<p>All we know of this student, at least from this post, are some stats. There is a reason there is more to the applications. We cannot see the essay or recommendations or anything else. It absolutely is not yield management, as was said in another thread Tulane has a very low yield (which despite Southlandguy’s comment there is not embarrassing when you understand how they approach admissions).</p>
<p>Tulane takes people with stats similar to Meg’s all the time. By stats alone she is certainly Tulane material. What reason would Tulane have for not wanting Meg if stats were the only criteria? There is a reason their average SAT for all attending students is getting close to 1400/2100, and ~70% of the incoming class will have graduated in the top 10% of their class. I advised Meg months ago when she was first wait listed to let Tulane know they were her #1 choice. No indication if she ever did anything about that.</p>
<p>Admissions all have the certain people they want. It does’t “make sense”, and there’s nothing to be mad about if a school waitlist/reject you. For example, as I said, Duke would send me a likely letter and accept me, Harvard would wait list me, whereas Rice rejected me, and UVA wait listed me. There’s no sense in the admission; there’s no qualification, but whether they think you will fit in the school.</p>
<p>Also, lest we forget, the entire premise of this thread, as embodied in the title, is completely wrong. Tulane may have moved down in the USNWR rankings based on the factors they use (and as has been shown they are not meaningful in Tulane’s case for at least 25% of the weighting), but who says that is even a good measure of what makes the “best” school, whatever that even means? There is an extremely compelling case to be made that Tulane is far stronger in almost any meaningful way than it was 5 years ago, and continuing in its ascension. Academically stronger students, exciting new programs, one of the strongest commitments to public service of any university in the country, amazing ties between one’s major and real world applications while an undergrad, just to name a few. Highest retention rates in the school’s history, exciting new faculty hires, and new facilities being built with more in the works to name a few more. </p>
<p>I think yield and USNWR rankings, while annoying distractions, are hardly hurting the school. The nicest thing about Tulane being ranked where it really “belongs” would be that everyone would stop talking about it.</p>
<p>I’m in the FB group for Tulane class of 2015, and there are loads of people I’m conversing with who have amazing stats. I can’t exactly prove this. </p>
<p>But, I did post this the other day, way before the discussion of Tulane “denying admission into qualified students” came into play:</p>
<p>You have no idea what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>The reason that Tulane can’t accept everyone who applies is very simple: 38k people applied, and they can accept only a little over 9 thousand because their expected yield and housing space issues… </p>
<p>Moreover, if TU were deflecting more qualified students, how come their stats are increasing dramatically? </p>
<p>Believe it or not, the world is not out to get you… Hate to break it to ya, but a 33 or whatever on the ACT doesn’t really make you a big deal. It’s just a test.</p>
<p>I know, smchls, he lost what little credibility he had by claiming those students don’t exist. He certainly cannot say they don’t, since he has no proof of that either, and it is FAR FAR FAR more likely that the ones that come on here are telling the truth the VAST majority of the time. That’s even besides the factual cases such as the Presidential scholar winners (not the Tulane merit award, the other one I cited) and the DHS winners. But to say that they don’t exist as a fact just sounds like someone desperate not to be shown to be wrong. I certainly never doubted that Meg was telling the truth about her stats and/or the schools she has been accepted to, and neither did he. Funny how he only thinks the others are lying. I will say again, if one proceeds on here under the assumption that nothing posted on here related as personal info can be taken as true, then almost all discussion ceases to be meaningful. Certainly when one sees red flags of a ■■■■■ or whatever that is different. But this is far from that kind of case.</p>
<p>Tulane’s yield was about 15-16%. Yield is the percentage of admitted students that actually attend. But again, so what? In the end it is the bodies that fill the class that count, and the class was fabulous by any measure. It was also 10% too big despite the low yield.</p>
