@ljberkow
Stats for the incoming freshman class of 2022 (starting this fall 2018):
"Oxford College
The following statistics are for the Oxford College first-year class, beginning in the fall of 2018.
Applications
Applied 16,620
Accepted 4,144
Enrolled 537
Admitted First-Year Class (25th – 75th percentile)
Admitted First-Year 3.71 - 3.97 (unweighted)
SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing: 680-750
SAT Math: 690-790
ACT: 31-34"
A typical Oxford freshman class in recent past years has about 490 enrolled. In the past 2 years, Oxford has had a big new science building with lots more classroom and lab space, hired more professors especially in STEM and a new dining hall. Hopefully, that’ll help with the additional 47 or so students.
https://oxfordspokesman.com/uncategorized/2017/02/20/an-insiders-guide-to-oxfords-new-dining-hall/
http://news.emory.edu/stories/2016/02/er_oxford_science_building_opening/campus.html
For the class starting 2015,
Emory College’s interquartile range for the ACT was 30-34.
Oxford College’s interquartile range for the ACT was 29-33. Oxford enrolled 488 students.
https://apply.emory.edu/pdf/AdmissionProfile2015.pdf
I’m not comparing SAT scores because there’s been a new SAT implemented since then.
But at least for admitted students, the ACT scores for the incoming Oxford freshman class are much higher than for 2015 and even higher than Emory College’s incoming class for 2015. This tells me that Oxford has been experiencing a higher quality applicant pool, which may have led to more being admitted.
@emorynavy
From my earlier post in this thread quoting from USNWR 2019’s publicly available explanation of changes to their rating system:
“Social mobility: New this year, we factored a school’s success at promoting social mobility by graduating students who received federal Pell Grants (those typically coming from households whose family incomes are less than $50,000 annually, though most Pell Grant money goes to students with a total family income below $20,000). See below the two measures that factor into social mobility.”
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
"New for 2019, acceptance rate (1.25 percent in last year’s ranking) has been completely removed from the ranking calculations to make room for the new social mobility indicators.
Also, we reduced the weight of the two remaining student excellence factors assessing the fall 2017 entering class – standardized tests and high school class standing."
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings
Are you sure you’re getting your information from the 2019 (most recent) version?
@BiffBrown
Selectivity includes, SAT/ACT scores and Class rank
So that and grad and retention rates need to be improved
@emorynavy
My point is that Emory would have to stop accepting so many Pell Grant recipients/low SES students if they want to improve SAT/ACT scores/class rank and improving grad and retention rates.
Consider Wash U’s 10%, U Chicago’s 11%, Hopkins’ 12%, Duke’s 13%, Vanderbilt’s 14% or Rice’s 14% Pell Grant percentage v. Emory’s 21%.
@BiffBrown
I agree, but it should be strategic. Don’t just accept less pull students. Figure out which type of pull student is more likely not to graduate and don’t accept those students. Also retention is an issue. Emory has to fix marketing to attract more students whom truly want to be here. I know as a student you see so many students with other schools shirts on. It used to bother me sir it doesn’t anymore. I’ve seen like 4 Gtown shirts today.
@bernie12
Get in on this.
@emorynavy : Why? Some goals aren’t just good for the rankings, some are just worthwhile goals. EmoryUP is trying to help with the graduation situation. I think most of the students Emory admits could and should graduate, but we need not compare ourselves to ND and VU because a bigger chunk of students at those schools get sorted into or choose “softer” majors. Emory’s students are highly concentrated in majors that grade lower than normal or have higher than normal attrition (mainly majors typically taken up by Big 3 pre-professional students. QTM is an exception, but is also unusually rigorous). Students on pre-prof. tracks are automatically at higher risk as they are more likely to get off at the last minute. For Emory to improve graduation outcomes, it must execute the various pillars of EmoryUP to ensure that students are successfully making progress towards a degree, no matter what it is. Students also need to be quickly assisted when they are considering switching from commonly sought after tracks. Numbers need to be put in context. If Emory wants to improve in that area, it may need to look at what Penn is doing. Penn’s breakdown/distribution of academic concentrations/interests overlaps far better with Emory’s than most schools. Again, I don’t care about the ranking. The ranking is fine. I’m sure it could eventually do better, but that is not a worthwhile focus. Improving students’ progress, outcomes, and overall satisfaction with and loyalty to Emory is a worthy goal regardless of how it would reflect in the rankings.
