<p>FWIW I think Tufts is a great school, has a fine reputation, around here. A friend’s kid went there, loved it. I visited this summer, thought it was a great campus, I would apply there myself if I was doing that. Didn’t connect so much with my son for some reason, maybe he just thought he wouldn’t get in.</p>
<p>It’s one of those smaller universities, possibly doesn’t have the big bulk of famous faculty in every single area, a 'tweener between the LAcs and the big Us. That makes it hard to stand out in the university PA race. but it seems to attract high-caliber students nonetheless, in the way that the good LACs do without benefit of Nobelists on staff.</p>
<p>Who are you? A parent or a student? What is your point? Do you really find it so necessary to dig into every minute detail? Who cares? Is it that you just want to argue a point?</p>
<p>I am a parent whose S toured Tufts a year ago. Our tour guide was a student who was a sophomore at Tufts. She turned down MIT to go to Tufts…really. We have met other people whose children have gone to Tufts even after being accepted at other “higher” level schools, whatever that means, because it feels right.</p>
<p>The Tufts president says it best in his most recent interview: students that go to Tufts go there for the academics but also for the active citizenship, more so than other colleges offer. </p>
<p>Not every student is looking only for an ivy education, even if they have the scores to get into an ivy school. There are MANY factors that go in to deciding which college would be the best choice. My S, for one, is not going on prestige alone. He is making a rational decision based on many criteria, even though he has the scores for Ivy league, only one is on his list.</p>
<p>Prestige isn’t a driver for D1 (who would love to go to Tufts) or her parents (who’d be glad to pay for it ), but I accept that it is a driver for others, including the OP. However, the OP wasn’t asking about Tufts’s prestige relative to Ivies, or MIT, or Stanford. The OP asked how Tufts was perceived relative to schools like Wash U, Northwestern, and Emory. These are all schools that could be considered Ivy “backups”. Some people use them that way. Others end up preferring them. The one student I know at Wash U turned down Harvard. Anecdotal, but it’s current data, and it isn’t projected or modelled. </p>
<p>Personally, I’m rooting for all of those students using Tufts as a backup to get into their first choice schools. Leaves more room to accept the applicants who want Tufts because of what it offers. Makes for a happier campus.</p>
<p>I agree with you. However this “infinitetime” person that I am referring to just started his posts yesterday. He is not the OP, who started this thread three years ago.</p>
<p>This infinitetime person looks to have nothing else on his/her mind then to prove somebody wrong. Who cares what the numbers are as long as the student is happy, challenged and engaged. Infinitetime and Buzzers had a back & forth reply that was ridiculous!</p>
<p>If we happened to meet one tour guide who turned down MIT to attend Tufts, then there are probably several others out there like that! I’m very sure not every student at Tufts is an ivy-reject. Gosh, just think about the people who apply to Tufts because they want to be there, imagine that!</p>
<p>Since infinitetime was the one who dug up that old cross-enrollment chart, I thought it was worthwhile to point out that looking at cross-admits with the Ivy League wasn’t addressing the prestige issue that started this (ancient, but probably eternal ) thread. </p>
<p>The great irony for me is that D1 first got excited about Tufts after an hour-long chat with a student on campus. The student, a junior, pretty clearly regarded Tufts as an Ivy backup, but was absolutely delighted to be at the school. It was her enthusiasm and love for the school that sold D1 on Tufts.</p>
<p>Your posts are starting to read like a long stream of consciousness. I don’t know if you expect a reply. But if you do, please organize your thoughts more coherently.</p>
<p>The fact that both of you felt the need to point these things out suggests that you know that they are very rare occurrences. It’d never occur to anyone at Harvard or MIT to mention that they turned down Tufts or WashU. Because it’s a given that Harvard and MIT students have turned downed schools that equal or surpass the likes of Tufts and WashU.</p>
<p>Don’t try to make it seem as if your alma mater (Chicago) that much more “desirable” than Tufts, JHU, etc. just because Chicago has a higher yield by a few percentage points. The main difference between Chicago and the others is a lot of spam mail. </p>
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<p>Congratulations to Chicago for being a rankings whore that wantonly contributes to environmental waste. You’ve outdone WashU on this front. Good job!</p>
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<p>Really? Tufts should try to “lower its admissions rate while gaining in yield points”? I bet none of the Tufts administrators have ever thought of such an original and ingenious strategy. Why don’t you give the Tufts admissions office a ring? I’m sure they’d be all ears to learn about your brilliant tactics. </p>
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<p>Yes. High schoolers cannot possibly be as deep and profound as you are.</p>
<p>I had no intention of providing fodder to Infinitime
The thread I read about “Tufts Syndrome” caught my interest because Tufts is tied (with an Ivy) as my son’s #1 choice above other amazing schools that he likes. And, those(above) are indeed the facts at our competitive HS. He loves Tufts but I must admit that I am a bit resentful that we feel pressure to apply ED if he hopes to get in. He is a top student with lots of EC, officer of 3, and Volunteer as well as unbelievable recs and awards. 8 APs, 5s on all, and SATs 2330. My friends who went through this process last year (from our hs)warned me that he better apply ED if he wants to get in to Tufts as their children (currently at Duke and U. Penn were waitlisted at Tufts). I wonder if he applied reg and was waitlisted and called to tell them that it’s his first choice and would commit to go, would they take him off the waitlist?</p>
<p>It’s unfortunate that simply because this parent’s children were waitlisted, he feels qualified to guide you through your own child’s application to Tufts. There is a direct and obvious correlation between academic strength and admit rate. And there are many reasons beyond “lack of effort” to make an admission decision, even for highly qualified candidates. Your child should apply in the round that makes sense, which seems to be RD in this case.</p>
<p>Can you PROVE this “direct and obvious” correlation? How about a POINT-BY-POINT graphical representation on your blog? </p>
<p>Why should anyone simply take your word for it? You are certainly not a disinterested party, since you work for (and attended?) Tufts.</p>
<p>You can start by explaining the “anomaly” as presented in post #232. Assuming the anecdotal evidence is accurate, the statistical odds of what was described happening are infinitesimal.</p>
<p>Thanks for your reply Dan.
