<p>What do people think President Monaco’s agenda will be in the short and medium term for elevating Tufts’ reputation, especially that of the undergraduate school? </p>
<p>Will his selection of a new Provost signal the direction in which he wishes to take the school?</p>
<p>^this post should be made a new topic. this thread is old and does not need to be revived</p>
<p>Weighing in on the Tufts “reputation” . . . this might help [College</a> of the Day! | uraccepted.com blog featuring news and commentary from Joe College](<a href=“http://uraccepted.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/college-of-the-day/]College”>College of the Day! | uraccepted.com blog featuring news and commentary from Joe College) I guess it’s just one opinion but seemed pretty interesting. Of course I bet opinions would be different for every college in Boston if we did this in the middle of February!</p>
<p>Is this thread still relevant? It appears to have a lot of good insights.</p>
<p>This died a long time ago, as well it should.</p>
<p>If it died, why was its death announced a year after the previous post? The info was still relevant for my D’s research.</p>
<p>I agree with gondaline. In fact, this thread should be highlighted in the Discussion Features at the top of the CC site for Tufts. It’s especially relevant for many parents who are making a $250,000 investment and must ask is Tufts worth it relative to Ivy League schools and their equivalents (eg Stanford and MIT) and lower cost options such as excellent in-state schools. The Ivy League schools, all of them, have enormous brand value (whether they deserve it or not is a separate question) and one can perhaps see paying a premium to attend one. However, Tufts does not have equvalent brand value, despite its protestations, and thus must be viewed in a quite a different light. </p>
<p>The fact that this thread has gotten so much attention suggests that it has hit a hot button and thus deserves to be included in the Discussion Features. I taught at Tufts as a visiting faculty member in the history department in the mid-1990’s and agree with one of the early posters here. See below her comments. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Tufts is a much better school academically than it gets credit for in the rankings;</p></li>
<li><p>Students who go there love it for its great academics and the super quality of life (not dissimilar in their feelings to Brown students);</p></li>
<li><p>Tufts still has more of a regional (New England) reputation than a national one, (not dissimilar in this way to Boston College);</p></li>
<li><p>It suffers from its proxmity to Harvard in the Boston/Cambridge area, whose shadow is so large that it nearly blocks out all light;</p></li>
<li><p>Tufts is more like a liberal arts college (for undergraduates) and should actually be compared more to some of the larger LACs like Wesleyan, Oberlin, Pomona/Claremont and Williams. It fails when compared to large multi-versties (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Duke, Chicago and Stanford) with whom it would like to be more positively viewed. And it doesn’t have the money or resources yet to compete as effectively as it would like with a range of true peer-like institutions (Brown, Dartmouth, JHU and Rice). It is thus stuck as a kind of 'tweener school", not unlike the excellent University of Rochester;</p></li>
<li><p>Recent alums, though happy with their Tufts experience, express some concerns that the school doesn’t have the name recognition or cache of either the Ivys or the top LACs and are sometimes frustrated in starting out in professional fields like consulting and investment banking.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Tufts alumni actually do really well in banking in consulting. I don’t know where people get this from. Hello, Goldman Sachs recruits for investment banking. Need I say more?</p>
<p>I think that placement has in large part been aided by alumni in banking (Jamie Dimon - CEO of JPM is a prime example). The university has done a good job of connecting financial alumni with students. McKinsey also has taken several Tufts grads recently. Soooo…not sure what people are talking about. Perhaps this wasn’t the case a decade ago (no clue on that). But things have certainly changed.</p>
<p>Buzzers hit it on the head. Plus, there is a growing trend of business firms to recruit from liberal arts schools and not out of undergrad business programs…</p>
<p>I disagree it has a regional general reputation now in 2013. I live in San Diego and everyone knows of Tufts as a top tier school with name recognition on par with any Ivy. We get lots of “wow- she must have had unbelievable grades and test scores to get in there”… and, well, yes, she did. She already got a job at a law firm here this summer, primarily because she is a Tufts student and they said they know its stellar reputation. Tufts profs are also often mentioned on NPR for their research, etc. Tufts definitely has made a name for itself as a selective top university in the nation, if that is important to you.</p>
<p>At my DD’s top NJ high school, I think the acceptance rate this year for Tufts applicants was noticeably lower than Cornell’s rate, even given that fact that fewer kids applied to Tufts than Cornell.</p>
<p>If increasing selectivity equates to desirability, then Tufts is moving upwards in esteem. I’m frankly dazzled by the stats and ecs of some of these accepted students.</p>
<p>^^In our school district, which is among the best in the northeast and which has traditionally had tons of kids apply to both Cornell and Tufts, the acceptance rate at Cornell has generally been higher, and many kids who applied to both got into Cornell but not Tufts. Not sure that anecdotal evidence like this means much, but it is what it is.</p>
