Tulane is more selective and has higher test scores than schools ranked above it in the US News rankings. For example Tulane’s composite act score is in the 30-33 range, has a 27% acceptance rate and is ranked 41. On the other hand, Wake Forest has a composite act score of 28-31 which is considerably lower, has a 34% acceptance rate and is ranked 27. Another example is the University of Rochester which has an ACT range of 29-32 and a 36% acceptance rate. I think it is ridiculous that they are ranked so much above Tulane. I know Tulane’s ranking was greatly affected by Katrina but I am disappointed that the US news did not take that into consideration. I know rankings don’t really say much but it just seems ridiculous that they are ranked so much higher. I just don’t think Tulane receives the recognition it deserves. Does anyone think Tulane will rise in the rankings in the next few years?
Tufts, for example, has an ACT range of 30-33 as well which is the same as Tulane. I just don’t think Tulane gets recognized for the intelligence of its student body.
@fallenchemist you and another member(can’t remember the name) were spot on about Tulane last year, think you may have even underestimated how many spots Tulane would rise, any thoughts on where they will end up this year???
hopefully they don’t rise for two years. Don’t need a rapid rise in applications next year. 
Scores and admit rates are only 1 piece of the puzzle. Depending on who’s doing the ranking, other factors like grad rate, freshmen retention rate and starting salary are also factored
The rankings are so frustrating though because some schools, especially those that focus on areas like engineering and business are of course going to have higher starting salaries.
In the end, why does it really matter? Tulane students are students that want to be at Tulane, not students that applied out of prestige.
Ah, were it only that simple! And certainly I wish it was. For starters, there are many parents, far more than you might think, that would forbid their unique, special, smartest-in-the-whole-world little darlings from applying and attending anywhere but an Ivy or Stanford, and a very slightly less dogmatic group that insist on top 20. The child has no choice unless they want to pay for college themselves and disobey/displease their parents.
And then make no mistake, there are students who can’t get past wanting to attend the most “impressive” school they can. Some students believe that is the right way to pick a school, but other times I have seen students actually struggle with knowing it is stupid in most ways, but they just have that psychological need (flaw?) to have the best that trumps their better judgement. I have even known students that visited Tulane and loved it and got full tuition etc. etc. but couldn’t pull the trigger. Now in many of those cases the parents were probably influencing the decision, even when they didn’t say so. But still…
Now you could say that those students weren’t right for Tulane, but I think that is too facile. I think a lot of those students would have thrived at Tulane if they could have overcome this aspect of their personality, which is to be sure all too human and present in many. But it is what it is.
I think there are other, more subtle “evils” that the rankings cause, but to me the vast majority of the harm they cause are encompassed in those two issues. But certainly you could make an argument that Tulane is actually a better school because of the rankings, since as you imply the students that are there, at least the ones that had the choice of schools that were ranked higher (and there are quite a few to be sure), overcame or never had those issues and maybe that is why Tulane is so often noted to have students that just really love being there, more so than most other campuses people observe.
@fallenchemist
Your argument does not take into account that there is a subset of high scoring students at Tulane, who ‘chose’ it in part due to generous merit aid. If costs were equal they may well have chosen another school
This is true, economics of course play a crucial role in choosing schools, even in the super rich where their economics mean that scholarships mean nothing to them, other than possible bragging rights. Interesting that you have that situation of students choosing because of the sweet deal, and at the same time students that essentially walk away from $200,000 to do full pay at another school largely because of the perceived prestige, even many who are not rich and the money is important to the family.
It is hard to know motivations at a 100% level of certainty in many cases. We have the clear statements of students and parents in some cases regarding their absolute insistence on prestige, and after that I am sure there are competing factors, just like those students I brought up that are torn on the matter. There is a lot of generalizing and over-simplifying in these kinds of discussions, for sure.
Is Tulane any better or worse a school than 20 years ago when it accepted more than 3 in 4 applicants?
Much better, IMO. There were huge changes after Katrina that have transformed the school in numerous ways. The stats of the incoming students are also much higher.
To get back to your first post, you are pointing out, in many ways, exactly why any ranking system is complete garbage. Universities are large and complex institutions, and going to college means very different things to different people. USNWR has taken various factors, some of which are objective in their measurement such as admission rates and retention rates, and others which are subjective such as peer assessment. They then created a formula wherein they weighted each of these factors by some arbitrary fraction of 100% and added it all up. But if big time sports is an important part of the college experience to you, the USNWR rankings are useless. OK, that might seem like a trivial example to most, but I use it because it is a very stark one. Sports are totally missing from the formula, yet they are, obviously, a huge part of the experience at many schools. In fact, USNWR does use various endowment and budget parameters in its formula, so shouldn’t they be subtracting out the athletic budget from the total resources when they do their calculations, since they didn’t think sports were part of the college formula in any way?
The only real point being that almost every parameter they use can be shown to be flawed in some way, either in its measurement, its application, or both. Couple that with the fact that almost every student would, if we could really figure it out, have their own personal set of factors and weightings as to what would make a college great. In your case you highlighted test scores and acceptance rate, i.e. academic selectivity seems to be what is important to you, and perhaps especially the quality of your peers. Yet in fact that is a relatively small factor in the USNWR scheme, overwhelmed by a truly bogus survey of “what do you think about this school” sent to guidance counselors and university admins, and also dwarfed by their emphasis on graduation rates, which can be affected by a huge number of factors that go beyond what I think any reasonable person would consider related to the quality of the education one can receive.
