A decline from 27-29 this year (source:https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_page=2). I know that rankings do not matter (and especially USNWR) for the quality of the school, but still, as many on here have said, shouldn’t Tufts be increasing in name recognition instead of decreasing?
An increase or decrease in ranking does not equate to an increase or decrease in “name recognition”, especially as small as 27 to 29.
sadly they do count and it’s silly and non productive to pretend they don’t. Did Tufts not provide data to usn? Based of the stats of the accepted class they’re basing the rankings off, I would have assumed Tufts actually rose in the rankings. Reminds me of a story someone told me about BC and holy cross. Back in the day, holy cross was the more academically well regarded school but foolishly decided that sports would diminish their academics and reputation. BC felt the opposite. Flash forward, and I don’t think anyone would doubt BC is the superior school. Living on the west coast, I haven’t met a single who’s heard of HC. Hopefully Tufts doesn’t adopt a similar attitude regarding usn&w rankings
@bclv Yeah, a decline in rankings does matter and may even decrease applicants, yield, and stats in the future. lol funny thing is that Tufts does have a common data set with admit rate and scores posted this year (just like every year before) so who knows what happened.
I mean Tufts is now ranked even lower than Wake (Wake is a awesome place, but I just can’t see Tufts and Wake on the same level, not to say ranked lower than Wake). So, if it’s really the admissions stats not being reported properly, hope they fix it for next year.
Holy Cross scores more points (77/100) than does BC (70/100) in the US news ranking in their respective categories. BC’s size and prominence is sports do give it greater national name recognition. Both are great schools, just different models.
agree. Not knocking wake but I definitely think tufts is a step up.
hc and bc are both great, no doubt, but I’m just saying in regards to national image and rep, BC has vaulted way past HC.
I was very surprised by Tufts’ decline this year, but I still think it will make the top 20 within about 5 years. I really think Tufts belongs with Georgetown and WashU… definitely above UVA, UMich, Wake, the UCs, USC, and even CM. There must have been something strange going on with reporting data or something this year – it was the first year Tufts personally reviewed the SMFA applications so the addition of that could have augmented admissions. Average ACT went up to 33 for c/o 2021, which is above the aforementioned colleges (save CM, possibly). Acceptance rate is also lower than all except CM (Tufts actually has a lower acceptance rate than GT and WashU too).
Tufts is actually expanding its class size (up about 100 compared to last year), and the university is building new dorms and revamping residential life and adding a massive 100,000 sf. building dedicated to interdisciplinary studies, all happening in the next couple years. I overheard that the goal is to get the acceptance rate to sub 10 by the time c/o 2021 graduates… exciting to see what happens with this. My personal feeling is that Tufts is still on the rise (despite the rankings which I find somewhat ridiculous) and will soon rival the Ivies, much like what happened to UChicago. I wonder how Tufts plans to increase its amount of applicants in the years to come…
I can’t imagine that any of the NESCAC schools would want to lower their academic standards to the Ivy level…
@potentialtransfer2018 look at this thread from 12 years ago http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/35609-ranking.html when Tufts was actually ranked higher (in the upper 20s and 22 in 1994) and this thread from 2009 http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/390170-tufts-reputation-p12.html where a poster can be quoted saying “Tufts’ reputation from what I can tell and hear from different people has greatly risen in the past few years and is still on the rise.”
Has Tufts risen really? People have been talking about Tufts rising 5 and 10 years ago while now, 5 or 10 years afterwards, Tufts has actually dropped in rankings. I wonder what is happening. Sure, Tufts has new buildings and better test scores (that happens like every year. First time I visited Tufts as a high school sophomore in 2014, there were some construction projects going on campus and they had that record low 16% admit rate then), but will this improve anything, such as peer reputation?
