Has Wesleyan fallen behind?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Wesleyan University
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@harvard2021 you’re welcome. And congrats on the money at both schools. No small feat. It’s awesome you have those options. Both are great schools. As @keenspoon also said, they are just very different schools, but not so much from an academic perspective. much more from a location, tradition, focus and “feel.”

Probably a good exercise is to imagine your “ideal” college experience.

If it’s a kind of Yale/Princeton/Oxford/Cambridge quiet, calm, fields and hills, tea with professor kind of experience, Wes is the place to go.

If it’s more an NYU, UCLA, Penn, Columbia, big city university, subway to a concert, students from all over the globe experience, USC is the way to go.

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And there are people who think USC is a football school. What are you going to do? There are also people who’ve never heard of Williams or Middlebury or Pomona, or if they have, are not even remotely aware how hard those schools are to get into.

The people who matter will know.

And keep in mind, when people talk about Wesleyan being relatively poor, we’re talking about a growing endowment with large gifts expected on the horizon, and it’s close to $900 million for 2900 kids. The only context in which Wes is “poor” is by comparison to its Bill Gates peers Williams, Amherst, Middlebury and Pomona, whose endowments are Ivy-League ridiculously high.

Amherst and Williams, and to a lesser extent, Middlebury, have done a great job with marketing themselves in the past few years. No doubt, they are indeed wonderful institutions. But 5 or 10 years ago, nobody in the West knew much about them. That kind of thing can change in a hurry. A lot of people didn’t know much about Davidson before Steph Curry either. Wesleyan’s name is popping out more … Hamilton helps.

USC has been on a mission to get the word out that it’s a highly academic school, after years of a “University of Spoiled Children”, “Couldn’t get into UCLA” and “Jack Factory” image. I can honestly tell you that, when I was applying to school, nobody picked USC over the University of Washington other than to be in LA. It was not perceived as a very academic place, and it was not viewed as being in the same academic zip code with UCLA, much less Cal or Stanford. Now, a lot of people put them in the UCLA and maybe Cal category (but not Stanford). And smart kids from Seattle commonly choose it over UW.

Wesleyan, by comparison, is on the front-end of a mission to get their name more recognized outside of New England, and they are on their way. Among educated circles in Seattle, Wesleyan is a name.

You are always going to have people who have a particular ideal about college. Some people think big football, big Greek and all that is what college is all about. Some people, just as narrowly, think it’s about small, elite and, particularly, New England.

Depends. Very different schools. Lots of smart kids at both. I’d peg Wesleyan as a bit more intellectual, but that’s my view.

Good luck.

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^ “Jock Factory”. Sorry for the typo.

I’ll also add that my D, a D1, 2 and 3 recruited athlete, chose Wes over many schools ranked higher than USC in in the USNWR ranking. She had a 3.98 full IB diploma (including two full years of HL Physics, HL calc and HL chem), and she tells me all the time she has her hands full at Wesleyan. It’s a pretty rigorous place and the kids, according to her, are very, very capable.

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“I just can’t imagine a student walking onto USC and Wes campuses and not knowing, or at least having an extremely strong feeling, that one makes way more sense than the other.”

@CaliDad2020 , completely agree.

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@keenspoon , Agree with much of what you said, but would pause on the following:

“In all honesty I do think Wesleyan has lost a little momentum,”

I think it’s regaining it. Super successful fundraising campaign, a clear and forward thinking President who is adding to the Wes experience but also managing the school in a fiscally sustainable manner. And the success of Hamilton has brought about all kinds of great public notice. Their sports teams are also no longer a joke. My D was in the women’s eight who captured the historic win at the Head of the Charles this fall. They also cleaned up the rest of the fall races and are the pre-spring favorites to win the NCAAs. Other sports teams have broken through. There’s the little issue of putting a bullet in the last of the frats - always a controversial thing - which caused drop in alumni giving which hurt them in the USNWR rankings. That will blow over. It did for Middlebury; it will for Wesleyan.

“but when you don’t control for a class size that is far smaller it is a invalid comparison”

They came in at 15.4%, and when you think about it, that’s impressive given that, unlike huge and big name schools, you don’t tend to get a lot of completely unqualified applicants to small LACs. A school like USC is going to have, I would think, a higher % of kids applying who aren’t even close to being qualified to be there, but they apply on a flyer “Because it’s SC!”. We can say that Amherst and Williams and Pomona have lower admit percentages, but then we’d need to compare USC to higher-ranking schools.

“USC has a stronger brand and name recognition - and sure it is MUCH stronger in Asia. It is on the West Coast, it is bigger and yes it has a great set of sports teams. People will know the school when you say it and it might have more value for finding a job in LA. That said it won’t be any stronger with graduate schools.”

They do for football, but I’m not sure the word is out there about its academics quite to the extent we might suppose. There are still A LOT of people who think football when they think of USC. It is, as you say, stronger on the West coast, but Wes does have a very solid reputation on the East coast.