<p>I dont understand what people’s promlems are. If Tulane is truely on a “downward spiral” then why post threads that come up as the first thing you see on the Tulane page. Although, I believe most of this information to be false, wouldnt you want to attract possible students rather than scare them away with your uninformed opinions. I doubt most of the people who slander Tulane have ever even been to NOLA.</p>
<p>Well spcampbell, it is entirely possible that this is one of our old “friends” that has continually tried to bash Tulane in the past come back under yet another name. Hard to say. But you are right, it is very hard to fathom what the motivation was for starting this thread in the first place. His first post didn’t even make sense because he talked about exploding apps or some such thing not fooling USNWR, but that isn’t something they even look at, so I have no idea what that was about. Nonetheless, he has every right to post it. IMO, and apparently some others, anyone with an ounce of logic that reads this will see the truth and, in fact, it does strengthen Tulane for those previously uninformed. So in that sense it backfired. I have had 4 PM’s from undecided students making fun of his line of reasoning.</p>
<p>haha I agree, I dont understand why he would post all this without doing any research. In the end its just embarrasses more though, so let him post all he wants.</p>
<p>I actually chuckled at his comment, because my mind just went straight to all the people I know–whether through FB or in real life–who received admission into TU with scores equal to or greater than Meg’s. Hell, I know kids who got into Tulane who also got into Boston College, Rice, GA Tech, Duke, Vandy, Emory, MIT–wherever. It’s silly just typing that sentence out; I can’t honestly believe people are claiming that TU is purposely denying qualified students for some secretive, evil reasons. Now, not all of these kids are choosing TU over those aforementioned schools, but TU definitely offered them admission, which is what this thread has turned into… To put it simply, if Tulane were to deny admission to every student who got into another top tier school, they wouldn’t have a school left…</p>
<p>
Yes. Very good points. I wonder what this guy has to say to this…</p>
<p>Be as it may, the context of this thread, Tulane’s MBA is now ranked 40 in US&WR and 35 in BW. What I can see is a willful effort from the Univ to pull itself up and compete at the national level. I’m certain that this attitude has spilled over outside the Business School too. I’ve also seen recent initiatives to rejuvenate Alumni relations, which means better employment opportunities in later years and more importantly, good guidance from seniors. On a personal note, I’m feeling very positive about coming to Tulane from India. The more I read about Tulane, the more I yearn to be a part of it sooner…</p>
<p>Obviously, I’m not going to join a big argument about this, because I find it rather pointless. However, I just wanted to point something out.</p>
<p>
This is true. However, admission rate plays a much bigger part, and yield and admit rate are directly linked. If a school has an applicant pool of 25,000 students, a 20% yield, and 2000 spots to fill, it needs to accept around 10,000 students. It then has an admit rate of 40%. However, if it has an applicant pool of 25,000 students, a 40% yield, and 2000 spots to fill, it needs to accept around 5000 students. It will then have an admit rate of only 20%. This makes a tremendous difference in rankings, and so it would be a large consideration for a school with a main goal of moving up the rankings.</p>
<p>I am not claiming that the main goal of Tulane is to move up the rankings. I am simply pointing out that any school with such a goal would need a lower admit rate. There are three ways to do this; increase the number of applicants, decrease the number of acceptances, or increase the yield. Schools generally maintain a relatively static class size, so the main efforts are on increasing the number of applicants (free apps, increased marketing, we see it with so many selective and non-selective schools) and on increasing the yield.</p>
<p>As to the actual purpose of this thread, I would agree that Tulane’s “downward spiral” was more of a singular, large drop resulting from the events of Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t actually fall a great number of places in the rankings, but the school itself took a big toll.</p>
<p>Thank you for trying to set FC straight about yield and admit rate. </p>
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<p>Unfortunately this isn’t accurate. Here are Tulane’s rankings during the years we’ve been discussing (starting with 1996): 38-36-34-36-44-45-46-43-44-43-43-44. (The source is given earlier in this thread.) Then in the last two years it’s fallen below 50 which (as we also observed previously) puts it outside of the top 100 American Colleges when you take LACs and SAs into account. What we see here, and have observed previously, is that Tulane’s biggest drops occurred in 1999-2000 (it lost over 10 places in just a few years, well before Katrina) and in the last two years, well after Katrina. The Katrina crutch is, clearly, extremely unconvincing as an explanation for the trend, which itself is quite definitive.</p>
