Pomona College or Tufts?

College Search & Selection
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<p>"And, yes, every Tufts student has the opportunity to take classes at Fletcher and the school of nutrition, sit in on lectures at the dental, vet, medical, and biomedical schools, undertake research with faculty from the school of medicine and sackler school of biomedicine if he/she chooses to contact the faculty member and fill out an application detailing his/her idea for research."</p>

<p>This is meaningless for the vast majority of Tufts students and certainly unimportant for someone who values the LAC model.</p>

42

<p>If you are lucky enough to be accepted at Pomona, you should think long and hard before you pass it over.</p>

<p>There are usually so many exciting, interesting and fun things going on on campus that you won't feel compelled to get out, but should you feel so inclined, Union Station in LA is 37 minutes on the metrolink (the station borders the campus), Newport Beach is a 40 minute drive (you can also take mass transit to the beach in just over an hour). If you like to ski, it's about 25 minutes up to Mount Baldy in the winter, and you can find virtually anything you need within an hour of campus. Furthermore, every weekend, Pomona runs shuttles, buses and the "Sagecoach" all around SoCal to whisk students off to whatever exciting off-campus things they want to do (for free). Pomona is hardly in the "middle of nowhere" like an earlier poster suggested. </p>

<p>In terms of resources, it takes a merely a moment as a freshman to realize that Pomona spoils the s**t out of you. The dorms are palatial, the campus is beautiful, and though it has some of the oldest buildings at a college West of the Mississippi, once you walk inside, everything is newly renovated, and state of the art. Beyond the physical campus, Pomona's resources are very accessible to the students. Want to start a club? Funding is easy to come by. Want to go on a camping trip but have no car, tent, sleeping bag, or camping stove? Pomona (through OTL) will set you right up. Have an exciting speaker that you want to bring to campus? There's funding there for that too; as an example, today the Nobel Prize-Winning Economist who developed the Black-Scholes model is speaking on campus. </p>

<p>The strength of its IR program are evident in its astronomical placement into the Fulbright Program. The Fulbright is a program of grants for international educational exchange for scholars, educators, graduate students and professionals and is considered one of the most prestigious award programs. The Fulbright Program has 36 Nobel Prize Winners among its alumni, more than any other scholarship program of its kind. Pomona edged out Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, Penn, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Tufts, UChicago and every other school in the nation (Save for Yale and UMich) in ABSOLUTE numbers; Pomona at under 1600 students sent more than Cal with 24000. As someone mentioned earlier, it is way ahead of every other school in the nation in terms of Fulbrights per capita.</p>

<p>The Chemistry program is also top-notch. David Oxtoby, the president of Pomona College and author of one of the most-used Chemistry textbooks in college classrooms, teaches sections of Gen-Chem and O-Chem. Harvey Mudd is a huge asset to Pomona in the sciences, and HMC students also have the advantage of being able to use Pomona's extensive resources. Nearly every chemistry major does lab research before graduating (and all have the opportunity to). Without graduate students around, students are heavily recruited by professors to work as research assistant, or co-author paper, and a number of students will publish and present research before graduating. Med-Schools are aware of the strength of the science departments at Pomona and med-school acceptance rates are high, despite Pomona taking a stance against weed-out tactics and against refusing to allow students to submit applications in an attempt to raise numbers. </p>

<p>But the best thing about Pomona is truly the people who you will be surrounded by every day. To quote someone on another forum,
Pomona Students are:
Grounded. Engaging. Wide-ranging interests. Friendly. Supportive. Witty.
Adventuresome. Thoughtful. Intellectually curious. Broad-minded. Respectful.
Fun-loving. Hard-working. Optimistic. Humble. Confident.</p>

<p>Another poster correctly added, and I might say that this is my favorite thing about the students here:
"Students are still discovering amazing accomplishments of their peers years after they have known them" </p>

<p>Choosing Pomona over the other schools I was considering made me a little nervous at the time, but it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. It might be a stretch to visit now if you already haven't, but a majority of the people who get in and take the time to really look into the school come to the realization that its hard to justify not spending the next four years here. </p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

43

<p>I'm sure, even considering Pomona's size that the same can apply, just the opportunities are not vast. That's just an essential difference between an LAC and a research university.</p>

<p>As someone who does experimental particle physics research at Pomona, I can tell you this is false. After transferring from a university to a LAC, one thing I have learned is that due the UG focus of LACs, research opportunites at LACs are better.</p>

44

<p>
[quote]
Newport Beach is a 40 minute drive (you can also take mass transit to the beach in just over an hour).