*I had a flop week and just got done with “throw away thursday” in my lab (I have meetings, R.I.P. seminars, and presentations ALL day). I don’t really wanna get on here and talk about some trashy old rankings. If you wanna talk about things that can legitimately help Emory improve its outcomes and student satisfaction, let us do that. I’m not gonna sit here and figure out how Emory can twist itself into a pretzel trying to enhance its already good rank. They keep changing the metrics and one school’s ranking is also dependent upon how other schools respond with respect to the metrics. Emory should look to improve certain metrics and infrastructure just because…not because it wants to game the rankings. “Admitting those qualified low income students that they know will graduate” ultimately results in: “Admit less low income students”…so that is really only a shortcut that could serve the purpose of enhancing a rank, and not actually improving the capabilities of the school to elevate students of all tax brackets to wherever the hell they wanna be.
@ljberkow
Could Emory’s increased enrollment for the 2018 incoming class at both Emory and Oxford be a strategic response to the impending endowment tax?
“Schools may increase enrollment – or give the appearance of doing so by changing the way they measure it – to reduce their endowment-per-student ratio to miss the tax threshold set by Congress, wrote economist Peter Hinrichs. Those colleges with low enrollment may reduce it in order to stay below 500 students to avoid the tax.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-17/schools-may-try-to-dodge-endowment-tax-cleveland-fed-study-says
@BiffBrown I really don’t think so. Since zero were admitted from waitlist, I believe there was some surprise in that grades and scores of those admitted were significantly stronger over the previous class.
If they really wanted to increase enrollment without taxing the infrastructure, what they would do would be what many schools are doing now which is to admit freshmen who study abroad first semester and then really begin in January or find other creative ways to accomplish that.
I suppose what I don’t understand is why there was a housing crunch last year, but not this year (when there are more freshmen and sophomores).
As far as retention goes, I would rather have them provide more Pell grants and take some risks than set out goals to match USNWR rankings. Don’t we want Emory to be about providing more opportunities than its peers? If they want to invest more in providing academic and life counseling to at-risk students, then great.
@ljberkow : Emory theoretically has the money to support all students, and if ECAS. Nursing, Oxford, and GBS do not, then they should be raising funds/resources to do so. Again, my guess is that is what they are trying to improve with EmoryUP, the tenets and progress of which current UGs can read if they wanna know about it.
Housing: I suspect they were able to just apply last year’s solution from the get-go (thus, it is just a norm. No need for attention from the Wheel for example). There was no scrambling involved this time to figure out where “overflow” students would go. I guarantee you that the traditionally allocated frosh dorms could not suddenly accommodate that class size unless they did something like selected less RA/SAs which I doubt happened.
No doubt Emory has the funding to support riskier students. I was suggesting making it more a point of emphasis. However, they still need to be comfortable living with that retention risk. What’s more important? Giving more kids a shot at Emory or worrying how some criteria might put them behind UCLA in a ranking system whose criteria is set by that bastion of upper education, US News?
As far as housing goes, it’s not as if they needed an complex algorithm. It probably just relates to management of current space available and could be as simple as letting fraternities know they must fill their houses (and encourage sophomore to move in) or risk losing them and I see a couple fraternities are now even sharing a house (I cringe at that very thought).
@ljberkow
No, I don’t want Emory taking that type of risk. Take Risk with research, that will produce more reward than a pell student fighting to be pre med. Pell percentage should hover around 15%, if they cant figure out a better algorithm for selecting such students. If Harvard, a school that has more money than the entire continent of Africa, only has 13-15% pell students a year, there’s no need for us to try and show off this metric and strain our budget.
The higher pell numbers for Emory has more to do with location than mission. The more Emory recruits from Atlanta( well GA in general) the more fin aid they will need to supply.
Yes I do wonder about the housing crunch, and why it didn’t happen this year.
@bernie12
I forgot that we only started having housing trouble when they knocked down that dorm to create space for new Duc.
@bernie12
In terms of support, Oxford’s Writing Center and Math Center are both excellent. The math center allows students to drop in with their questions and seek problem solving help not just from other undergrads but also from faculty including tenured faculty.
A lot of Oxford’s intro STEM classes have student mentors going over problem sets twice a week even for small sections of 25 and the professors are good about being available for office hours.
@emorynavy I don’t know Emory’s policy when it comes to enrollment percentages from Georgia or even if there is a policy.
