Perhaps you should actually read the original Boston Magazine article that mentions the extensive building of housing and academic buildings, large hiring increases of professors, and increased research spending/funding.
As someone who attended BU the only new campus housing is the village and we had a housing problem on campus (with a few hotels being used)… again accepting a class of 3100 shifting 600 to January and accepting 750 transfers you get a class of 4450 at BU … just ask GWU about what happened when they were caught messing about with admission numbers and faking it.
BU received less applications and lower their acceptance to 18% … they are playing with these kids and their guaranteed transfer admissions
I am talking Northeastern here, which in the past 20 years alone has built:
7 New Apartment Style Residential Buildings with classrooms in the bottom (West Village A-C, E-H)
4 New Academic and/or Research Buildings (Behrakis, West Village H, ISEC)
2 New Large Suite Style Residential Buildings (International Village, East Village)
1 Large Subcontracted Apartment Building (LightView)
I can’t speak to new buildings on BU specifically.
This hit Northeastern and BC as well and was caused by overenrollment of one freshman class, not related to US News gaming. In fact, it would have been in the advantage of all schools to accept fewer applicants and avoid the problem entirely, but something in all 3 schools was off in their yield calculations.
Yes northeastern used to be a commuter school. Go read about their history… in the early 1990s 41000 students attended per year… building new facilities is the norms to keep up but shrinking your incoming class from 4500 to 2800 is gaming and shipping students around the world (and accepting them but under your admissions for fall they’ve been rejected making your admissions look great)
For a selective school I’d expect their programs to be a lot higher ranked…
I know my history on this. I am not denying in any way that the class size shrunk or that NU.in plays advantages to the rankings like CGS and other similar programs. I’m simply saying that real meaningful changes have occurred to improve the school, something you argued against.
When schools change drastically, rankings take time to catch up. Northeastern’s programs are consistently ranked higher each year. When you use metrics that do not rely on reputation, you end up getting well-ranked programs. For example, if you look at research output to top conferences in CS, Northeastern is actually in the top 15. But when you look at the US News survey for graduate CS (100% based on survey rankings from other schools), they come out much lower. They did jump 11 spots between the last survey though. A great example of how actuality and reputation take time to match up though.
http://csrankings.org/
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings
@airway1 BU and BC were commuter schools too. They transitioned to residential a generation before Northeastern did. The total enrolment of 41,000 was back in the 1960’s and included about 25,000 part time undergraduate students in University College, the predecessor of the College of Professional Studies. It was a time when Northaestern was the only college in the Boston area that offered a broad range of part time evening programs both in Boston and many locations in the suburbs. . There was no UMass Boston or community colleges back then. Northeastern filled the void. The academic world has evolved.
@TomSrOfBoston I’m not saying BU was not I was just explaining to @PengsPhils why they built so many dorms at NEU …
Again I’m also negative about BU with what they are doing… I wouldn’t recommend students to look at these schools as they are playing around with kids emotions… to be frank the whole system is rotten … as long as they are allowed to do this I expect more universities to join…
I don’t understand why NUin is taking such a beating. It is not like NEU is unique in this type of offering. Other schools that do spring admits of some type are - NYU, Cornell, Rochester, Middlebury, USC, UCLA, Franklin and Marshall, Mount Holyoke, Maryland, BU, etc. I know of two kids who had USC admissions that required a year in Paris first.
@airway1 I too am reading this thread and not understanding why you feel the need to be so authoritative on a school you really have no connection to or experience with. Why do you feel it is your mission to warn students, perpetuate old data, improper investigative reporting, and biased opinions? Again, your responses are evidence of one of the greatest problems of CC - people getting up on their soap boxes and spouting off misinformation about universities they don’t have the faintest ideas about. Why? I hope people reading comments such as yours are intelligent enough to realize when someone is definitely not an authority on the subject.
Colleges and universities are ultimately businesses who look for ways to improve the bottom line and to think they are acting any differently is naive. You better believe schools will make changes to insure survival into the next century. NEU has chosen a very specific way to adapt (criticized by many, except most of the kids who participate in NUin) and found a way to make this model work for them. It is ridiculous for people to condemn schools for finding ways to evolve. What’s the alternative to staying fixed in the status quo? For many schools, failure to evolve will mean closure in the next century.
If CC readers want to know anything truthful or realistic about NEU, please read @PengsPhils or @TomSrOfBoston comments. Honestly, sometimes I feel commenters on CC need to provide evidence that they have first hand knowledge of a school before being allowed to post anything. I see so much misinformation on these forums from individuals who join conversations simply to regurgitate hearsay and third hand information. Some people should do everyone a favor and keep disingenuous and inflammatory comments to themselves.
