<p>This is rather self-explanatory.</p>
<p>A $30,000/year merit scholarship at Tulane.</p>
<p>^Wow. I bet that was hard to turn down. I know that it probably pay all of your tuition, but still. Did you get offered anything close to that much at LSU?</p>
<p>emory
10char</p>
<p>Tulane
FSU
UCF
Allgheny College
U Arizona</p>
<p>what I find strange is I got a scholarship to all of these schools but nothing from LSU</p>
<p>USC
Va Tech
La Tech</p>
<p>Every other college in the world… Tulane merit scholarships are nothing more than a desperate university trying to hang on by creating the appearance of a good deal.</p>
<p>“Every other college in the world… Tulane merit scholarships are nothing more than a desperate university trying to hang on by creating the appearance of a good deal.”</p>
<p>A desperate university? Hahaha, that’s a good one. LSU is the school facing massive budget cuts while Tulane just broke admissions records for the second consecutive year. The acceptance rate dropped to 27% last year with correspondingly high test scores and grades. The preliminary acceptance rate for the current admission cycle is 22.5%. Seems pretty desperate to me.</p>
<p>What’s Tulane ranked by US News? 60 now? What I meant is that it is a decent university that still thinks it is “elite.” It’s not even sniffing the top 25 at the moment. LSU is what it is. It’s not trying to be something it’s not.</p>
<p>And that acceptance rate is mostly due to free applications and millions spent on marketing to get kids to apply who have no shot. </p>
<p>I’m guessing probably 3/4 of students accepted get these supposed “merit” awards. It should be reserved for only the best students otherwise it is a joke.</p>
<p>tulane’s 51, and lsu is 130.</p>
<p>i’ll be attending lsu over a tulane dhs due to:</p>
<p>huge scholarship with cash stipend
nearly 50 hours in ap credit</p>
<p>are tulane’s ratings inflated? sure. but it’s nothing to sneeze at. it attracts tons of talent to our state who would otherwise never set foot here.</p>
<p>^That’s true about the OOS. I read somewhere that only 20% of LA residents actually go to Tulane. The majority of students are OOS or internationals. I think that having Tulane in LA is a plus. It does attract tons of talent to LA who might actually stay in LA. It’s always a plus to have a diverse group of bright students who will contribute to not only to their community, but their state as well.</p>
<p>LSUGuy- not everyone gets the merit scholarships. Tulane does give out a lot of merit aid, but you have to be an exceptional candidate to get the best awards. Keep in mind that nearly every LSU student gets a full tuition scholarship called TOPS.</p>
<p>I am willing to go into debt for a good education. Tulane would have cost me about $30,000 over four years in loans (probably more with tuition increases). For a school like Notre Dame or Penn I would have paid such a price gratefully. An education at a top-25 school comes with it lots of extra benefits.</p>
<p>Tulane didn’t seem to offer anything that would justify a top-25 school price. Sure, the alumni network is decent, but it also has one of the worst party school reputations. I did a lot of research into starting salaries for my major (business) and which university had the better program. Tulane is slightly better, but the only notable offering they had was finance. Starting salaries for business majors at LSU were only a few thousand less.</p>
<p>Professors I talked to all told me to stay away from Tulane. The undergraduate program there isn’t bad by a long shot, but not anything to write home about, either. I was told that its graduate offerings are much better and well worth looking into, however.</p>
<p>If Tulane were a top-25 school, would I have gone? In a heartbeat. But comparing its cost/benefit ratio to LSU’s, it was clear to me that the public school was a much better deal than the private.</p>
<p>Texas A&M
Oklahoma
Mizzou
Santa Clara
USan Diego
Tulane 
</p>
<p>But I’m very excited to come to LSU next year.</p>
<p>I chose LSU over Agnes Scott.</p>
<p>tigerbound said:
</p>
<p>I think you meant that only about 20% of the students at Tulane are from LA. If 20% of LA seniors went to Tulane, that would be a huge number. The actual number of Louisiana residents at Tulane is about 16%. Like all private schools that are considered highly competitive, most Tulane students are from OOS. In fact Tulane apparently has more students from >500 miles than any other school, although the % of International students is lower than many other schools of similar size and character. Tulane’s % from LA would be even lower except there is a special program for LA residents that increases the number.</p>
<p>LSUGuy - a healthy rivalry is fine and even kind of fun. However, I think you make two fundamental errors in your critique. First, the rankings are rather useless as they are attempts to measure something unmeasureable. None-the-less, everyone knows Tulane suffered in the rankings after Katrina. Before that is was steadily in the mid-30’s to lower 40’s, and it will return there or even improve. It is rather ironic that all the publicity from Katrina and the post-Katrina efforts has seemed to have actually attracted a higher quality student than ever. This is demonstrated by the average SAT score rising from 1257 to 1365 over a relatively short time, and this year it appears the entering class might hit 1400. This, combined with the percentage acceptance rate dropping to about 23%, will result in an improvement in the rankings, worthless though they are.</p>
<p>This leads to the other flaw in your thinking, in my opinion, about what makes a school “elite”. There are a lot of factors that go into what makes a school excellent for an undergraduate education, but probably the most important is the quality of your fellow students. This is true for a number of reasons: Being forced to work harder to maintain good grades, being around a lot of people smarter than yourself, being in an atmosphere of people that take academics seriously are just a few. Professors are quite capable at many schools, and the books are the same. The biggest “X” factor are your peers. State schools such as LSU recognized this as well, and in an attempt not to lose all the brightest students to private schools created either “Honors Colleges” or “Honors Programs”, the former especially designed to keep the best students clustered together. Anyway, if you compared Tulane’s improvenment in student quality since Katrina and especially compared this year’s incoming class to other schools, Tulane would stack up very well.</p>
<p>In any event, to imply that the school has some sort of ego complex about what it is and to try and imbue it with those kind of human qualities is rather silly. It is a school with a great history that went through a tough time, came out of it spectacularly well, and is trying to be the best it can be. I am sure Wash U, Duke, Emory, Vandy, etc. all try and be the best they can be as well. Hard to see what is wrong with that. Frankly, I don’t see how Tulane’s ratings are inflated at all. If anything they are underrated by the measurement criteria used.</p>
<p>Oops. That’s what I meant. Thanks for correcting my mistake.</p>
<p>Oh don’t take anything I said about Tulane seriously, I just enjoy busting their chops, especially the Montegut guy who will follow the entire boards looking to make sure Tulane is getting its due.</p>
<p>LSUguy - LOL, fair enough. That I can totally understand. Hey, btw, congrats on the Baseball win!!! Well done, LSU.</p>
<p>I meant Monstar, not Montegut, sorry beginning of the name’s confused me as to who the Tulane guy was.</p>
<p>Indiana (direct admit into Kelley School of Business)
Georgia
Clemson
Florida St
Arkansas</p>
<p>…got rejected from Florida and as an OOS student LSU offered the best scholarship</p>