<p>For those who a curious how "selective" Tufts (and other schools) were in "prehistoric times" (i.e. before the advent of the Internet, the PC, and the US News College Rankings) the following link has application, acceptance and mean SAT scores for 50 schools.</p>
<p>LIFE</a> - Google Books</p>
I love the first sentence (emphasis added):
Puts some of those “How many colleges should I apply to?” threads in a bit of a different light, eh?
Yale $2,550 a year. Good times.
I think the comments on the individual schools are fascinating as they touch on the culture of each school, many of which were still all male…
@dfbdfb - If you scroll back to the beginning of the article there are some interesting paragraphs that set the context of the times (post war college boom).
If I remember correctly you are in academia, so you might like this one…
Assumptions are often made regarding the historic strength of the Ivy League, but in 1960 their members were fairly scattered (among other possible observations):
By SAT Score Tiers
Amherst
Carleton
Columbia
Harvard
Haverford
Princeton
Reed
Rice
Swarthmore
Williams
Yale
Brandeis
Brown
Chicago
Cornell
Dartmouth
Hamilton
JHU
Lehigh
Oberlin
Rochester
Stanford
Antioch
Bowdoin
Duke
Kenyon
Michigan
Middlebury
Northwestern
Penn
Iowa
Tufts
Union
UC-Berkeley
Sewanee
Colgate
Denison
Grinnell
Knox
Lawrence
Muhlenberg
Occidental
Colorado
Beloit
NYU
Pitt
SMU
Syracuse
Virginia
Vanderbilt
@merc81 - I actually entered all of the SAT data into a spreadsheet and calculated the average math+verbal score and compared it to today (this was a couple of years ago). The results were very interesting, but my disk drive bit the dust before I could post it… A couple of schools have risen quite a bit, while some have fallen quite a bit.
The admissions data is also interesting. The NESCAC Schools had lower acceptance rates than the Ivy Schools.
Go NESCAC!
Thanks a lot for the link, @Mastadon.
@Mastadon This is likely a function of changing fashions. Students today seem to believe that a big school is better able to offer opportunities. When I was a kid, students believed that the close intimate attention received at a small school was more valuable. Back in the 1960s cities were a horrible place that people were fleeing. Today most students seem to want to be in a city. These changes in selectivity have nothing to do with a school’s quality, but rather changes in tastes.
@urbanslaughter - I am not sure that I would go as far as to say “nothing”, but I would agree that the acceptance rate is an indicator of popularity and size, not quality. Popularity is driven in a large part by demographics and exposure (i.e. marketing).
On the demographics side, the migration (of all ages) back into the city and the growing popularity of “profession oriented” undergrad degrees (first business and now engineering) have all impacted popularity.
In my day, Somerville was the car theft capital of the nation and the home of the infamous Winter Hill Gang.
More recently it is one of the “most hip” cities in the nation and the home of Barrack Obama - who actually lived in Winter Hill when he attended law school at Harvard. First Somerville and now Medford are among the most desirable places in Massachusetts for young people to live.
In my day the liberal arts school had a lower acceptance rate than engineering.
More recently, the engineering school has had a lower acceptance rate than liberal arts.
Among the population of families that make their living in academia, the popularity of smaller schools remains strong. Children of academics (which are plentiful in New England) often choose NESCAC schools over the Ivy League. But over time, those families have become a smaller percentage of the overall college-bound population.
On the exposure side, research is more visible than teaching, and in general bigger is better. Ivy league schools have unsurpassed marketing budgets and it has been interesting to watch them morph into a joint marketing consortium over last few decades. First there was Harvard, then there was HYP, then there was the Ivy League.
With division 3 sports and a commitment to teaching, I believe that NESCAC schools offer a range of academic experiences that rival or exceed the offerings of the Ivy League.
Maybe we should form a joint marketing consortium as well…
In colleges, as in other aspects, the nation appears to have moved (partially) away from Small is Beautiful (as a book and a philosophy) – and perhaps Walden Two as well – and toward Super Size Me.