I know rankings do not matter much, but it is what the common folk and everyone who doesn’t know about Tufts looks at. Though schools are supposedly “not-for profit”, every university is like an business and the ones that do not meet popular demand (higher rankings) will ultimately fail. As a Tufts student, though I love love the school and the atmosphere (I chose it over 2 “higher ranked” schools so I’m not ranking obsessed), I just want Tufts to be more highly ranked, better than how its only like 5 ranks above BU and BC. (CM’s admit rate is 21.7% (not 13.7% on google) as reported on its latest common data set and I got in CM but chose Tufts).
IMHO, three things are holding back Tufts: a relatively small endowment, graduate programs that are weaker than the undergraduate school and the small size of the school relative to bigger research universities. I think it’s difficult to compare the school to many of the other schools in its compare group. Caltech has a similar challenge. All this being said, the future looks bright for Tufts! The faculty and staff are world class and the students are clearly at a peer level with students from schools ranked higher.
@ReallyOk endowments aren’t directly used in US News rankings, and aside from that, I think Tufts has more money than it knows what to do with. Interesting to note that it does have a small endowment relative to its peers… even more shocking is that GT’s endowment isn’t even as large!
In general, a move of two places in the rankings (especially when two schools were tied the previous year) can be attributed to statistical noise.
But in this case, there appears to be an explanation. I found this note in the ASEE database:
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7324/screen/19?school_name=Tufts+University
I borrowed a friend’s US News account and looked up the raw data. The field for “% in top 10% of class” contained “NA”. The previous year it was 90%.
Whatever value USNews choose to plug into their formula caused Tufts to be ranked as 57th for the “selectivity” portion of the ranking - 12 places behind Boston University. Without knowing the exact formula one cannot predict the impact on the overall rank, but I suspect that it would take off a few points, which would explain the drop.
I noticed that Tufts admissions office did not fill out the field for “% in top 10% of class” for the class of 2021 (which will be used to calculate 2018-2019 US News ranking on September, 2018) again, according to the common data set submitted to college board. (literally tufts is the only school that left this section blank – all the other colleges & universities submitted the data)
This will influence Tufts’ position on US News ranking for another year, for the high school rank counts for 3.25 points of the entire score… (For 2017-18 ranking, if Tufts were to report the high school rank of the class of 2020 correctly, it would have been ranked at #25, not at #29. Even a point difference makes a difference among the top 30 schools)
I wonder what is happening with the admissions office recently… should someone send them an email…? Considering that Tufts peer schools’ – Carnegie Mellon, NYU, UNC, etc. – acceptance rates & scores improved, Tufts can be ranked outside of #30 this year, due to this mistake.
If Tufts is not fully providing the data, they should not participate in the absurd ranking system just as Reed has done. If they are participating in the system, mistakes such as this should not be happening every year…
@aegis400 Unfortunately, I believe this is willful. Sure, maybe we can start a new thread here on college confidential here or send them an email, but as @Mastadon indicates that “Note: Tufts no longer tracks high school class rankings for applicants.” I believe this is not a mistake. The “no longer” may indicate that they are well aware about this and will continue to do this in the coming years 
@Dawala282 I really wonder why… My only concern is that people who don’t know Tufts well will just look at the USNWR ranking and think that it is a far less selective and attractive institution than it actually is. While Tufts is ranked lower than Wake Forest, UVA, U Michigan – which are all excellent institutions by all means – I think Tufts’ true peers are Georgetown, Wash U, and Notre Dame. I mean for the class of 2021 itself, with its enrolled ACT mean 33 and SAT Mid-50% 1410-1540, Tufts’ admissions selectivity is comparable to those of Dartmouth (1400-1560, 30-34) and Cornell (1390-1550, 30-34). I believe Tufts should be ranked somewhere around #18-23, not at #29. Its endowment per student even exceeds those of Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon.
