I thought that generally smart kids went there, but this girl in my grade who has taken maybe a couple of APs and gets bad grades got in… I’m assuming she has some good ECs but I happen to know that she is a horrible student. This is making me wonder about Tulane’s acceptance policy…
She may not even take any APs, but I’m pretty sure 1 or 2 at the most… I don’t feel bad saying this about her because she’s mean…
I would expect they have a range of students. It is fairly popular for good students hoping for some merit money.
http://admission.tulane.edu/apply/gettinginto.php
this has some info. 30% acceptance rate so pretty selective
Middle SAT scores 1950-2150
http://tulane.edu/oair/common_data_set.cfm
you can read more statistics in the common data set
She might be a bad student in her classes, but she probably knocked it out of the park on her ACT. That’s how it works: a good ACT can make up for a mediocre GPA, and a good GPA can make up for a mediocre ACT, but a bad GPA and SAT don’t get you into Tulane. Here’s the good news: that girl will be out of your life in six months, and then you’ll never have to see her again. Wishing bad on others, or hoping for some “poetic justice,” will eat away at your soul. Move on!
Oh, and BTW, Tulane’s acceptance rate for the class of 2020 is currently at 25%. (See blog if Jeff Schiffman on Tulane Admission’s website.). So yes, it’s a “smart school.”
I’ll add a couple of things to the great statements that have already been made.
It’s a fact that about 15% of the incoming class at Tulane are people that have won a combination of full tuition/full ride awards or very large partial scholarships. To win these you have to have Ivy type stats of top 1% standardized testing and top GPA/strong AP(IB) record. And of course it doesn’t just drop off a cliff after that, you have the next 10-15% who got the next level awards which require stats of 31-32 ACT or comparable SAT and very strong classroom record. And so on.
There is a national award out of the office of the President of the United States in which only one male and one female from each state are selected for recognition. That’s 100 people out of about 2.5 million graduates! (There are another few dozen awards for the arts, but those don’t factor in here). In my D’s incoming class, Tulane had 3 (!!!) of these winners (more than all but three of the USNWR top 25 schools), and my D was a finalist (no way to know if there were other finalists). That was unusual I will grant you, but it shows that Tulane does attract some really smart people that work hard in academics.
You may not know as much about this person as you think you do. Or maybe she is just like you say and somehow she got in anyway. Who knows. Admissions is largely about academics, but there are exceptions sometimes, especially in areas like music or other talent based majors. Maybe there is family history with the school. Useless to speculate, really, but rest assured Tulane has a lot of smart people and a great track record for graduates that want to go on to graduate and professional schools.
The incoming class won’t be as uniformly high stat as an HYPS type school, but Tulane more than some looks for other things as well. It isn’t for everyone, and if you are looking for that more narrowly tailored academic-nerd type school, I suggest U Chicago or a university similar to it. That is a compliment to Chicago, btw, I love that school for a lot of people, and I even thought my D would do well there. (She liked it OK but ultimately decided it wasn’t for her). Tulane, I would say, is more balanced. Obviously still very high academic standards, but a lot of people that really care about service to others and other aspects of what really is higher education, and should be more a part of other universities thinking when it comes to what a college education means. Just my opinion on the last, but I am glad Tulane thinks that way.
Tulane is a smart school. Every day that I go here I’m astounded by the intelligence of the people around me. I don’t think it’s a smart school in the traditional sense of nerdiness though; students here are just really well-rounded people.
My daughter is a freshman at Tulane on a Dean Honor scholarship has been impressed with the caliber of the students as well as of the professors. Her high school was ranked in the top 100 high schools by US News & World Report, where she graduated AP with Distinction. For the first time in her academic career she has found she has to work for her grades and finds herself surrounded by ‘smart’ people. As a side note, she loves NOLA and the diversity of the student body at Tulane.
Tulane strongly solicits applications and sends he students an enormous amount of paper mail and emails. The reason they have 25% acceptance rate is because of this practice. They also send students individualized invitations to a “free” application while they in fact do not charge an application fee at all. While there is no doubt that very smart and capable students attend Tulane this practice artificially positions them as a super selective school when they have in fact gone down in the US News ratings in the last few years.
Wow, talk about not paying attention and making your whole post seem ludicrous. Tulane jumped 13 spots this year to #41, easily the biggest move by any school in the top 150. I can also shred your argument about the increase in applications. First, applications actually have been down some since they hit their peak in 2009 or so. It rollercoasters some, but definitely nowhere near where it was before they added the extra essay.
If you read back a few years you will see that both nothwesty and I predicted this move by Tulane back then. How did we know? Because USNWR does weight 6 graduation rates extremely heavily, at over 25% when you take into account the rate itself and some weird factor they use called a predicted rate. Not only that, but they use a rolling average of 4 years for these factors, meaning something that happened in 2005 (6+4=10) was still in the mix last year, albeit at a fading level. You know what happened in New Orleans in 2005? Hurricane Katrina. For a few years Tulane’s graduation rate was a meaningless statistic, since so many people couldn’t finish their education at Tulane. And now the Katrina effect is a very small factor and after next year should cease to be a factor at all. Tulane will most likely settle in around #40. Tulane actually ranks in the top 30 in national universities in average test scores.
