I don’t think that is how you can evaluate a university PurpleTitan. Columbia has 9,000 undergraduate students, but 20,000 graduate students. Are we to ignore those? I have noticed that private universities tend to do that, which I find strange. Graduate programs share a university’s faculty and financial resources with undergraduate students.
But even if you look only at undergraduate students, Brandeis has 3,600 students, Rice 3,900 and Dartmouth 4,300, which makes them all at least half the size of NU. And USC and NYU have 19,000 and 25,000 students respectively, making them more than double the size of NU. Like I said, I am not sure NU’s was overly concerned about size when listing its peers.
If I were to list NU’s closest peers, in terms of campus feel, academic quality, overall reputation, I would say Michigan has much more in common with NU than any of the schools mentioned above. In fact, I remember reading that Northwestern’s largest cross admit campuses are Cornell, Duke, Michigan, Penn, Vanderbilt, UIUC and WUSTL. If I had to list its closest peers, those would be the ones. Brown, Chicago, Columbia and JHU are certainly just as good as NU academically, but they have drastically different campus cultures.
I agree with Alexandre’s broader list of NU’s peer schools. If you want to narrow down at the undergrad level, president Shapiro mentioned in his address that the schools NU wrestles most with for cross admits are Penn, Cornell, Duke and Georgetown. So, in I consider those schools the closest “peer” schools.
FWIW, at our local high school (NYC suburbs) the kids who went to Tufts were on par academically with the ones who went to Northwestern. As I recall.
That does not mean the schools are rated the same. The Tufts kids might have alternatively applied to some good northeastern LACs as opposed to a Northwestern. Is Northwestern “better” than a good LAC? In some ways yes, but the differences still attract comparably capable students. As I recall, Tufts is sort of a “tweener”- a smaller university with some excellent grad programs but not world-renowned grad programs across the board.
I think one can say Northwestern is “better” than Tufts as an institution, overall, by conventional measures. I’m not sure whether the students are “better” though. But I haven’t looked in a long time.
I guess you could say they are similar in that they attract highly capable students and are located in a close suburb of a major city.
Tufts is less likely to be a primary overlap with Northwestern though, due mostly to geographical preferences and due to its smaller size. IMO.
OP: Northwestern has a better reputation than both Tufts and Wake Forest in my opinion. So I guess I agree with your original premise. Of course that does not mean it is best for every student. One of the other schools (which are excellent) may be a better fit for a particular student.
In our NYC suburb, tufts and NW students are on par academically, but attract different types of students. NW attracts the kids who want the BIG 10 experience, including frats. Tufts attracts the activist, intellectual type, and has a lot of cross over applicants with brown, Wesleyan, Amherst, Yale…at least at our school. And for those kids also game to attend school in the Midwest, the tufts applicants also apply to UChicago, but not so much Northwestern.
I know both schools extremely well. Obviously both NU and Tufts are excellent and are among the most highly competitive in terms of admissions.
They are completely different in “feel.” Tufts seems much more intimate. NU, on the other hand, has more going on on campus.
NU’s peers are, among others, Duke, Penn, Cornell, Wash U, Dartmouth, Brown, and JHU. In my view, most people accepted into those schools and Tufts would choose them over Tufts.
Most important, in my personal experience, while both Tufts and NU are really excellent, NU is run better.
There is a distinction missing here between the universities and their students. The schools are pretty dissimilar, so it’s hard to see them as “peers” in that respect, but the undergrad students enrolled at the two schools are pretty clearly on par with one another. It’s pretty common in our area for high caliber students to apply to both schools and then it comes down to factors like size, location, programs and intangibles that drive the decisions on where to go. Tufts attracts really strong, near Ivy caliber students in droves and so does Northwestern.
Sorry, but I don’t know how to answer. I guess you are asking to compare schools again rather than the quality of their students. I don’t see Tufts as very similar at all to USC and UCLA. Those schools are way bigger and more focused on grad students. I think it is more like JHU, Chicago or maybe Duke. Again, I would say caliber of students at Tufts and Northwestern are very similar. Comparisons of Northwestern to Cornell and Penn seem plausible.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I disagree with you. Northwestern and Tufts are different types of schools so I have a hard time viewing them as peers. Tufts started as an LAC and still has that core focus in a mid sized university now. Northwestern is much bigger and has D1 athletics. It belongs in the Big 12, while it would be hard to imagine Tufts there even if located in the Midwest. Apples and oranges. The students are on par with each other overall.
@jaecha – What are you talking about? The accepted metrics for both schools are pretty similar. There are marginal differences, but on the whole it’s not like Northwestern’s accepted students are leagues above Tufts’. The average SAT score is within 30-50 points of each other, the average ACT is slightly higher for Northwestern, and Tufts’ acceptance rate is slightly higher (~3%). Considering they both have sub-15% acceptance rates, and average SAT/ACT scores in the 98th+ percentile, I don’t think there’s much (if any) difference between the student bodies.