Help! ED-II Wesleyan or Tufts?

Both are great institutions and I’m in the camp of people who don’t split hairs as between schools of this caliber unless there is something very specific one of them does particularly well. Wes is among the top small colleges at which to study physics and astronomy and of course the film program; and Tufts has the Fletcher School.

Tufts figured prominently in both our college searches. Campus and locale are inherently subjective items and they are quite different places in this respect. For obvious reasons, Tufts is the outlier in the NESCAC in terms of size. It’s as big as (and bigger than a couple of) the Ivies. Tufts’ proximity to Boston is of course a plus, but it’s obviously not a casual walk. We all thought the Tufts campus was nice but were not overwhelmingly taken with it or its immediate surroundings.

Both of my kids liked Wesleyan immediately and its location was actually plus for both on their visits, some of which I attribute to its proximity to a real small town Main Street - not the antiseptic variety that modern developers try to recreate in their quest for Bedford Falls - and a fantastic and authentic food scene. Location remained a positive for the one who attended as it did for her friends and teammates; but that also has a lot to do with how they feel about Wes in general, to which they casually refer as “home”. It was, for her and her cohort, a personal connection to place and a sincere feeling of warmth toward their alma mater. Does that happen at Tufts? I assume so.

Your 34 is I believe at or around Wesleyan’s 75th percentile, so while that is a mark in your favor, I’d never say anything is a slam dunk in selective college admissions, especially this year on the heels of Wes’ 2020 over-admission. Although another mark in your favor is applying from outside of New England and the Mid Atlantic. I have no idea how legacy plays at Tufts, but it would seem to be a plus.

IDK, go with your gut. If you like one over the other, that seems good enough to me. I didn’t play the “how could you like that school and not this other one” game with the kids. They wound up liking lots of schools of disparate and similar type.

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Wow. It’s hard to know what to make of that assertion. You’re basically carving out 30% of the student body and saying their activities don’t count for anything.

No, I’m not.

Let’s turn this around and take a closer look at the Tufts campus since the assertion implied that Tufts doesn’t provide adequate space for its students compared to Wesleyan and Vassar. The Tufts Veterinary School is located on 600 acres in Grafton. It’s where their cross country course is located. Add in the medical/pharmacy complex downtown, and the Art School on the Fenway, and the crew facility on the Malden River, and the Tufts Somerville campus and we’re now talking about campus property of almost 800 acres. But that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of student activity takes place on the Somerville campus. The same is true of the other schools. Comparing schools by the total acreage that the college owns isn’t a valid way to compare students’ experience on campus.

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Georgetown - 100 acres
OP was concerned about Wesleyan seeming small, not Tufts

Well, there’s an element of a straw argument there; no one is accusing Tufts of not providing adequate facilities or space for students (graduate and undergraduate) to pursue their studies. The rap was simply that the main campus - however you may define it - has a cramped feel to it - which is bound to be true when compared to any school with fewer undergraduates. Why argue with a basic law of physics, that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time? Let’s move on.

No, she was concerned about Middletown being too small, compared with Boston or the big West Coast city she’s from.

But thanks for bringing this back to the OP.

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