So while we can only speculate as to why you thought to come on to the Tulane forum and make these specious and easily smashed arguments (btw, U Chicago and WUSTL are also famous for killing a lot of trees and electrons with their marketing}, it seems odd to me at least. But you are of course welcome to your own opinion. As someone famously said, you are not welcome to your own facts.
Just to second fallenchemist, my daughter has received far more marketing material from U Chicago, Duke, and many other schools than Tulane. Anyway, there is nothing wrong with Tulane letting prospective students know about all it has to offer. I suspect NewYorker404 was deferred or rejected.
I guess I am wandering off topic from the thread title, but just to make a point: When my D was looking at schools back in 2008-09, I knew that many schools, even some of the best, marketed fairly heavily. OK sure, I was still a little surprised at how much there was and how expensive some of the brochures were (ASU! whew! Beautiful, but had to have cost a fortune), especially since this was right after the financial markets collapsed. In any case, my point is that I was truly surprised when she received material from Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. Maybe Princeton too, I forget for sure about them. I would have assumed that Harvard, famous for its low acceptance rate and high yield, and obviously its world fame, would see no need to do anything to increase applications. Not that it was high volume, high pressure or slick; it was a simple letter on Harvard stationary merely reminding her that Harvard is the kind of school that students like her should want to attend. Of course they phrased it better, but that was the essential message, and it was brilliant to do it in such an elegant and understated manner. The other Ivies were similar, but also included a small full color piece with the letter.
Then I remembered what I had learned in marketing about being a luxury item provider and market leader, and how important it is to constantly cultivate that customer base and use it as an opportunity to reinforce your image. I guess Harvard would be foolish to have one of the 2 or 3 leading business schools in the world and not listen to their own lessons! Well, they are not foolish.
The moral of the story is that everyone markets themselves, and that they do it in such a way that best fits their vision for who they want to reach and where they want to be. It is really as simple as that. The notion that Tulane does it mostly to look “super selective” is nonsense of the highest order. One look at the average stats of Tulane students compared to almost all other schools in this country is all one needs to know to see how super selective Tulane is. Harvard/Yale/Duke selective? No, and that is just fine. No one was happier than I the day Tulane realized it was foolish to market themselves as “The Harvard of the South”. Lots of schools did this, btw, and not just the South. WUSTL called itself the Harvard of the Midwest, and there were many others. Tulane is a great school with its own unique offerings, personality, strengths (including some Harvard doesn’t have and no other school has) and I am very pleased with the type of student they are attracting and the directions they have taken to meet the challenges of these times.
My son is also a freshman at Tulane and received an amazing merit scholarship. He turned down an Ivy League acceptance to attend Tulane, so I was all ears when he was home for vacation in December and a good friend of mine asked him bluntly if he thought that the kids at Tulane are smart. “Yes, definitely,” he answered enthusiastically and without hesitation.
Also, back in the fall he was admitted to the Tulane Scholars Program (sort of an honors program within the Honors Program–students must apply in October of freshman year). So this semester he is in a colloquium that meets two days/week that is only for Tulane Scholars. This class (or one that is similar)–plus other special programming and faculty mentorship–will continue over the coming three years. And next year he will live in the sophomore honors dorm with the Tulane Scholars as well as with other top students.
So, although my son already respects the abilities of his fellow Tulanians, I imagine that his ongoing affiliation with the Tulane Scholars will raise his respect of some of them to awe! And I also have to wonder if he would have gotten a similar opportunity at an Ivy. Probably not.
From what I’ve seen so far, prospective students (and their parents) should not shy away from Tulane for fear that academic standards aren’t up to snuff. There is certainly challenge at Tulane as well as top-notch, caring professors, and ample opportunity to hob-nob with other students who would fit in at the most hyper-competitive colleges and universities in the country.
A few years ago I started a thread on CC called something like “How did HE Get In?” It may have come across as a bit snarky, but the purpose of it was to point out that ALL colleges make admission decisions that surprise some outsiders. None of us beyond the admission-committee doors can fully know why an applicant was accepted or denied. And Tulane, like everywhere else, is inevitably going to admit students whom others may feel are sub-par and will also reject some who seem stellar.
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The admission rate isn’t much of a meaningful statistic to anyone. It has minimal weight in the USNWR formula. Admissions selectivity is only 12.5% of the overall USNWR formula.
USNWR computes a “selectivity” index for each school. Acceptance rate is 10% of that metric. SAT/ACT scores are 65%. Percent of kids in the top 10% of HS class is 25%.
So admissions rate is 1.25% of the overall formula.
Going with that formula (fwiw), Tulane has a selectivity rank of 45. #46 is Lehigh. NYU is #49. Brandeis, Wake and UNC-CH are T36. Cal Tech is #1. HYP are T4.
Tulane’s ACT range is shown at 29-32. Compare to Michigan at 29-33.
Is what it is.