Tied with Michigan and Wake Forest
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities?_page=2
In the neighborhood with USC, Boston College, NYU,U of Rochester, and Brandeis.
How do you feel about that ranking and purported peer group?
Personally, i think Tufts should be ranking well above all of those schools except probably Michigan., so i am disappointed.
agree completely. I would rank over mich, wf and usc
I’m fine with #27 although I predicted incorrectly that they’d be tied for 23rd. Not sure how Wake got that high. I’ve known quite a few Wake undergrads over the years (lived in W-S and have family member that is faculty) and they just aren’t that impressive, at least not compared to the Tufts students I’ve met over the last few years.
Clearly Dartmouth’s meteoric rise from #12 to #11 is because you stole our admissions director.
With that scientific analysis, it must be so.
Others have opined in the past, that Tufts’ inclusion in the University category by USNWR (instead of in the LAC category) places them at a disadvantage, and that the number would be higher if in the LAC group. Certainly, as a university, among college counselors I’ve spoken with, Tufts is more in alignment with Rice, Emory, Vanderbilt and WUSTL than with Rochester, BC or Brandeis. At the LAC level, similar to Wesleyan, Haverford, Davidson, Colgate.
I fully concur with @Naspy58 . There are very few schools that have “twins” and are directly comparable. Tufts is bigger than most of the LACs, smaller than many national research universities, and generally very good at what is does but not doing everything. Just one of the many reasons that these rankings are more entertainment than science.
Why does Tufts need to be higher? Which school does it deserve to leap ahead of? If anything, UMichigan (which is is stronger in basically every academic field) should be higher than Tufts. Thanks US NEWS #PublicSchoolBias
That’s one of the problems with the ranking…it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
Michigan, where I attended a phd program, is exceptionally strong in many areas, including engineering. Actually, if I were considering schools simply in the Midwest, the only school I’d consider stronger is Uchicago, minus engineering, bc uchicago has a more selective student body and smaller classes, both of which I think affect an undergrad education more than any other metric. Likewise, tufts overall has a student body with strong stats and it has smaller classes than Michigan. At my sons’ high schools the stats of the kids who attended umichigan weren’t in the same bandwidth. At our high school, the stats required for tufts were the same required for NW, for example, but higher than JHU or Michigan. And these schools attract different kids. Partiers and those who wanted rah, rah sports at our local high school were more likely to attend umichigan or northwestern, two schools with heavy frat presence. All of which is to say, kids should choose schools based on fit. If comparing apples to apples, michigan’s match is northwestern. And let’s face it, at this level, all these schools offer an amazing student body and academics. You can’t go wrong as long as you choose the school best suited to you.
I agree with most of your assessment but I think there’s really no argument for placing Tufts in the LAC category. Certainly it’s much smaller than many schools in the Research University category (especially public ones) but, at the end of the day, Tufts really is a research university even if the undergraduate campus has the feel of a liberal arts college.
The two other things I’d like to add -
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Does this really matter, anyways? Rankings are all subjective at the end of the day; Tufts may not have the name recognition of some of these other institutions but those of us who are intimately familiar with it know it to be a great place.
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Compared to many of the institutions that we perceive to be our peers, the biggest area (as far as I can tell) that Tufts is behind is in the power of the alumni network. Part of this is the obvious - we’ll have a smaller network if we have fewer alums. But even aside from that, many of my friends who’ve graduated in the last few years and looked for jobs (even in regions/industries that have high concentrations of alums) have been disappointed in the amount of success they had in leveraging the Tufts network
As to 1), it only matters in this regard, at least to me: most Tufts students, parents and alumni are proud of the school the community it provides, and the educational experience and opportunities it confers. That is, WE all know Tufts is a place of understated excellence, we would just like others to know it as well. And as to 2), I think that goes along with the type of student Tufts attracts – non-arrogant achievers, which may not translate into an active, influential network, and that’s truly too bad.