<p>What about Cornell? ANyone think it will ever break the top 10 again? :)</p>
<p>Wake Forest should go up in the undergrad rankings this year as its law, business and medical schools all rose for 2010.</p>
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<p>Anyone have any ideas why Baylor’s application pool increased so dramatically relative to other colleges’? I would be as interested in knowing as anyone else, as I am a prospective student…</p>
<p>Tulane
Entering Class Year (applications)</p>
<p>1998 (7,783)
1999 couldn’t find
2000 (8,245)
2001 (about 10,000)
2002 (12,986)
2003 (14,107)
2004 (17,572)
2005 (18,666)
2006 (20,757)
2007 (16,969) <-somewhat of an anomaly due to being under water two years prior 
2008 (34,125)
2009 (39,920)
2010 (43,834)</p>
<p>*This was all for around 1,500 spots. </p>
<p>I think what Fallen and I have been getting at is that even if Tulane has a low yield (which as addressed in my previous post doesn’t mean too much), its rise in the collective minds of kids in the college search process has been staggering. Forgetting the fact that the stats of enrolled students have also been increasing dramatically year after year as well, the university is clearly gaining in national appeal. </p>
<p>You certainly can’t discount the appeal of the easy/free application. I think you just can’t chalk up these figures to saying that ALL it takes to gain applications is to reduce their cost to zero. Why wouldn’t everyone do it?</p>
<p>1998-2000 6% increase in applications over 2 years.
2000-2001 21% increase
2001-2002 30% increase
2002-2003 9% increase
2003-2004 25% increase
2004-2005 6% increase
2005-2006 11% increase
2006-2007 18% drop (big drop a year a later than you’d expect.)
2007-2008 101% increase
2008-2009 17% increase
2009-2010 10% increase </p>
<p>Over the last 5 years, that’s a 111% increase. Over the last 8 years, that’s a 238% increase. Over the last 10 years, that’s a 432% increase. Over the last 12, that’s a 463% increase. I’d say that’s a school with increased appeal and not just a free application.</p>
<p><3 the responses. I was one of the post Katrina brave. Ranking shmankings don’t tell you how happy we all are here. That puts Tulane top 10!</p>
<p>I know it’s bit late to say this, but</p>
<p>@highroller, why exactly your so-called “questional admission policies” can result in a decline of school? If you mean reputation among HS students, I can understand, but about academic and school quality? I can’t see the relationship.</p>
<p>And to those who continue hate WashU (because of its admission policies), I suggest you check this post. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064008696-post66.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064008696-post66.html</a></p>
<p>Well, I’d better copy and paste, otherwise people won’t see it.</p>
<p>Originally by Keepitcoolidge</p>
<p>Here goes:</p>
<p>i post on here every now and then. there was a thread just like this about a year ago. the title of this thread is about “what exactly did WUSTL do in the rankings?” so I’m going to tailor this post to rankings-related information and research.</p>
<p>1) it seems, purely from observation, that nay-sayers <em>often</em> tend to be a) students that didn’t get in; 2) parents of students that didn’t get in; 3) students at other similar colleges that love being a part of the establishmentarian Ivy Leage, thinking that any school that has forward momentum is somehow gaming the system.</p>
<p>2) If you look at the link someone posted about the historical USNews rankings, Wash U really hasn’t moved a whole lot since like 2002. It seems that 9th is the highest they’ve gone one year, but they’ve been hovering around 11 and 12 for the better part of a decade now. A decade at relatively the same places? And people keep talking about Wash U climbing higher and higher and somehow gaming it?</p>
<p>3) Wash U has a higher average SAT and ACT score than many of its competitor schools. Its impossible for them to “wait list top applicants” and still maintain amongst the highest test scores in the country. Sure, Wash U might wait list top applicants, but it also ACCEPTS top applicants. MIT and Cal Tech are probably two schools that have higher test scores than Wash U, and those schools probably don’t steal many applicants from Wash U. Of course, we all know that test scores are the only measure of intelligence and likely success.</p>
<p>4) Selectivity and acceptance percentage are such a small portion of a US News ranking, that a school’s selectivity has to change SIGNIFICANTLY for it to have a material difference in the ranking change from year to year. The actual acceptance rate (yield is no longer included in rankings methologies) makes up something like 1.5% of the aggregate ranking of college.</p>
