They are, @NJDad68, but those numbers cited by President Fitts were for applicants, not actual matriculating students, while the W&M middle 50 are actual attendees. With schools like Tulane and W&M that apply to and get accepted to a lot of the USNWR top 20 schools, the applicant stats are inevitably higher than the final stats. Now Dr. Fitts was comparing applicants this year to applicants last year, if I read his message correctly, so what he is saying is fair and should translate into some increase in Tulane’s stats this year, when the class is finalized. And it is common for schools to report the stats of applicants as well as the final class, although personally I am not a fan of it. The bottom line is that the schools are not terribly different when it comes to the quality of their attending students, I agree. If you take the CR and M from Tulane’s CDS for the actual attendees for the latest class, it is 1230-1410. So there is a small but significant (statistically) difference in the two. The median tends to be in the upper half of that range, but it won’t be 1380 for Tulane.
@Arlmom2
Oh, I don’t think we disagree. Most colleges and LAC’s do some research, and some of them do it at a pretty high level, depending, as you very correctly point out, on the area involved. But as a blanket statement, a research university such as Tulane has far more extensive research programs with a cadre of graduate students in a variety of Ph.D. programs publishing in the leading journals in their fields. The term “research university” doesn’t refer to whether a school does any research at all, but instead is the accepted terminology used to convey those schools that have strong graduate programs. Unless I am confused, I don’t think that includes W&M. But just to say it again, that ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT mean that undergrads there do not have excellent research opportunities with their professors in many areas. Sorry I didn’t clarify that. I forget that not everyone slings the lingo around like I am used to, having spent a good part my career supporting scientists at “research universities”, as well as at other schools.
You are, of course, 100% correct in pointing out the very different surrounding milieus that NOLA and Williamsburg represent, to say the least!! But standing in the main quads of either campus, a student at either school finds themselves in what I call a “classic movie style campus”, one that has the architecture and feel that one associates with a very traditional campus. Of course Tulane has actually been in a number of movies, with NOLA becoming the leading movie center in the country the last decade or so. I don’t know if W&M has ever been selected for a movie location, but it certainly could just have easily conveyed the same kind of presence as to why Tulane was chosen for the movies it was.
For that matter Charleston is a lot less dynamic than NOLA as well. While there are some streets in Charleston where, if you took off a blindfold and asked “where do you think you are” I would have a hard time differentiating between Charleston and NOLA, that is about where the similarities end. NOLA is certainly larger and has far more going on all the time, for better or worse ;).