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Honestly, I find the original question in the post to be a bit of a head-scratcher. I agree with WesmoreDad’s view regarding Wesleyan’s momentum. I think any neutral observer would conclude that, among its NESCAC peers, Wesleyan is leading the way in several areas. As a graduate of one of the other Little Three schools who has had recent exposure to the positive developments at Wesleyan, my view is that the only thing lacking at Wes is an endowment comparable to the other two.

Wesleyan and its president have articulated and implemented a cogent approach to liberal arts education that goes beyond the traditional model currently in place at most of its NESCAC rivals. The concept of “practical idealism” that Wesleyan espouses should resonate strongly with applicants seeking a liberal education that can translate into a practical application in a rapidly changing world. This concept has been put into practice in a variety of ways (center for public engagement, established program for social entrepreneurship, on-line learning).

All of the small liberal arts schools that Wesleyan competes with admit highly qualified students. Each school has a unique identity and culture, but I think Wes stands out as the most forwarding-thinking institution in its cohort. The value of an education at a small liberal arts college should go beyond just being surrounded by smart kids who do well on tests. The encourages intellectual and critical academic and social thinking, not just doing well on tests. The vibe is more about exploring, discovering and creating the next big thing rather than what do I need to do to fit in to what life and careers look like today. Admittedly, this is a generalization, but I think it is an accurate characterization of the educational philosophy at Wes.

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^ Great post @Little3grad.

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For completeness, this topic has been discussed before, sometimes vociferously.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/wesleyan-university/1191404-what-has-happened-to-wesleyan-p1.html

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^Yes, there seems to be an intermittent meme that Wesleyan has somehow come down from a golden period in its history that coincided with the 1960s. Take it from someone who was there. Wesleyan is 10xs better today than it was then.

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^ here’s the bottom line: it’s USNews. Period.

Some people can’t get past that ranking. Others don’t care. The internationals from the Asian countries seem particularly hung up on it.

Watch Wes rise back up into the top 10 (where it arguably belongs) and watch this question disappear.

Nobody ever has a substantive argument. It’s always ranking and endowment. The endowment is only far behind a few schools and is within striking distance of the next tier.

It’s the US News ranking. Nothing more. Agreed. Wesleyan has never been better, except for the time it was the wealthiest LAC.

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OP, have you looked at the College of East Asian Studies at Wes? It seems like it would be right up your alley.

http://wesleyan.edu/ceas/index.html

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Here’s the irony: Wesleyan officially ceased being the wealthiest college in the country the moment it reached gender parity in the early 1980s. Unlike some NESCACs that cut back on the number of males admitted to each class in order to “make room” for women, Wesleyan seamlessly absorbed the equivalent of an eighth Seven Sister college in a period of ten years, beginning in 1969. That effectively halved its per student endowment just in time for publication of the first USNews poll.

Did it have any effect on the quality of the school? It depends on how you look at it. When I enrolled the Fall of 1969, the student:faculty ratio was 5 to 1. By the eighties it was 10 to 1. OTOH, when I enrolled my class of 360 guys had been selected from a pool of 1,900 applicants and the selectivity was north of 30%. Today the number of applicants is over 12,000 and the selectivity has been reduced by half.

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^ My understanding is that they also rested on their wealth, built like crazy and didn’t pursue fundraising as seriously as they should have for many years. In so doing, they also missed a couple of bull markets along the way.

That’s in the past. Roth has proven himself a good fundraiser, and he’s been smart with the school’s money.

It’s not often you get an alumnus who’ s qualified for the job to run the school. Nobody cares more about Wes than he does. I’m confident that by the time he steps down, Wesleyan will be well positioned for the long haul.

Great things are happening now too. The Hamilton scholarship is a terrific thing. That will attract great talent for years to come.

And did I mention the women’s crew team? How 'bout that women’s 8??? :slight_smile:

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In reading the thread from 2011, I do think that the atmosphere has changed gradually from “political stridency” to one that is more accurately described as “socially aware and engaged”. I have heard at least one alum from that earlier period describe with some wonder visiting campus and seeing students decked out in Wesleyan gear, and students of all stripes (not just athletes) singing the fight song at the drop of a hat.

The bottom line is that if you are looking for a student experience at a highly selective liberal arts college where you can have an inward “bubble” focus in the woods or mountains, Wesleyan is probably not the right fit for you. There are plenty of other schools that fit that bill.

I have always thought that one way to get a good sense of what the culture is really like at a particular school is to read a few issues of the student newspaper. The Wesleyan Argus is published twice weekly. It is filled with content that covers political topics (local and world), arts and culture (local and world), and thoughtful editorial content. I guarantee that you will not find that same quality at some of Wesleyan’s peer schools, even those that are supposedly “better” because they have a higher USNWR ranking.

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Wesleyan’s building boom was largely over by my senior year. A lot of credit goes to Colin G. Campbell, one of the real unsung heroes of university administration. Almost immediately following the revered and visionary presidency of Victor Lloyd Butterfield (1943-1967), he imposed Wesleyan’s first real austerity budget since the end of the First World War. Don’t like Exley Science Center? You have Colin Campbell to thank for cancelling a whole slew of similar projects that were on the drawing board and only awaiting trustee approval, including one that was destined for the foot of Foss Hill.

