Why doesn’t Tufts have the same level of prestige/ elicit the same reactions as Williams/Amherst etc.?
@mjroh
Because maybe Tufts isn’t on there level (in their mind). Or it might be the location you are in that affects lay prestige.
“Prestige” is based on a healthy amount of ‘old news’ from the past. Tufts has been viewed as a very prestigious school for a long time, but just in the last few years the students have risen to a peer level with those from Amherst and Williams. So “prestige” will eventually catch up with the reality of the excellence of Tufts. IMHO, over the next few years Tufts could very well move past these LACs in “prestige” (whatever that is, really) because many students would prefer to go to school in Boston at a somewhat larger school. But Williams and Amherst are also great . . . .
Because while Tufts is a great school it is not at the same level as Williams and Amherst … and very, very few schools are. W and A are two of the very top LACs in the country.
In terms of national prestige, tufts, williams or Amherst aren’t known to the general public like Harvard and Yale, or schools like UCLA and Umichigan, known for their athletic prowess.
On the east coast, for those that are aware of LACs (fewer ppl than those who are aware of universities), yes, I’d say williams, Amherst and Wesleyan are probably best known and the most prestigious LACs.
In terms of student quality, the stats of students at williams, Amherst and tufts are pretty much identical, as is the acceptance rate at these schools, all around 14%. What’s most different about them: their location and vibe. My younger son did a summer program at Amherst and wouldn’t apply because it was too small for him, both in terms of physical plant (it bugged him that there was only one dining hall on campus and it closed early) and student body. Didn’t want to even look at williams, although he was qualified in terms of his stats, because it was too remote. The only LAC he seriously considered and applied to was Wesleyan bc it’s, I think, the biggest LAC. He also looked at Carleton, Macalaster, Hamilton, Vassar, and Colgate. Didn’t apply to any of them. Ended up really wanting a mid-sized or larger university.
He’s now a senior at Tufts, where he applied ED2 after being deferred from Brown. He was notified two weeks before his tufts acceptance that he was a finalist for a full-tuition merit scholarship at USC, and also smaller merit $ at WUSTL, and had been accepted as well to umichigan, but he decided not to convert his tufts app to RD. Somehow, even though he pulled his UCLA app, he also was accepted. He’s met many students at tufts who were admitted to other amazing schools, but chose tufts. It’s been an excellent fit for him. So my advice to you, based on the experiences of my two sons who both chose schools that weren’t the highest ranked schools that accepted them, is not to prioritize prestige over fit. I’m not saying that prestige isn’t important, bc some ppl will argue it is potentially important for jobs, particularly your first few. But I know from my own kids’ college experiences, that fit correlated with their happiness and success (academic, personal, and extracurricular). Don’t underestimate the worth of fit.
^^ i have never thought of Wesleyan, while a great school, as being at the same level as Williams and Amherst. They are both harder to get into than Wesleyan, as is Tufts.
^Wesleyan receives over 12,000 applications a year. Roughly translated, that means 4,000 students a year who are not applying to either Williams or Amherst for one reason or another. So, it’s hard to say which of the three is genuinely harder to get into. I would say the same is true of Tufts which receives about 20,000 applications a year. Furthermore, what @RenaissanceMom says is true: there are definitely parts of New York City and the West Coast where Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams are on equal footing as far as “prestige” is concerned.
How are we sure it isn’t?
I can stick a thermometer into two cups of water and tell you which is warmer.
What repeatable measures are there to tell you which is more prestigious? Note: "Somebody else put them in an order that pleased them " is not repeatable.
Go there if it’s consistent with YOUR budget and values, blow it off otherwise. NEVER waste time worrying about what the other guy thinks.
@circuitrider "^Wesleyan receives over 12,000 applications a year. Roughly translated, that means 4,000 students a year who are not applying to either Williams or Amherst for one reason or another. So, it’s hard to say which of the three is genuinely harder to get into… There are definitely parts of New York City and the West Coast where Wesleyan, Amherst and Williams are on equal footing as far as “prestige” is concerned "
That makes no sense. The number of applications reflects not only aspirations for apply to top schools, but also realistic expectations about getting in. Amherst and Williams are reaches for almost everyone. Wesleyan and Tufts are getting more applications because they are getting applications from students who see them as a reach and ALSO getting applications from students who see them as a match (of course, they are not not a safeties for anyone).
Moreover, I go to Naviance and easily see that Amherst and Williams are far harder to get into than Wesleyan or Tufts, at least from my kids’ school. And we live on the West Coast and no, they are not on equal footing out here as far as “prestige” is concerned.
I really like Wesleyan and Tufts - both are great schools. I can think of many reasons to choose one of them over Amherst and Williams. Nevertheless, what you are claiming here is a bit of wishful thinking, IMO.
I agree with @ThankYouforHelp – - certain independent schools have a variety of relationships with different highly selective colleges, and good college counseling can definitely steer students in more productive directions. Having said that, I think the perception of Amherst and Williams is that they are a cut above Tufts, and probably Wesleyan, and more on par with Swarthmore. Whether their students are “better,” or “smarter,” or “more successful at getting into a good graduate school” is probably endlessly debatable. Having gone through this once, and preparing for it again in about a year or so, I think at this level, students should really concentrate on fit, on where they’ll be challenged and happy, not who has the most prestige. All of these schools are pretty prestigious.
Parents who believe that Amherst and Williams are better known by the general public than any other LAC in the country are understandably in the tank for their kid’s schools. The fact is, NESCAC college selectivity has been stuck at double digits while their older cousins in the Ivy League surpassed them on their way to single-digits over a decade ago (IIRC, Cornell is the only exception.) Don’t get me wrong, Wesleyan, Williams. Middlebury, Bowdoin and Amherst do exceptionally well for colleges no one can recall at the top of their head; their selectivity rates have never been lower and the Class of 2021 will probably enroll the most closely contested classes in decades.