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<p>Laguna Beach is also 1 hour away. Very nice touristy area. You can see people play volleyball wearing bikini when you drive down Pacific Coast Hwy. Not something you often see in the East Coast. It's time to experience another Coast, IMO.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
After transferring from a university to a LAC, one thing I have learned is that due the UG focus of LACs, research opportunites at LACs are better.

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</p>

<p>You do not know this about all research universities and all LACs. You don't even know whether it is true in general. You only know it for the place where you were and the place where you are now.</p>

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<p>Revealed preference makes your point rather hollow. Yes, some Tufts students could have gotten into Dartmouth, Penn, Amherst, or Swarthmore. But they lose the head to head matchups. They lose by a pretty large margin to Pomona too. Pomona is 24th among all colleges and universities in revealed preference, Tufts is 42nd.</p>

<p>I believe there is a link somewhere to go directly to the document, but you can download it from here: SSRN-A</a> Revealed Preference Ranking of U.S. Colleges and Universities by Christopher Avery, Mark Glickman, Caroline Hoxby, Andrew Metrick</p>

<p>BTW - Amherst is 9, Swat 14, Williams 19; Davidson is 37, Haverford 60. And considering the objective data, such as SAT's, Class rank, and other such measurements are much more in line with this organization that your 'feelings', no one should be surprised.</p>

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<p>I doubt that Tufts loses many applicants to Pomona. But not because Pomona is not good enough - it's prolly mostly just a combo of geography and LAC vs. research university. I remember reading (it's on the president's section of the tuft's website) one of President Bacow's speeches and he said that Tufts shares a majority of thier applicants with brown, duke, rice, dartmouth, georgetown, harvard, johns hopkins, BC, cornell, and northwestern. And that Tufts hasn't shared a majority of their applicants with LACs since the early 90s. </p>

<p>According to usnews, pomona's yield was 40 percent. That's a fantastic yield. There's no arguing that...who would anyone want to? But yield isn't that much of an indicator of a college's popularity amongst high school students or of a college's quaility. In that case, pomona would suck more than wheaton, berea, principia and thomas aquinas. That's def. not true. And Brigham Young has the highest yield of all colleges....would you rather go to Brigham Young or Harvard? From what I can see, most colleges that have extremely high yields are colleges that have a specialized and homogenous study body like Brigham Young and Wheaton (IL). </p>

<p>And Tuft's yield was 36 percent, on par with universities like JHU. Is there much of a difference between Tufts' 36 percent and Pomona's 40 percent? They're both major competitors in their respective playing fields, which tend to not overlap.</p>

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<p>
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That's def. not true. And Brigham Young has the highest yield of all colleges....would you rather go to Brigham Young or Harvard?

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<p>You should check out BYU tuition. It's very cheap, super cheap, less than $2K per semester. If you get 1520/1600(V+M), the tuition is free. It's also an excellent school. It's not for the fact it's in the midwest + religion, it might even have higher yield.</p>

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<p>EffectiveMind - did you read a thing I said? That wasn't a ranking of yields, but of revealed preferences - how people choose when given acceptances to multiple colleges. That means that, on average, a person accepted to both will pick Pomona well before they will pick Tufts.</p>

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<p>The last yield I have seen for Tufts is 31%. While there are some outliers (mostly due to financial or geographical reasons like BYU or some state schools), I've found historically comparative yields between schools is generally telling (especially when you're comparing like schools [private; drawing from a national base; with similar use of ED composition of the class).</p>

51

<p>In California it is Stanford, Berkeley, Pomona and UCLA. Tufts might as well be Whats?</p>

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<p>Bump…</p>