The chart I had looked at only had ones in the 40s, so I never saw the ones in the 30s. So I suppose I am wrong, thank you for correcting me.</p>
<p>Still, since 2000, it doesn’t look like a lot of change. Not quite a “downward spiral.” Maybe vaguely sauntering downward, to steal a line from Good Omens, but I don’t put too much stock into rankings anyway. Now if only colleges themselves felt that way.</p>
<p>Because he fails to do his homework or understand how this works, he is also wrong about Katrina and its effect. As you can see from the same chart, Average Graduation Rate is an 80% subfactor of a 20% factor, or 16%, and Graduation Rate Performance is another 7.5% If you look down to where they explain all these factors, you can see they use the 6 year graduation rate over a 4 year average. So the effect of Katrina wouldn’t be felt mainly until a couple of years out and is actually at it’s peak now when we are approaching 6 years from Katrina. In addition to all that, it would be absurd to imagine that Tulane did not suffer in the peer aspect of the survey (about another 20% of the result) from the fact that the school was closed for a semester and the horrible images on the news for New Orleans, even when they had nothing to do with Tulane. These factors explain the drop in the rankings entirely as I have said over and over. Some people just do not want to acknowledge facts when they see them.</p>
<p>I certainly won’t respond to Southlandguy’s latest nonsense, because it makes it so clear he is being hyperbolic. I have stated numerous facts, he has stated none except that the yield is 15% and that Tulane gets a lot of apps and of course those things have nothing to do with rankings, and he has been wrong about so many things that I have clearly pointed out that it is useless to address his ranting any longer.</p>
I stand corrected. I suppose the CC conventional “wisdom” that acceptance rate matters a lot in rankings was off base. I could see how it would affect a few of the other categories, but not by a great deal.</p>
<p>Southland is clearly trying to get attention and a reaction out of all of the thread’s readers. Fallenchemist has done a tremendous service to prospective Tulane students and has been a revelation for Tulane. There is no reason to be contentious with Fallenchemist’s facts and observations. Southland, stop trying to make something a negative that clearly is all positive.</p>
<p>As I had feared might happen, the introduction of additional data points has served to confuse certain members of this conference. Here’s the gist of it, in the simplest terms: Tulane was ranked in the 30s in the decade beginning with 1990, in the 40s in the 2000s, and in the 50s (so far) in the decade beginning with 2010. <em>These</em> are facts, they are different from your <em>opinions</em> and no amount of propagandizing will change that.</p>
<p>The single biggest drop–again–occurred in the 1999-2000 years. </p>
<p>[S]orry, there’s no way that Katrina explains even the tiniest part of the fall in the 90s or up to the year 2005. And that’s when the bulk of Tulane’s slide occurred. Now, I will admit that the slide has resumed in earnest in 2010-2011, for what that’s worth.</p>
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<p>How is a collapse in the college rankings “all positive”? That’s a simple question, you ought to be able to provide a simple answer.</p>
<p>Sorry Billy, you were not corrected, you were tricked. Acceptance rate mattered a lot indeed for nearly the entirety of the rankings’ histories (and still does for many besides USNWR), but matter less now and part of the reason is schools like Tulane which attempted to game the system by leafleting the nation with free apps, just to run up their admissions stats. Talk about a backfire!</p>
<p>I guess math works differently for Southlandguy. No one was tricked, it is there in black and white for all to see. And were you talking about rankings other than USNWR? If so you should be specific. Everyone assumes that as the default.</p>
<p>As far as the slide in rankings in the 90’s, that is ancient history and I certainly don’t care about that. It wasn’t worth noting, but by talking about the hurricane I assumed it was obvious I was talking post 2005. </p>
<p>I don’t even care about rankings, I am just answering the question. But to try and “fix” something that happened a decade ago or more is rather silly to talk about, IMO. In fact this whole thread is fairly ridiculous. You seem to like sock puppets a lot though.</p>