<p>5) Waitlisting helps colleges even out their freshman class. Wash U has 5 or 6 undergraduate schools, each with their own enrollment numbers. Most colleges like Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, etc… have ONE or TWO undergraduate schools – they only admit one or two freshman classes. Wash U has to do this for 5 or 6 classes! How difficult it must be to coordinate ideal and actual enrollment numbers WITHOUT using a wait list to even things out.</p>
<p>6) Last year (or was it two years ago?) Harvard accepted 200 people from their Wait List. Penn and other Ivies were around 100 - 200. Why does Wash U take the flack for it??</p>
<p>7) Wash U received about 23,000 applications last year. Let’s say they admitted exactly 4000 people for an acceptance rate of 17.4%. Given their freshman class size, that’s a yield of about 35%. Somewhat low, but Northwestern, Emory, and UChicago have similar yields. Let’s say of those 4000 accepted people, 150 of them were accepted from the wait list. Accepting people from a wait-list helps to even out a freshman class. Waitlist-accepted people are more likely to say “yes” than a typical Regular Decision accepted kid. For ease of argument, let’s say ALL of the 150 wait list acceptances said “yes” to Wash U.</p>
<p>NOW… let’s say that those 150 people weren’t accepted from the wait list. Instead, Wash U didn’t use a wait list… and as a result they needed to accept 4450 (4000 + 150/onethird) people to get to the same freshman class size. That increases their overall acceptance rate to 19.3%. Which is only 1.5% higher than if they did use the wait list to accept people.</p>
<p>Clearly this does NOT make a significant difference in statistics, rankings, etc… especially considering that the acceptance rate amounts to 1.5% of the overall college ranking. So, here we’re basically talking about 1.5% of 1.5%.</p>
<p>8) I highly doubt that Wash U spends the time required it would take to: calculate “demonstrated interest,” think if an applicant is “ivy material,” or calculate the likelihood that someone from a given high school would go to Wash U if accepted. It would take an inordinate degree of time for how many applications they get. Ultimately it’s all guesswork and basically unfair if a school did all this “strategic” work. Perhaps I’m naive, but I believe that schools looks at a kid on his or her merits, not guess his or her intentions of going elsewhere. The kid applied to Wash U, he or she obviously has some degree of interest already just by applying.</p>
<p>9) Wash U IS accepting kids who are “ivy material” – that’s why their yield is so low! Kids who they accept are choosing the ivies instead of Wash U. It’s the sad state of a name-brand and bumper-sticker culture.</p>
<p>The most preferred college in the market is, usually, the school that attracts the most of the same type of kid on academic metrics (high rank in class, high test scores, etc). The school becomes more popular as simply another check-box on the Common Application for kids to apply to. IMHO, it’s honestly sad how generic this all is. I’m a firm believer of attending a school that YOU can change, not go to a school that you expect should change you. Contribute to a community and help that community move forward, don’t expect for a community to contribute to your well-being by coasting off reputations. Go to an off-the-beaten-path smart-kid school… like the UChicagos, the Rices, the Wash Us, the Emorys. Whenever you start looking at top-tier schools like the ones listed above, you’re not going to notice any material difference in the quality of your undergraduate education. There’s only so many ways you’re going to learn Biology or Poli Sci or English or Math or Physics in undergrad. Look at other variables that determine why you should go to a certain school.</p>
<p>I applaud a school like Wash U that has become more prominent and thinks about forward momentum. Why is it a bad thing to become more nationally prominent? Why do people suspect ulterior motives?</p>
<p>Keep in mind that popularity for a school amongst 17-year-olds is NO indication of their quality. Schools like UChicago, Wash U, and Rice are extreme victims of academic prestige =/= social prestige. If you remove “Peer Assessment” from the US News rankings (there is a link floating around the CC forums for this) and rank schools purely on quantifiable metrics — faculty resources, financial resources, graduation rates, test scores, etc — you get a different picture. Wash U, Duke, and Brown go WAY up, while other schools (namely Cornell, Stanford and Hopkins) experience a couple of points drop.</p>