<p>Academics, doctors, lawyers, and everyone in international relations knows Tufts and is seriously impressed with it. </p>
<p>If you want a school that will impress your plumber, go to a Big Ten. If you want a school that will impress grad schools, go to Tufts. (Nothing against plumbers, of course.)</p>
<p>Can anyone speak to the Psych program at Tufts? Getting into gradschools, getting jobs after school, getting internships while in school, etc? I’ve tried searching for any info on Psych in this thread but there are so many pages!</p>
<p>I live in London and Tufts even has a decent rep here amongst those who are familiar w US unis, in part because a lot of students there do exchange programs here. My cousin goes there and absolutely adores it.</p>
<p>This thread keeps getting resurrected, so people must be interested in the subject. The problem with the thread is that it contains some ■■■■■■ and lots of obsolete data. </p>
<p>It references a ranking from a simulation using a revealed preference model in a research paper by Harvard and Penn/Wharton grad students who seemed to be frustrated with the fact that schools (including theirs?) were attempting to appear to be more selective by inflating application counts and manipulating yield. Their model/ methodology is very difficult to game and arguably has more meaning than a ranking based on selectivity calculations. I have to admit, the more I play with this ranking method the more I like it -because of the transparency. It is what it is a ranking based on actual student choices. There are no assumed proxies or seemingly arbitrary weighting factors. You can choose to attach whatever meaning you want to it.</p>
<p>Since there is a new ranking available using the revealed preference model that uses a database of actual decisions made by high school students (rather than a simulation), I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison between the original (simulated) data (circa ~ 2000) and the more recent (actual) data (circa ~ 2010)</p>
<p>[Parchment</a> Student Choice College Rankings 2013 | Parchment - College admissions predictions.](<a href=“http://www.parchment.com/c/college/college-rankings.php?thisYear=2012&thisCategory=National]Parchment”>Parchment Student Choice College Rankings 2013 | Parchment - College admissions predictions.)</p>
<p>Based on the new revealed preference data, over the last decade, Tufts has risen from #40 to #23 on the combined LAC/University list and from #28 to #14 on the University only list. </p>
<p>After each entry in the ranked preference list, I have included the percentage of people that were admitted to both schools and chose Tufts. That percentage is followed by the percentage admitted to both schools that chose Tufts roughly 10 years ago.</p>
<p>Tufts increased its winning percentage (in some cases dramatically) against every school on the original list except Berkeley. A ? means the school was not on the original list and no data means that the current sample set did not have enough data. </p>
<p>1.Harvard 17% (1%)
2.Stanford 22% (2%)
3.Yale 16% (2%)
4.MIT 40% (2%)
5.Princeton 22% (3%)
6.U. Chicago 42% (?)
7.Brown 23% (7%)
8.Caltech No Data
9.Duke 28%(22%)
10. Penn 16% (12%)
11.Georgetown 33% (21%)
12.Columbia 50% (9%)
13. Cornell 28% (19%)
14.Tufts
15.Dartmouth 16% (11%)
16.Berkeley 30% (32%)
17. Notre Dame No Data
18.Vanderbuilt No Data
19.Rice 43% (?)
20.Northwestern 56% (30%)
21.Johns Hopkins 50% (?)
22.UCLA 60% (47%)
27.Virginia 70% (23%)</p>
<p>Here is the original study that Mastadon cites. It’s from 2004. It is worth reading.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf?new_window=1[/url]”>http://www.nber.org/papers/w10803.pdf?new_window=1</a></p>
<p>Here are the revealed preference rankings from that study.</p>
<p>1 Harvard
2 Yale
3 Stanford
4 Cal Tech
5 MIT
6 Princeton
7 Brown
8 Columbia
9 Amherst
10 Dartmouth
11 Wellesley
12 Penn
13 Notre Dame
14 Swarthmore
15 Cornell
16 Georgetown
17 Rice
18 Williams
19 Duke
20 Virginia
21 Northwestern
22 Pomona
23 Berkeley
24 Georgia Tech
25 Middlebury
26 Wesleyan
27 U Chicago
28 Johns Hopkins
29 USC
30 Furman
31 UNC
32 Barnard
33 Oberlin
34 Carleton
35 Vanderbilt
36 UCLA
37 Davidson
38 Texas
39 NYU
40 Tufts </p>
<p>I would like to see the more recent academic study that Mastadon cites. If it is from Parchment, I would be very skeptical of its methodology and its findings. Is there more behind the Parchment findings Mastadon? </p>
<p>What the data Masterdon cites is saying is that Tufts’ desirability has increased significantly and more than all other schools. That’s very unlikely. In fact, I bet that Tufts’ desirability is about the same today as it was when the original study was conducted.</p>
<p>Dan of Admissions, in the spirit of transparency, could put an end to this controversy by showing us the statistics that Tufts tracks as to the preferences of those accepted students who choose not to attend Tufts. I don’t think he will do that though. It will interfere with his marketing mission.</p>
<p>
Ah, no. OldScareCrow, before you continue bashing a school you know nothing about, you should learn about the school. (Why do you ■■■■■ the Tufts board, anyway?)</p>
<p>Back in 1980, Tufts was nearly bankrupt. In 2004, the endowment was growing, but was approximately 1/3d of what it is now. Tufts has vastly more financial resources now than it did a decade ago. More financial resources mean that fewer students choose Furman based on aid.</p>
<p>Moreover, the 2004 study is methodologically flawed: it only examines 3,240 students. There’s no way that you can get the fine gradations with that few students when you study 50 schools.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that U of Chicago has catapulted up those rankings too.</p>
<p>Oldscarecrow -How much would you like to bet?</p>