I have read both or those threads before and was particularly struck by your quote,
“My time at Tufts has taught me that our community tends to populate itself with students who tend to be unpretentious, grounded, and at ease with their lives.” This is a perfect description of my son and I think that is part of the feeling he got when he toured Tufts and one of the reasons he liked it best. His other top choice has a similar feel. Both schools have everything he is looking for as far as what he wants to study, learn, do in college and to prepare for grad school. Honestly, his GC at school suggested that he would likely get into Harvard as they take 1-2 every year from our school. He did not like the school when he visited and will not be applying.<br>
Naviance is such a helpful resource but, combined with its direct link to CC, it can also be a great stressor so I am going to stop looking for info on these sites as most of it seems to snowball out of control and I will just try to calmly wait out the admissions process. It would be nice if S gets into top choice but he has applied to 7 great schools that all meet his needs and I sure he will be happy at any of them…assuming he gets admitted.</p>
Any statistician could tell you that anomalies are normal. I can tell you that there is absolutely no such anomaly in our school’s Naviance data. I think Naviance and CC can be useful sources, even this thread can provide from food for thought if you separate the wheat from the chaff, but ultimately kids should apply to the schools they like best and can afford. And no one should be applying ED to a school that isn’t unequivocally their first choice. My son liked Tufts a lot, but he was not willing to limit himself to one school in October - and that was fine. Ultimately Tufts convinced him that it was the best fit for him, but there was no need to decide that before he’d really looked at his other options.</p>
<p>@KnowsNothing Naviance is only useful for getting a very vague answer to the question, “am I in the ballpark?” Trying to use it to do any more than that will only serve to stress, as you have already noticed. This thread in particular has taken on a nasty tone, and while I’m not a fan of the anxiety that College Confidential so easily whips up, I hope you will feel comfortable returning to ask questions of me when you need a more direct source of information than the speculation that is so easy to find and so hard to trust. </p>
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<p>This foolishly and incorrectly assumes that somehow these students were destined to be admits. No applicant to Tufts begins as an admit. It does not matter how strong your academic record it, being admitted depends on whether a strong enough case for advocacy can be made, a case based on much more than just the academic record. Some cases are stronger than others, which is the reality of highly selective admissions, and sometimes weaker students (by the numbers) present the best applications. Sometimes working in an environment like that feels like a gift, other times it feels like a curse. I don’t know which school this is, nor do I need to. We don’t deny or waitlist students to game yield numbers; you are, of course, entitled not to believe me, but that won’t change the reality of our process.</p>
<p>Finally read through the paper that was the source of the cross-admissions preference graph. I retract what I said about how the authors are constructing a ratings system that’s a non-gameable version of USNWR. This is an effort to rank colleges based purely on the preferences of parents and students. The authors do try to account for significant merit and need-based aid and legacy status. The student sample was drawn from the high school class of 2000, so the data really are old. It’s interesting in a theoretical sort of way, but I wouldn’t use it as some sort of gold standard of data to support sweeping conclusions.</p>
<p>There’s a brief discussion at the start of the paper about methods schools use to increase their yield. To illustrate, the authors use their data set to graph the probability of being accepted at MIT, Harvard, Yale and Princeton as a function of academic achievement, as measured by combined SAT scoring percentile. Admissions at MIT corresponds very very strongly with ‘academic achievement’. For Harvard, it corresponds, but not as strongly. Yale and Princeton both “engage in strategic admissions”, meaning that they tend to not admit some of the strongest students because they fear that someone else (meaning the big H :eek:) is going to vacuum up those students. The effect was strongest for Princeton, so I suggest that people here feel free to use the term “Princeton Syndrome” :D</p>
<p>Caltech (among others) is a problem for the authors, because of the self-selecting nature its students. There’s a lot of overlap between Caltech and MIT applicants, and some between MIT and e.g. Harvard applicants, but far less between Caltech and other non-techy schools. So the authors have to use an indirect comparison technique. Monte Carlo simulations are wielded! There is much use of alphas, omegas, and subscripts! USNWR, overwhelmed by the flood of mathy truthiness, quakes in its shoes! Wouldn’t you all love to see this kind of preference ranking get used by American Idol or Dancing With The Stars? ;)</p>
), but I accept that it is a driver for others, including the OP. However, the OP wasn’t asking about Tufts’s prestige relative to Ivies, or MIT, or Stanford. The OP asked how Tufts was perceived relative to schools like Wash U, Northwestern, and Emory. These are all schools that could be considered Ivy “backups”. Some people use them that way. Others end up preferring them. The one student I know at Wash U turned down Harvard. Anecdotal, but it’s current data, and it isn’t projected or modelled. 
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