So why are those schools ranked higher than Tulane? One could look at the inputs USNWR used for each of those schools and get to the technical answer, but I think the real answer is that it is because ranking systems are inherently flawed, idiotic, and should be eliminated if people would wake up and realize how worthless they are.
@seniorgirl94 rankings for what they are worth are a way of rating schools against each other. Would it be better if they simply had tiers and no ranks within the tier - probably.
That being said schools have a peer group and aspirational peers. So for Tulane to move up they need to do well within its peer group and then approach or enter the rankings between its aspirational peers.
For example, of these two groups Tulane squarely is in with these top urban non Ivy research universities, but has a lot of ground to cover to get in with its aspirational peers:
Aspirational:
Carnegie Mellon
Georgetown
Northwestern
Rice
Vanderbilt
Washington University
Peer:
Boston University
Emory
Miami
Northeastern
NYU
USC
@fallenchemist @ClarinetDad16 I know rankings are trying to measure the unmeasurable, but based off of the formula for the usnews do you think Tulane will move up in the rankings next year? I’m attending Tulane (the perfect school for me) next year so it obviously isn’t going to change anything for me, but I’m just curious if you think Tulane will settle in a position that reflects the caliber of students that attend it, because in my opinion the rankings have not caught up to the intelligence of the students.
@seniorgirl94, when one takes a long term look at Tulane their us news rank held very stable from 2000-2008 in the low to mid 40s. Which is where they are at now. Although there were many schools tied at I believe 41 and also 47. So they could move up to the high 30s as easily as they can fall to the high 40s…
Their aspirational peers are 20-30 spots above them. And some of the peers I noted are near Tulane, some 15 spots higher.
Do you see some of these schools slipping in the ranking for Tulane to rise?
What about the Katrina effect on 6 year graduation rates? I had read on last years posts that many thought the significant rise in usnwr rankings was due to that stat beginning to correct itself and move beyond the classes affected by Katrina. Additionally, I thought there were 2 or 3 years left weighing down Tulanes ranking. Thoughts?
It is really hard to say if Tulane will rise much further. I think it is possible they might manage to get up to 38 or so, but we are probably talking about fractions of points between the schools around it, so predictions are impossible when you don’t know what might happen with categories such as peer assessment, etc. I understand your frustration with schools that have lower stats being ranked higher, @seniorgirl14 but USNWR just doesn’t weight those categories strongly enough to push the needle in Tulane’s favor more than it does. Also, they use GPA and class rank in the calculations, I believe. And this is a category that has been misreported by many schools (not Tulane) since the beginning.
Schools are supposed to only report the unweighted GPA of the student, but a lot refuse to and report GPA’s such as 4.23 as being the average of the incoming class. I have no idea how much effect this has on the calculations, but this is the kind of thing that leads me to say that I can tear apart virtually every factor they use. But again, I get your frustration. A few years ago Tulane was ranked 52 and UC Davis 38. Yet Tulane had 25-75 SATs of about 620-700 that year, and Davis 520-600. 520!!! That is barely above the national average, and that means 25% of the students had lower scores than that! Yet they were reporting average GPA of around 4.0, which I will always maintain makes no sense at all, and is absurd in the extreme. And apparently things haven’t changed too much. They currently report a CR range of 510-630 (510!!!) and a GPA of (ding, ding, ding, ding ding!!!) 4.0! That is statistically very unlikely, unless the grading at their high schools is extremely lax. Anyway, you get the point, while apparently USNWR does not.
As far as 6 year graduation rates, @fontana I think this is the last year that is affected. It hits in two places on the USNWR factors list, one for the actual 6 year rates and the other for one of their most ridiculous fudge factors, the predicted 6 year rate. One of them uses a 4 year rolling average, and that one still is affected by 2012, the 6 year graduation year for Katrina freshmen. The other uses a 3 year average. This is all from memory, and USNWR does change the formula from time to time, although the tweaks have been relatively minor the last few years except for when they added guidance counselors to the mix a few years ago. But I think Katrina will be gone after this year, and the effect is certainly small this year. I mean, one could argue if it affected retention of students that started fall of 2006 and even 2007 as Tulane still recovered, but I think that would be wrong unless one can prove it. However, having said that, Tulane certainly has seen an improvement since then in the 6 year rate, so it can only help if USNWR keeps the ranking formula the same.
FWIW, I do not agree with the list of aspirational vs. peer schools. Now it is true that the list reflects schools that are more selective vs. schools more similar to Tulane in this regard, and if that is the definition being used, OK. It isn’t what I would take those terms to mean, though, at least not to a student looking for a school. Of course Tulane, like any institution be it a school, a business, or a charity, needs to see how it stacks up against others in any number of categories. That is a crucial part of self-assessment. But for the student trying to choose a school that is right for them, the factors used to create that list might or might not fit the criteria of many students. Creating a list of schools for internal comparative analysis is potentially very different than a student creating a list of schools. One need go no further than the fact that many students have both LACs and big research schools on their list of applications to know this.