As we saw this year, Tufts had the smallest increase – ED application decreased by 100, while BU saw 20% increase in ED after its upgrade in ranking – in application out of all the top 30 schools (top 30 schools saw 10-15+% increase in application on average; USC hit 13% acceptance rate, 4% decrease from last year after its ranking soared up to #21. USC used to be ranked #40 when Tufts was #27 in the early 2000s. NYU whose ranking went up from #36 to #30 saw 20% increase in applications!!!). While I hate to say this, I feel as though Tufts’ decline in ranking did partially contribute to this, for the ranking sadly does influence many, particularly international student and parents’ college decision (fortunately, it did not sway me by a margin). It seems true that USNWR ranking influences a college’s # of applications received, annual donations, and perceived prestige by many employers and people. (sad, really!)
After all, I just wish US News ranking to be gone forever, but its influence seems to grow every year with the current college admissions frenzy… Regardless, Tufts will be always #1 in my book which I guess is the most important thing!
There was an interesting article in the Washington Post back in the fall of 2015 about the trend of high schools eliminating class rank and its implications on college admissions.
Interestingly, no mention was made of the implications of its use in, and the validity of, college rankings.
At this time, it was reported that:
20% of Tufts applicants supplied class rank.
33% of Dartmouth’s class of 2018 supplied class rank
44% of Swarthmore’s admitted class supplied class rank.
It would be hard to build a credible argument that a statistic that applies to a small minority of applicants is meaningful. I suspect that this is why Tufts chose to stop tracking it. I also suspect that Tufts did not consider the implications of not tracking the data on its’ US News ranking.
In terms of not reporting the data for the class of 2021, it is important to recognize that the the US News ranking is based on data from two years earlier. This means that last fall’s ranking came out after the admissions data was collected for the class of 2021, so the class of 2022 (this year’s admissions class) would be the first opportunity to reverse the decision based on knowledge of the impact on rankings.
I have no knowledge of whether or not Tufts decided to collect class rank data this year, but one could argue that the “correct” thing to do would be to de-emphasize the metric in the USNews rank given that fewer and fewer high schools are ranking students, and it is losing relevance.
@Mastadon Very interesting…!! Thank you so much for your post.
One thing, though, is that the class of 2020 stats (w/ acceptance rate of 14.3% & old SAT score mid-50%: 1370-1520) was used for the US News ranking which was published on September, 2017. (I am referring to the 2017-2018 US News edition where Tufts is placed at #29/ You can find that US News uses old SAT scores & class of 2020 acceptance rate for the current ranking edition: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/tufts-university-2219.)
Class of 2021 stats (w/ acceptance rate of 15% & sat mid-50%: 1410-1540) will be then used in the 2018-2019 US News Ranking edition which may place Tufts outside of top 30 for the first time (I don’t know what the repercussions might be).
Class of 2022 stats will be used in next year’s US News ranking (September, 2019), so really, if Tufts wishes to correct the ranking that will be released this upcoming September, they need to follow up with the US News immediately providing the class of 2021’s “top 10%, 25% of the class” through the revised Common Data Set (2017-2018). This set has not been published publicly, but based upon the college board’s information sheet that derives its info from Tufts’ common data set, it is very clear that the admissions did not provide the data regarding high school rank again.
(https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/print-college-profile?id=1245: You will notice that Tufts is missing high school rank section which appears in every other college profile page)
I also figured out that similar thing happened to Brown Univ. in the past:
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2014/09/09/brown-slips-two-spots-u-s-news-rankings/
These incidents reaffirm how unreliable the US News ranking system is, even though it is a globally read and cited source…
Depending on how one interprets the words “stopped tracking” Tufts may not have collected the data for the class of 2021, so they may not have the option of reporting it for this years CDS and US News ranking…
The Brown case is interesting. I wonder what percentage of Brown applicants come from high schools that provide class rank…
@Mastadon For Brown, the admissions team and administrations immediately responded to the ranking drop – you can see that people were very mad in the comment section – to correct its ranking, while Tufts seems to be unaware of the issue…