Campbell’s strategy was to hold on to as many of the academic young guns that had been recruited by his predecessor while raising Wesleyan’s enrollment to a more sustainable level. The tricky part was doing so without the help of a huge construction budget. He accomplished that by shrewd management of Middletown’s fading real estate market, trading its traditional, but, largely abandoned, junior faculty village for student housing. “Party on Fountain”? You have Colin Campbell to thank.

The result was that almost no one outside of Middletown knew just how close Wesleyan had come to going broke. So impregnable was it’s aura of great wealth that as late as 1986, when Wesleyan abandoned need-blind admissions (the first time), it made the front page of the New York Times. But, Wesleyan’s cool-headed approach did come at a price: it would be years before older alumni were convinced enough that it really needed the money and, remarkably, the “wealthiest college in the country” would only conclude its first successful post-War capital campaign in 1987, some twenty years after its leading innovator left office. I can understand why, from the outside at least, that would appear as if Wesleyan was “resting on its endowment”, but, it really wasn’t.
beneath the surface, it was paddling like a swan.

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@Little3grad again, I agree.

What sold me on Wes for my D over Bowdoin, in particular, was what you describe as the bubble woods experience. It’s a beautiful and safe and high level bubble, admittedly, but a bubble nonetheless. Wes is untethered.

I also agree with your observation about the Argus, and I would extend that thought to the alumni magazine. When I picked up the latter for the first time, I also had a copy of my UW alumni magazine, Columns. They don’t compare, and Columns writes for a school and alumni base more than 9 times Wesleyan.

It’s not a rave, it’s not a collection of lunatics and they aren’t chaining themselves to trees and buildings on the daily. Our college advisor bought into that stereotype as well, and now I warn people from using her; she gets paid to know better.

Sure, at the end of the day, there was a passionate student voice supportive of Black Lives Matter who wanted Wes to defund the paper. But, in the end, Roth said ‘no’ and explained why quite eloquently. THAT is Wesleyan. The whole thing; not just the voice from one side of a public and complicated and delicate debate.

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@circuitrider you are a wonderful ambassador for Wes and a great historian if its past. I dare say there is not another alumnus on this entire forum who knows his school as well as you know yours.

I type this as I sit outside Exley waiting for my girl to finish her multivariable calc test so I can take her to lunch. I’m here to watch Wes women’s crew take on Bates Tufts and Wellesley next weekend in Boston. Wish them luck. The venerable Bates crew has a lot of talent back from studying abroad, but Wes is loaded and incredibly deep: the 2V crew will threaten to place at the ECACs.

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S is admitted student for 2021 and attended Wesfest this week and spent the night. Absolutely loved the culture at Wesleyan, very creative, musical, and academic. Canceled trip to Oberlin and considering canceling Colby visit next week. Also read Niche reviews and USN ranking which concerned him. We spoke with an admissions officer and here is the 2021 application results:

12,500 applications
15% Acceptances
32-34 Mid ACT

Wesleyan has had a huge increase in applications over the last several years and a resulting decrease in acceptance %. For comparison, Williams had 8,593 applications and 1253 acceptances (14.5%), 33 ACT Average.

During Wesfest, the President complemented the admitted students and told them to “chill out” about the decision process as the fact that they have been accepted to schools like Wesleyan allows them to not make a bad decision.

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@harvard2021 I’m a prof at USC and my son is going to Wes in the fall. He was also admitted to Amherst. I teach many many international students from Asia and I agree with you that USC is a well known school in Asia and Wes is unknown. If name recognition in Asia is important for you in terms of career, family, etc., I think USC has a definite edge. However, if you are more interested in a more academically rigorous and liberal-arts-style education that is more personalized, I think that Wes is great. My son is planning on studying something in the humanities and he’s really interested in social justice and activism. USC is not great at any of these. I totally understand that rankings are important to some - but I think that rankings can change over time and they can also be manipulated. I know that USC has had some good numbers - but the profile of the incoming class does not reflect the large number of spring admits and transfer students. That’s not to say that USC students aren’t smart - but let’s just say that there isn’t an emphasis on rigor and learning. There seems more of a concern about resumes and money. Of course - there’s nothing wrong with that - but for our family, that’s not what we were looking for in an undergraduate experience. If my son went to USC, he could have gone for free. He didn’t even apply. It’s not that USC isn’t a good school - it is. But it doesn’t have what he was looking for in terms of a liberal arts education that will prepare him for academics and beyond.

USC is a very large school with a focus on marketing itself - that doesn’t mean it is “bad” - but you should know that you are mostly paying for a brand - a brand that doesn’t always have positive connotations in the US or abroad. I think that as an international student from Asia - you might want to talk to others in your position. There are many USC alums who can share their experiences with you - they might be a good source of information.