@emorynavy Why are you talking about Georgia? That is so stupid! I hate to be blunt, but it is just stupid to say that. Georgia has one of the highest median household incomes in the south (yes! Higher than Florida). And Emory mostly recruits WEALTHY and solidly upper middle class people from metro Atlanta (even the URMs I met were like from the upper middle class enclaves of south Dekalb and increasingly Gwinnett) , much like UGA and Georgia Tech (most of the poorer folks I met were the few from outside of metro Atlanta OR from some large northern or mid-Atlantic city). We are talking households out of range for full Emory Advantage packages. Let that one go. BTW, it makes sense for Emory to recruit between 15-20% of GA students because GA is about the 8th largest state in the nation population wise. Also, I think like 3 of metro Atlanta’s 4 core counties (counties over 500k) are in the top 50-60 for most educated (% with bachelors or higher). One of them is in the top 20-30s. That was just uninformed. Given this, ecruitment ought to be heavy from GA, or Emory is doing a poor job competing for the overlap it has with Tech and UGA. The only reason it recruits less from Florida is because of bright futures keep them largely in-state.
You missed the mark on that one. Sorry. What Emory needs to do, is get its act together and finish the Scholarship endowment. That will make it compete better with peers regardless of where they can recruit. If they can get more scholarships for students abroad, even better as that could help Emory go head to head with very top schools who can afford to provide them aid. Emory has started a “lite” version of this that most of near peers haven’t. Stop proposing these non-sense short-cuts.
@BiffBrown : I am talking larger scale/more macro things. More like enhancing the ways through which students navigate through the college. Emory has not been the greatest (it is decent but could probably be much better) at facilitating that and people fall through the cracks. This mainly has to do with various advising and mentoring apparatuses which are probably under more pressure due to enrollment increases. They are already reconsidering PACE because it is a burden for many faculty and is so stretched that it may have limited value for students in its current form. Not sure what Oxford could do, but I am sure they could also work on the same things and are indeed already working on a more cohesive academic experience for its students which may help in the long run.
@bernie12
No, I didn’t miss the mark. you just missed the point. The “mission” part of my statement matters more than the “location” part. As it speaks to why Emory should reduce pell student percentage.
UGA and tech are public schools that’s an apples and orange comparison. Those schools barely if ever offer any aid to instate students.
@emorynavy No, it is not an apples and oranges comparison because they have similar median household/family incomes WELL OVER 100k which puts the average student out of range for either Emory Advantage package and certainly out of range for Pell. Get serious here. I don’t give a damned about it reducing Pell Grants to pursue some rankings. It shouldn’t be doing that, and you threw GA into the mix as if reducing recruitment from GA would achieve that goal. It won’t. Period. Perhaps your kind of nefarious plan to game the rankings and exclude more low income students should target students from TN or Mississippi. I am personally not down for any of this, but the facts are not on your side in supporting exclusion of more GA students helping to exclude more Pell Grant recipients. If UGA and Tech are on our tails in terms of the wealth of students they recruit with mostly GA students (UGA may still be 80% + GA students), do you seriously think Emory is recruiting poorer GA students on average than either of them (if anything, it skims off the students from the highest earning families in GA. To get to the 10-20% of GA students that enroll at Emory, you only need like 450 students total. It is not hard to ensure that 300-350 are at least close to or well over 100k. UGA has managed with like an incoming cohort of 5000 or so and Tech 2500 or so. Over 1/2 of those cohorts are over like 125k)? Come on. It would be so intellectually dishonest to answer that question with a yes. The few very low income students in Pell range who come to Emory are those so poor that Emory ends up being a bargain versus UGA or Tech. This is not that common.
And for the record, in my own demographic’s interest, I am one of those few for which it happened, and I don’t think it would help to exclude the few of us who fall into that range and are qualified to attend and do well at Emory, especially for those reasons. That is just a dirt poor, unethical idea especially since the school now espouses ideals of social justice in that and other some other contexts.
I feel as if such logic should be more easily applied to those outside of GA who fall in Pell Grant territory. If you want to be shamefully pragmatic, at least Emory wouldn’t have to pay full freight (minus their Pell Grant) for GA students as HOPE is picking up a small portion of the tab. Emory technically pays more to provide aid to EA qualifying students outside of GA.
*The only thing I will take back is GA being higher than Florida in terms of income…I am unsure but they are strikingly similar and metro Atlanta is likely better off than all large metros in Florida by a mile.