I’m surprised they changed the ranking criteria so much that Wake fell 18 places this year. The upside is that it might be easier to get admitted in 2024.
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Hard to say - it’s still a school of those who can afford it and with a great name. There are several schools in this boat of - they’ve now gone from one level to another - if you really believe that.
I could see it not being good for admissions - but over time - not right away.
It will take a few years of people subbing in others instead of them.
At the same time, many of those that surpassed them are large publics and in theory it should be a different audience.
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If a kid was looking at, say, the U of Washington and Wake Forest… my advice would be the same this year as it was last year: fit and finances. The schools haven’t changed much, if at all, from one year to the next. It’s the ranking formula that changed…
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Pure speculation on my part, but if you were the kind of kid who picked out Wake because it has a great reputation for undergraduate education, and legitimately had it high on your list in a way you could demonstrate to Wake, I am not sure this is going to do much to change your mind about any of that. And those are the kids Wake was inclined to admit.
If you were the kind of kid who applied to Wake because it was ranked pretty high and you needed some less reachy schools but still wanted to be somewhere on the East Coast, maybe this will affect your reasoning. But those are the kids Wake was really trying to identify and avoid admitting.
So . . . I am not sure this will make much difference to many individual kids, even if say the application volume goes down a bit and the admit rate goes up a bit. But to the extent a few people of the second kind were basically fooling Wake into believing they were people of the first kind, and to the extent some of them now don’t bother–maybe it will help a little for people who were legit in the first group all alone.
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Agreed - as noted different audiences - but not everyone is as reasonable. But hopefully they are because while school selection can never be perfect, it’s dumb to go to a school that clearly wouldn’t be right for someone.
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its ridiculous that wake could fall by 18 places in a year… it is not the school that has changed it is clearly the formula for ranking that values public institutions and disvalues private universities with small classes. all part of the agenda toward diversity rather than true excellence.
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So diversity and true excellence are mutually exclusive?
not at all- but the issue is that us news seems to value one over the other. no longer valuing small class sizes, alumni giving or tenured professors reduces the quality of small, private schoolt
Where is all the outrange on the other rankings. They died a quick death 
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Actually, it does not. USNWR in fact has no ability to reduce (or improve) the quality of any school.
Believe it or not, Wake Forest has the same quality this week as it had last week.
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actually! it does reduce the quality as people (unfortunately) do take stock from the rankings and seeing public universities all shoot up, while the private schools drop makes this clear
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My son got into a good flagship state school as well as a comparable private school (not Wake). In the end, we couldn’t justify the 200k more for an equal school with similar earnings potential. We would have paid the 200k for a Duke, Stanford, or Ivy because those colleges do increase lifetime earnings on average.
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