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<p>My statement was in response to pizzagirl, it wasn’t a deliberate question. I meant to precede it was "yes, but… "</p>
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<p>WUSTL’s currently ranked 44 on the THEWUR 
(down from 41 in 2012.)</p>
<p>Let’s not put too fine of a point of it. The region that has historically cared the most about prestige and colleges is the northeast. They have historically overvalued their own region and undervalued other regions. (Of course, the same could absolutely be said of any other region – hey, if I wanted to be successful in Texas, going to UT-Austin or SMU would be a prime consideration – and of course the UC system.) Like it or not, however, the northeast are the “kingmakers.” Therefore, for schools to get on the radar screen of people in the northeast is a good thing, a smart thing. It would be silly for a school which HAS a good product not to try to market it effectively. I don’t see why they get scorned for it. Do I personally think Chicago’s “life of the mind” gets a little thick and pretentious? Yeah, sure, they’re a little full of themselves. But, so what? They made you look (so to speak).</p>
<p>Since the most popular schools can fill their classes three times with the same calibre of students (so they say), the other two thirds must find other schools.</p>
<p>Sigh. “Most popular” WHERE? It’s like the dreaded prestige question – it all differs by what part of the country you’re in. Anyway, why a board of smart people can’t understand that for many people in the Midwest, WashU would be a <em>preferred</em> choice over many of the Ivies – it astounds me. They seem to understand intuitively why the kid from Boston would prefer Brown over WashU but they never understand why the kid from St. Louis would prefer WashU over Brown. Duh, it’s what you grew up hearing about.</p>
<p>That was a euphemism for most selective. ;)</p>
<p>Xiggi,</p>
<p>Regarding marketing, I really don’t understand why you judge schools based on this. What constitutes “obsessive determination” with marketing and rankings? What’s the threshold here? What’s the “right” amount of determination? This also seems arbitrary and hard to define. The bottom line is, all schools care about the rankings, and they should, because the rankings matter. A school marketing less doesn’t indicate a moral high ground. Rather, this shows the school doesn’t have as much money flowing into its admissions department as another school. I think top schools that DON’T do this actually are not working for their own self-interest. It’s not good for the applicants, but schools should do this - the rankings and admissions have that much impact.</p>
<p>Regarding UChicago’s administrative non-disclosure, I agree completely, but these non-disclosures extend far beyond items such as admissions stats and CDS figures. (Trying to find post-grad statistics, info on faculty pay, etc. is hard to do.) Schools, however, have no obligation to disclose these numbers. External pressures, however, can force positive changes. See here, a dip in the rankings and interest in the College compelled UChicago to actually pay attention to its College, and led to positive changes for the undergrad. </p>
<p>Generally, Xiggi, your posts imply that schools should operate with some sort of vaguely defined moral compass. With all of the recent changes in higher ed (increased impact of rankings, increased pressures to justify escalating higher ed costs, etc.), I see no reason why this should occur. Schools now are more self-interested than they ever have been, and operate predictably in a market that is zero-sum and, increasingly, winner take all. Certainly, there are times where schools clearly cross the line (e.g. fraudulent reporting of data at Emory or Villanova Law), but pointing the finger at schools for not disclosing data they aren’t required to disclose, or for marketing heavily, seems pointless. All schools, in various ways, have shed their moral compass in this brave (or is it sad?) new world.</p>
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<p>This may be true of Northeasterners. It is absolutely not true of Midwesterners. Wash U is not on the radar of many Minnesotans, but it’s an extremely popular choice among Illinoisans. A friend of mine who teaches at the University of Illinois told me a couple of years ago that Wash U was the first choice of most of the top students in his son’s HS graduating class, by a wide margin. Only a few of them applied to HYPS, and somewhat surprisingly relatively few applied to Chicago. We speculated that might be because the city of Chicago has a somewhat negative reputation in downstate Illinois, and in any event St. Louis and Chicago are roughly the same distance from Champaign-Urbana.</p>
<p>Here in Minnesota, most of the top students choose either our own state flagship or the University of Wisconsin (where they get tuition reciprocity), or one of our local LACs (Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf are popular choices). If they’re aiming at any place beyond that, it’s usually Northwestern, Chicago, or Notre Dame. Yes, a few apply to one or more of HYPS, but not many. Minnesota is similar in population size to Maryland. In 2013, only 381 Minnesotans sent SAT score reports to Harvard and 292 to Princeton–two schools that require SAT Subject Tests of all applicants, so the number of Minnesotans completing applications to those schools must have been equal to or less than those figures. That same year, 925 Marylanders sent SAT score reports to Princeton, and 866 to Harvard. And Princeton and Harvard were nowhere near the most popular Ivies among Marylanders; 1,219 sent SAT score reports to Penn, and 1,153 sent SAT Score Reports to Cornell. Even more popular with Marylanders was the hometown choice, Johns Hopkins, which got SAT score reports from 2,065 Marylanders.</p>
<p>This is all far more regional than the conventional narrative on CC would have you believe.</p>
<p>Even in St Louis, WashU is not preferred over the Ivies. If you eliminated from the St. Louis contingent people who send their kids there a.) because it’s free to faculty and staff with 7 years service, and b.) people who want to keep their kids close to home and would send their kids to the best school in town even if it were ranked #526, the St. Louis contingent would be considerably smaller. It is rarely the top pick of the top St. louis students, but I’ll admit that could simply be people not wanting to go to college in their home town. I’ve met plenty of Northeasterners who don’t want to go to school in their home area either.</p>