<p>This can be debated endlessly, and I do not want to start any sort of discussion on the validity of removing peer assessment or even the validity of US News rankings themselves. I’m sure we can all agree that some of the things US News measures (faculty resources, financial resources graduation rates, test scores, etc) are at least somewhat important measures in determining school quality to some degree. Debate comes in into the WEIGHTS they put on certain metrics, including weights for peer assessment.</p>
<p>People hear “ivy league” and they automatically think it’s an amazing school. People say “I’ve heard XXX is a good school”, but they can’t tell you one oustanding program, anything about the curriculum, prominent faculty, important discoveries, what activities students do, etc. Some friend might have said “XXX is a good school” and that’s how some other guy heard about a school. It’s all about word of mouth, and what’s sad about colleges is that for most of America, a NAME is all they know… nothing more than a name. For people “in the know”, ie top company recruiters, grad schools, etc, they know which schools are really great, which schools consistently produce top performers, and which schools have great professors and WHY in certain fields.</p>
<p>I digress.</p>
<p>Changing the subject: If you go by USNews rankings (which admittedly are not the sole or necessarily the best determinant), it is interesting that the University of Pittsburgh appears to have made the biggest jump among national public universities over the past 10 years - going from 38 in 2000 to 20 in 2010. </p>
<p>[UC</a> in US News and World Report College Ranking](<a href=“http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/comments/99ucrank.html]UC”>http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/comments/99ucrank.html)</p>
<p>[Best</a> Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-top-public]Best”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/national-top-public)</p>
<p>“Pine Valley University (okay, it’s a fictitious university on a soap opera, but so what?)”</p>
<p>…and they left Llanview University out of the list???</p>
<p>It’s important to keep in mind that a school’s reputation can vary considerably depending on where you are in the country. For example, a relatively small liberal arts college like [Fairfield</a> University](<a href=“http://www.fairfield.edu/]Fairfield”>http://www.fairfield.edu/) in Fairfield, CT has a good reputation in the northeast, but is relatively unknown in the southwest. That said, the U.S. news resource that quakerstake refers to is a fairly good barometer of a school’s overall reputation.</p>
<p>Another underrated factor - the success of sports teams, specifically basketball. There was a College Confidential thread about this awhile back:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/477679-ncaa-march-madness-boosts-applicants.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/477679-ncaa-march-madness-boosts-applicants.html</a></p>
<p>Rodney - too funny! I always loved how the kids turned down Harvard or whatever for good old “PVU”.</p>
<p>Coming in a little late to this discussion… but wanted to repost a post I posted elsewhere in March, about schools such as Tulane using the personal application as a marketing tool to increase applications. It is FAR more common than people realize (the links to the articles can be found here <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064239111-post66.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064239111-post66.html</a>)</p>
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<p>Furman University, SC</p>
<p>Duke, USC, Penn, Rice. For LAC’s-Davidson, Holy Cross, Wesleyan.</p>
<p>Duke and Penn are both very highly rated. How much on the rise can they be, LOL?</p>
<p>this thread has started to get off the mark, imo…can the op repost?..I think it has missed the point…</p>
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<p>It’s nice to know that Tulane employs the same marketing tactics as such illustrious institutions of higher learning as College of Saint Rose and Mount St. Mary’s University.</p>
<p>^^^How about Wash U and U Chicago? Does that make it better for you? What an ignorant thing to say. The fact of the matter is that Tulane has successfully employed a strategy over the last 8 years that has netted them stronger classes than ever before, despite Katrina. It isn’t a matter of increasing apps, lowering admission rates or seeing lower yields. Those are known consequences of this strategy. What it is a matter of is increasing awareness, getting top students to take a look and apply, and then getting some number of those top students that never would have considered Tulane. This has been an unqualified success. You can be as snide and snarky as you want iamtbh, but it only shows you don’t have a clue what you are talking about or anything about marketing strategy.</p>
<p>Dont feed those ■■■■■■ FC.</p>