Well, there is that. I think all the old stock New England small colleges have had to devise different strategies in the face of shrinking markets back east and the near canonization of the large research university as the most widely accepted way of “going to college” among Americans and perhaps even around the world. There are languages where the very word, “college” (as opposed to, “university”) roughly translated means, “high school” and imposes tremendous obstacles to recruiting, especially in Asia. In the wake of all that, you would think there would be more of an effort to model NESCAC as an alternative to the colorless uniformity of most American, indeed, most world-class, post-secondary educational institutions.
Instead, I see Amherst and Williams adopting the opposite strategy. In an ill-advised bid for exceptionalism, they seem to implicitly accept the arguments of many small college critics who say that they are too small, too unknown and too inefficient to really matter in the world of new knowledge production and say, “Yes, that’s true. But, they’re not us.” When pressed to explain what they mean, it is nearly always some variation of, “We have more money.” Perhaps, that is the sort of thing to which you are referring when you say, they’ve become “more corporate?”
This is not specific to Tufts, but in regard the discussion above, I think that small LAC’s would help themselves by aggressively arguing for the LAC experience in general. I think the ubiquity of the USNews, Times, Shanghai etc. rankings, which by their nature overstate big research Unis (either because the top-line rankings combine grad and undergrad or because, as in USNews, they separate out Unis and LACs and the “top” brands (Harvard, Stanford) is the list the world most gravitates to.
LAC should be making a much stronger and mutually-concerted effort to argue the virtues of their programs (they probably are, but I don’t see it much.)
Amherst, Williams, Tufts, Wesleyan… None of these schools are having any trouble attracting applicants. Building the brand or whatever might take them into single digits acceptance rate, maybe…but why?
As an aside, the changes Amherst have made in the past couple of decades seem to mostly be about expanding access to lower income students.
@OHMomof2 That, I think, is an even better answer. It’s a bit distressing to see some schools work so hard to be able to say “no” to a larger number of students, when even their adcoms admit they could create another full class (if not more) of interesting, academically exceptional students from the “denied” pile.
The admission rate should not even be considered, really, unless schools are increasing their class size. Does it matter if Williams gets 20,000 or 40,000 applicants if a significant portion of the extra 20,000 are not “better” applicants? (BTW, not saying Williams does this, just picked a name out of the air. It seems to be more the modus operandi of the bigger U’s.)
I really dislike the way a lot of schools have been trying to gose the application numbers in order to job the admissions and yield #s. It really just rips a lot of famiies off for 50 or 100 bucks a head. (now here’s an idea: make it mandatory that schools refund the application fee for every applicant not admitted - that’ll make schools think twice about encouraging non-competitive applicants! ha!)