<p>bclintonk, you can present data until you are blue in the face but I doubt you will ever convince the Ivy-enchanted that any other schools compare. If only we had the analytics for this website…I’d be very surprised if it didn’t skew northeasterly as well.</p>
<p>I think it’s a mistake to understand ‘most popular’ schools purely in terms of applicants. Better criteria, I think, is the incoming stats of the applicants, combined with the schools yield, and the number of applicants the school receives. </p>
<p>More people apply to CalState Long Beach than Stanford. It doesn’t CSULB’s more popular than Stanford is. Although it has a greater number of applicants, the incoming stats of its applicants is far weaker, and I suspect that it’s yield’s far lower too. Less people apply to Stanford because they know they’re not qualified to attend it, and will be outright rejected. It’s as simple as that.</p>
<p>Under the criteria I proposed above, I think we could pretty easily come to a consensus on which universities are the most popular, which should surprise no one, as being HYPSM.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s irrelevant to the OP’s situation. They visited WashU (I agree, it’s called WashU by everybody, WUSTL is a weird CC acronym) and they liked it. People with decen self esteem needn’t worry about “what’s popular” with everyone else.</p>
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<p>Please stop treating “the Ivies” as a bloc that is somehow mysteriously elevated over other colleges. Such a perception is REGIONAL, not national. </p>
<p>bclintonk, can you pull what are the numbers for Missourians submitting scores to WashU versus the Ivies individually?</p>
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Minnesota instead of Wisconsin? Tennessee instead of Kentucky?</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, you can find those numbers in the links to each state from the following page:
[The</a> 2013 SAT Report on College & Career Readiness | Research and Development](<a href=“http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/cb-seniors-2013]The”>http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/cb-seniors-2013)
In each “State Profile Report”, there is a table near the end showing “Institutions That Received the Most SAT Program Score Reports from Your Students”.</p>
<p>For Missouri students, here is the order of score reports to the T20 National Universities:
WUSTL (393 reports)
Harvard
Stanford
Northwestern
Princeton
Vanderbilt
Duke University TIP (scholarship)
Yale
MIT
Chicago
Cornell
Columbia
Duke
Penn
Dartmouth
Brown
Berkeley
ND
Rice
Georgetown
JHU
Emory</p>
<p>There is of course variation from state to state and region to region. HYPS are high on the score report lists for many states. However, from Indiana (for example), more score reports go to NU, ND, Chicago, and Vanderbilt than to any of the Ivies or Stanford. From Ohio, more score reports go to NU, Vanderbilt, Chicago, and WUSTL than to Yale, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, or Brown. Etc. Even if you look at tiny LACs, there are strong regional effects. From Minnesota HS students, more score reports go to Carleton College than to all but 7 of the T20 universities. From Colorado HS students, more score reports go to Colorado College than to all but 7 of the T20 universities. From HS students in Washington, more score reports go to Whitman College than to Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, NU, and several other T20 universities that don’t even make the list.</p>
<p>… I’m surprised, though, that for California, none of the Claremont Colleges even make the list of institutions receiving the most score reports. Harvard is 4th to last on that list. NYU gets more score reports from Californians than any of the Ivies do. The UCs and Stanford, predictably, get lots (more than 16K each). And notice that the last college on the CA list (Northern Arizona U) gets more than 10X as many reports (5964) than the first college on the MO list (WUSTL, with 393).</p>
<p>WUSTL Common Data Set:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.wustl.edu/policies/assets/pdfs/wustl%20cds%202012-2013.pdf[/url]”>http://www.wustl.edu/policies/assets/pdfs/wustl%20cds%202012-2013.pdf</a></p>
<p>“WUSTL’s currently ranked 44 on the THEWUR (down from 41 in 2012.)”</p>
<p>Says a UCLA student whose school is ranked 13th in the world according to THEWUR, above Columbia (14), Penn (15), Cornell (18), Johns Hopkins (16), Northwestern (19), Duke (23), Brown (51), Rice (75), NotreDame (94), Vanderbilt (106), Dartmouth (124), Georgetown(174). </p>
<p>If you believe that ranking, then by all means do it. But I think it seems drunk to me, and it’s time to go home. :P</p>
<p>I don’t see what is so fishy about the SAT scores. I would definitely pick WUSTL over some Ivies. Just because it’s not an Ivy doesn’t mean it’s any less competitive. I’d say it’s even more competitive that a few Ivies. My cousin got denied at WUSTL but was a cross admit at both Yale and Stanford. Also, acceptance rate has literally nothing to do with SAT scores. Of course, there is a confounding variable that correlates higher test scores with lower acceptance rates but other than that a school could accept 75% of applicants and have high average test scores so long as their applicant pool is that competitive and stacked.</p>
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<p>As always, the East Coast provincialism on this site rears its head in amusing ways. “Washington University in St. Louis shall henceforth be known as WUSTL because we really don’t know or care what people who know the school call it.” I think I am going to start calling Harvard HUBOS.</p>
<p>“My cousin got denied at WUSTL but was a cross admit at both Yale and Stanford.”</p>
<p>ram0276 nailed it. You can’t say “WashU is for Ivy rejects”. Heck, the Ivies are filled with Ivy rejects. I know that Penn was definitely known for being a school for HYP rejects. Does that make it a “bad” school? Not from what I see on this site.</p>