<p>how prestigious is tufts? I don't want to feel like I'm putting all the hard work and loss of sleep getting all As in AP and honors classes and a lot of activities all in the trash can.</p>
<p>Well where I live on the west coast it's not that well renowned - I don't know about on the east coast. And of course it is a great school, considering how hard it is to get in.</p>
<p>I never heard of it until I got to Berkeley...a girl on my dorm floor transferred from Tufts...</p>
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how prestigious is tufts? I don't want to feel like I'm putting all the hard work and loss of sleep getting all As in AP and honors classes and a lot of activities all in the trash can.
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It's a pretty decent school. Not as prestigious as Williams though.</p>
<p>Tufts is a fine school and is incredibly prestigious. If you're seriously worried that Tufts isn't prestigious enough, put the fricken US News and World Report down and get a life. There's so much more important factors you should be considering.</p>
<p>Hard to stand out when you got Harvard, MIT one city away, BC (very very popular school), BU (well known internationally), and etc...</p>
<p>You could say Tufts is in a rough neighborhood in that respect...</p>
<p>But in terms of academic quality, Tufts is going to be the winner among the schools that aren't Harvard or MIT. I'm sure if you asked any Harvard or MIT kid where they'd go in Boston if all of Cambridge were hit by a meteor, they'd all make a beeline for Tufts.</p>
<p>*Okay, the MIT kids would probably try to tell you that a meteor striking Cambridge would wipe out all of Boston, Tufts included...dorks :)</p>
<p>am I crazy to choose tufts over georgetown, even though I like tufts much better?</p>
<p>I think Georgetown's campus is a lot prettier and situated on a bluff in DC overlooking the Potomac River just steps to Georgetown shopping area. Tufts is in a nondescript town 6 miles from Boston.</p>
<p>tufts is very popular among people reluctant to sift through the variables of smaller, more branded, colleges like, Williams, Wesleyan or Amherst. No one has to explain why they chose Tufts, they just point to Boston. The average Tufts student is just that -- sort of nondescript. The fact is, if you want to go to med school or graduate school and want a place to escape on the weekends, you can't do much better than Tufts. Okay, maybe Georgetown. Or, Emory. It's really a slippery slope from Tufts back to Holy Cross, when you think about it.</p>
<p>I agree. Many kids are not attracted to Williams, Wesleyan or Amherst precisely because they are hours from any major cosmopolitan area. I cannot say that I blame them. It is nice to get outside the pressurized environment occasionally for a breath of fresh air and change of venue.</p>
<p>milkmagn,
You've impressed me in your other posts that you're a pretty smart fellow, but your concern about prestige has me questioning that perception. Tufts is absolutely a great school and there is no problem with choosing it over Georgetown (another great college). Please go where you will be happy and not where you think others think you should go based on their perceptions of relative prestige. </p>
<p>This preoccupation with prestige on CC really is turning a lot of heads in the wrong direction and heightens the risk for a lot of incorrect decisions. Listen to yourself and trust yourself....</p>
<p>I agree. Milkmagn, if you like Tufts so much better then maybe you should just go there! :)</p>
<p>I can tell you that Tufts moved up on our list after we visited there. I think it's about comparable in terms of prestige with places like Georgetown, Hopkins, Rice, Emory, and Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>i dont know, i'm from CT, and tufts is EXTREMELY well thought of and impressive.</p>
<p>Hunt,
I'd politely disagree with your statement above as measurements of prestige will vary noticeably depending on where it is being measured. Tufts may well out-prestige several of those you mention in the Northeast while the favor is returned (and probaby by a greater margin) in their home regions. </p>
<p>The reality is that only a handful of colleges have universal prestige (HYPSM) and that the others will swap places in any ranking depending on the locale in which the question is being posed. I include the non-HYP Ivies in this as they are great beneficiaries of the reflected glow of HYP and the Ivy brand, but if identified and evaluated on their own names, IMO the actual prestige levels of the non-HYP Ivies sag significantly and there are not great differences with any of the colleges you mention, not to mention others like Duke, Northwestern, U Chicago, Wash U, and ND.</p>
<p>Go where it makes you happy -public perception is something you create for yourself too. Yeah, no one may have heard of the school sometimes; I still get that from the general population, but from the hospital and the medical profession I get lots of smiley faces. All of the people I've met know about Tufts now and I make sure they remember how awesome it was :)</p>
<p>Hawkette, I guess I think prestige and selectivity are a bit more closely linked that you seem to think. For example, I left Duke and WashU off my list of comparables to Tufts because (if I recall the numbers correctly) they are both more selective than Tufts is.</p>
<p>hunt, I hear you, but the SAT differential between Tufts and Duke/Wash U is only about 35-40 points. I'd personally prefer Duke or Wash U over Tufts, but my more important point is that this preoccupation with prestige greatly overrates these modest differences in selectivity and leads students to places when they might have been happier and more successful somewhere else. </p>
<p>I should also add that sometimes I see prestige acting like a prison as students will choose "prestigious" colleges for the wrong reasons and then after they matriculate, even if they know they might be happier elsewhere, they stick it out because of the prestige of the institution. I hope you'd agree that this is a suboptimal result and overrates the value of prestige and how it affects (or doesn't!) one's ability to succeed in postgraduate life.</p>
<p>I agree with you--my first post was intended to promote Tufts as a good (and prestigious) place to go.
I do think it's reasonable to think about "peer groups" of schools, and how you group them can certainly vary depending on what criteria you use.</p>