I wish we could end this belief that acceptance rate is any sort of indicator of the quality of a school. It has a lot more to do with how many applications a school gets than with the quality of education. Sometimes people on CC appear to forget that.
@circuitrider "Parents who believe that Amherst and Williams are better known by the general public than any other LAC in the country are understandably in the tank for their kid’s schools. "
Who’s talking about the general public? The guy at the gas station has never heard of Amherst, Wesleyan, the University of Chicago or Penn. To them, the most prestigious school in the country is probably Notre Dame.
I’m talking about prestige in terms of elite job and internship opportunities, graduate and professional school admissions, etc.
And, I’m talking about leaders in their field. I’m talking about the greatest football coach in NFL history; I’m talking about one retiring governor and a sitting senator from the same purple state, both of whom are being talked up as 2020 presidential contenders; I’m talking about the composer and director of the greatest American stage musical in history; a sitting member of the Federal Reserve Board - Good god, man - I have to stop now, because I’m getting writer’s cramp.
Anyone west of the Mississippi who has heard of a 1600 student liberal arts college in Massachusetts and can differentiate it from the state flagship university with which it shares a town, has probably heard of Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury and Tufts, too. If two candidates for the same job, one from Wesleyan and the other from Amherst, have reasonably similar resumes, the Amherst guy isn’t going to have an automatic leg-up because he went to Amherst. I understand that this is a bone that Amherst people are reluctant to let go of; a lot of their identity seems to be tied up with being tiny and exclusive and a privilege to get into, but, people, believe me, are not as snobbish as they were forty years ago.
I think I’m realizing the above point through my sons’s experiences. My tufts son, an English lit major/Econ minor, is in an internship this summer at a leading technology consulting firm. His fellow 6 interns are students at MIT, Wharton (2), Georgetown, Yale, GW. What they all have in common is that they’re rising seniors who are at the top of their respective classes. So again, at this level, it’s not where you go, but what you do once you get there.
My older son, a Brown grad, just applied to neuroscience phd programs this past cycle. While interviewing at the top programs in the country, he met his fellow applicants. While many were from leading undergrad programs, some were from schools he’s never heard from, and he could see that also in the earlier classes bc their students and their undergrad institutions were listed. Again, what they had in common is that they were top students in their class with remarkable lab experience and high GRE scores.
My advice to high school students:
Pick a college where you think you have a shot at finding your peeps and making good friends; where you’ll have a blast in the classroom, extracurricularly, and hanging with good friends…all a part of a college’s vibe. Knock your academics out of the park, which I think is easier to do when other aspects of your life on campus click.
This is what both my sons found for themselves at their respective schools. They took their college search seriously and figured out what they were looking for, and it paid off. And because they did that, they were confident when choosing a school that wasn’t the highest ranking one to admit them. I know a few friends of ours thought we were crazy not to pull the “parent card,” but I felt that this was one of their first big life decisions, and I wanted them to own it. In our family, we are fortunate enough to be able to foot the bill, but our expectation and trust that they will make the most of the opportunity was clear, and neither has let us down. They’ve each made what will probably be life-long friends, established decent relationships with professors they loved, took challenging courses and did well, engaged in their college’s public service centers as well as other ECs that mattered to them. They worked hard but also enjoyed their college life.
Admittedly, I had also learn this lesson earlier, when I let my S1 opt to attend his private NYC school over Horace Mann, another, more prestigious NYC private. He chose his high school because he liked its more interdisciplinary approach and more relaxed vibe. And he thrived there in a way I know he would not have at Horace Mann bc the latter school’s crazy-intense atmosphere would have smothered him. I experienced this all over again with S2. He turned down our offer to send him to his brother’s NYC private for our local public high school, and again, for various reasons personal to him, that made sense. But the decision was his, and he made a good one.
This exercise was a good one: my sons gained confidence in their decision-making abilities, and my husband and I both learned to let go and to trust them with a big decision. Our respect for each other deepened. And the fact that their college experience is all they hoped has been confirming for them.
I blame jumbo.
Sorry for the typo in my above post: shld be sons’ experiences
@circuitrider Kind of a rude response. “I understand that this is a bone that Amherst people are reluctant to let go of; a lot of their identity seems to be tied up with being tiny and exclusive and a privilege to get into…” Was that really necessary?
I like Wesleyan, I know several students there right now, and I think it is an excellent school. I just thought you were overstating things things a bit. Yes, I do think that Amherst does open more doors than Wes does. It feeds a larger percentage of its class into top law schools, top MBA programs, medical schools, Wall Street jobs, PhD programs in virtually every academic field, Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships, etc. Wes does have a much larger presence in entertainment and media, although Amherst does produce a lot of successful writers.
I’m gathering from your response that you don’t believe in the concept of prestige except with regard to man on the street recognition. Well, if that is the case, Amherst, Wesleyan and Tufts are all far less prestigious than, say, Rutgers or the University of Arizona. After all, everyone has heard of them, and among their hundreds of thousands of alumni, there are some very famous people. For that matter, Cornell has the same prestige as Harvard. Both are Ivy league, after all.
If you want to take that approach, that’s fine. We just disagree.
Well, @ThankYouforHelp, I don’t think I said anything personally demeaning unless you so identify with Amherst that pricking some of its pretentious self-importance is being “rude”. And, I guess, if you’re going to assign strawman arguments to what I say, there is much to disagree about. It’s sad because I think NESCAC could be a force within the bland, university-obsessed, higher education landscape. That is - if - Amherst and Williams stop undermining the brand.
@circuitrider could you explain what you mean by “undermining the brand”? Are you referring to how they’re trying to become more corporate?