaming the rankings” that many Northeastern detractors prefer.
One thing that authors always unjustly shy away from in pieces like these though is that simple fact that for many schools geography is destiny in an era when students are drawn from increasingly (inter)national populations as opposed to local/regional students.
At the end of the day, SU is in Syracuse and not Boston. This is a huge factor in the minds of many applicants.
Well, consider this 1960 Life Magazine college review:
At the time, Rochester’s SAT scores were above places like Duke, Penn, Cal, or NYU.
There is more to that story than geography, including some loss of relative financial standing. But I do think being in Rochester and not in a more popular location is part of it.
Northeastern implemented the correct admissions strategy. The total number of high school graduates grew by over a million. In most colleges, the number of freshmen seats did not increase. Students now apply to more colleges than before on average. So for students aiming to attend college in or near Boston, Northeastern now makes it onto their target list. NU admits way more OOS & international students today than 30 years ago.
Some might argue that if the goal is to increase the denominator thereby making the % admitted look as if the school is more selective than one might think- yes, then it was a “correct” admissions strategy. But colleges which invested in actual academic rigor and depth instead of marketing strategies are also “correct”. And colleges which doubled down on core strengths in the arts are also “correct”.
Not every college needs to be- or wants to be- Northeastern.
For those that care about historical rankings. Syracuse was a top 40s (ranking above #50) during the late 90’s but then never ranked above 50 again. During this time, U.S. News only ranked #1 through roughly #50, and then defined Tier 2, Tier 3, & Tier 4 ranking cohorts.
Withdrawing from the prestigious AAU back in 2011 certainly didn’t help. Maintaining a Tier 2 ranking should be a priority; it would not benefit SU to fall out of the top 100 & it may not be able to break top 50 again due to more competing universities plus inconsistent methodologies.
Northeastern, on the other hand, has risen from Tier 4 to Tier 3 to Tier 2, and now a fairly consistent Tier 1 (top 50) since 2014. This is significant.
Also examining overall endowment trends: SU grew from $330M in 1995 to $2.5B in 2026; NU grew from $250M in 1995 to $2.1B in 2026.