I’m just saying then add it to the acceptance rate… those students in these programs used to be part of the total applying… CGS students used to be part of BU acceptance… underestimating your acceptance should not be an accepted norm… I am against this gaming and playing around… I don’t care what program they get accepted too… these students in this programs under the system have been rejected by NEU and BU (that is a fact)… what’s the misinformation? I went to BU and I graduated from there and yes I have no issues in saying that BU used to have an acceptance rate of 85%… I stated facts that Northeastern was also an easy school to get into… plus was a commuter school… non of what I said weren’t facts… I did not pick on Northeastern but also commented about BU. Both are misleading in their numbers… this is not norms again or GWU would have gotten into issues or this thread wouldn’t have been created if it wasn’t for an article that highlighted the issue. @elderwood
This thread was started by @kiddie due to an article that appeared in The Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago. The author of that article started out discussing the recent celebrity studded scandal in the college admissions process that primarily involved USC and to a lesser extent Yale and a few other colleges. For some odd legal reason the court appearances of these cheating parents was held in Boston. In the middle of the article the author chose to do a copy and paste job of the old 2004 Boston Magazine article about Northeastern “scamming” the college rankings process. That Boston Magazine article was actually a mostly positive article about Northeastern’s transformation if you read the article and not just the clickbait title. The Globe author only copied and pasted the alleged scamming portion of the article.
Northeastern took the unusual step of printing a rebuttal to the article on its website and in a letter to the editor of the Globe. The Boston Globe is a leading newspaper while Boston Magazine is essentially an entertainment and dining “lifestyle” publication. The rebuttal states “It is an extreme and rare occasion when a news outlet publishes an article with such disregard for facts and important context that it effectively sabotages basic journalistic practices.” and "The Globe article is riddled with breaches of journalistic norms.’ That is very strong wording.
And when did being a “former commuter school” become an eternal negative for a university that has transitioned to residential? E.g. Northeastern, BU, BC, NYU, USC, Case Western and even UCLA. Perhaps it is a Boston thing derived from our English colonial heritage that you will always be judged by your ancestry no matter what you do in your life. Not to imply that said heritage is anything to be ashamed of. The heritage just doesn’t fit the current mold of “respectable”.
@kiddie add UMD and American to the list that allows Spring admits.
@NovaMom93 spring admission or summer is within the norms but window dressing your acceptance rate by shipping so many students to a program as BU did this year is not… BostonU has less applications but dropped their acceptance to 18% shrunk their class to look selective… directors of admissions are now addicted to keeping the rate down … let’s see as schools application pool start to drop how will they react…
By the way again look at George Washington after being caught messing about with their admissions numbers their acceptance rate jumped to 40%… BU, USC and Northeastern should be at 40% and not 11 to 20%
@airway1 George Washington got in trouble because they were reporting the stats for accepted students, not enrolled students. The stats for enrolled students are lower for all colleges except the top 10. That violated the instructions for what data is to be reported.
@TomSrOfBoston they fudged the top 10% (78 instead of 58) if you look at GWU their acceptance jumped from 30% to 50% after the scandal
@airway1 not sure you mean about window dressing. These schools aren’t hiding the fact that they do this.
A few years old, but there’s a WaPo article about UMD’s approach.
@airway1 I would like to know if you or anyone else who is so indignant about this “gaming the system” issue has ever researched every type of admissions option used by universities now? It seems to me that offering students a variety of acceptance pathways is a growing trend among so many schools. To say these students are actually rejected is wrong. With the number of qualified applicants greater than seats available, many schools might just want to change the way they structure the admissions process to reach desirable candidates. If you actually speak to students who have chose to attend NUin programs you will find 1. they are very accomplished, 2. don’t consider themselves rejected, and 3. actually enjoy this experience.
The now outdated Boston Magazine article you and others continue to refer to was, as pointed out, complimentary to NEU. You seem fixated on BU and NEU, wanting to punish institutions for thinking differently, or not the way you want them to. There is a failure to acknowledge that many schools seem to be utilizing similar methods. It feels like you are saying “stay in your place, you’re not elite” to schools who try to change with the times and reinvent themselves. All I hear on this board is “don’t pay attention to rankings, they’re meaningless.” Yet it is an obsession for almost everyone here.
There are greater issues in higher education to be indignant about instead of whether including/not including certain data improves their standings on US News list. Don’t worry, BU and NEU probably won’t crack the top 20/30. But rest assured, scrappy Bostonians/New Englanders don’t give up the fight and just sit there while the world is changing…remember they were the original rebels!!
@elderwood never said they weren’t accomplished… I’m saying add it to the acceptance… again in the system right now these kids have been rejected by BU and NEU( at northeastern their gpa at NUin are not transferred to northeastern) that’s deflating the acceptance rate…
Again I am not taking away any credit from these kids as they scores and accomplishments are amazing… please read all my comments before concluding on what I’ve said
I would be careful with your estimates though. You seem to be under the assumption that the effects on acceptance rates are quite drastic (over 100% increases is what you have estimated at 40%). While few have that data, you can find some assumptive analysis in the post linked below. In this very linked article at the top of the discussion, you’ll find an average SAT that is very much in line with other admissions stats.
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/22119181/#Comment_22119181
The bottom line headline is that with NU.in, the acceptance rate can be estimated to be about 26% at Northeastern.
You’re doing the same overestimation for other schools as well.
I don’t think anyone here is arguing that it would be good for these spring entry programs to be included in freshman class numbers. But the omission of these numbers doesn’t discount the other changes the schools have undergone that do drastically improve the schools. You keep ignoring this point and going back to the numbers point, which again, I don’t think anyone is arguing here.