<p>Aren't athletic scholarships merit scholarships? They are based on ability (like a music, art or acting scholarship-even a physics or math scholarship). They (athletic scholarships) certainly aren't need based at all. I expect to see prestige on the Duke board blasting them for giving BB scholarships based on ability rather than need. I'll be looking for your post.</p>
<p>The WashU bashing is horrible on this board. I strongly dislike their practices, but they are still a great school. Due to WashU's rise in the rankings, it has seen a greater yield rate than it expected (sad to say, but many kids decide which college to go to based on prestige) and now they have to cut the number of admitted students for the next few years before they reach the point where no one can live on campus. There is nothing wrong with this, and most colleges would do something similar. It's sad that so many intelligent people assume that anything WashU does is to improve it's rank in USNWR. It's incredibly foolish to think that a college is so concerned with a rank that really means nothing. </p>
<p>Personally, I put WashU at the Emory-ND-Vandy-Rice-Georgetown level of nation wide prestige. Prestige has nothing to do with academic quality, but it does have some to do with recruiting and some other stuff. All these colleges offer merit aid. All these colleges are a level bellow the Ivies and will see many applicants applying to use these colleges as safeties. All of these schools (and Ivies and most other institutions) will try to adjust for yield. A college like HYPSM won't have to adjust for yield because it's incredibly high to begin with. However, most other colleges do. Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago (which is in the top 10 with a 1/3 yield rate, relatively high acceptance rate, large range in mid 50% SAT, etc), Emory, and others use "Why <em>_" essays to see why students wish to attend the institutions. A poor "Why _</em>" essay will probably spell rejection because it shows lack of research in the college search process and a lower likely hood that the student will matriculate. With admissions so competitive, it makes no sense for a college to accept a student who shows no interest in matriculating, and would be better for everyone to accept a student with slightly lower numbers who will actually go. </p>
<p>The one area I do disagree with WashU in is it's massive yield adjustment from what I have seen in my school. Last year, over 50 applied, 24 accepted, 10 enrolled, and 10+ were waitlisted. This year, they accepted one ED, two RD, and (it seems like they) waitlisted nearly every other student who applied. Of the two accepted RD, one was incredibly qualified and offered a merit scholarship interview. The other had pretty bad numbers compared to those waitlisted (Cs on transcript from 10th grade) and wasn't recruited for athletics. Most people think that WashU accepted him because it was a big reach and they felt that he wouldn't get in anywhere as good and likely matriculate. He is a very bright kid and had a good upward trend from 11th and 12th grade, but most elite schools don't accept students with multiple Cs in 10th grade. Granted, I don't know the full story, but it felt that some students were as qualified (if not more) but were waitlisted. Most colleges are using the waitlist liberally, but there is no need to waitlist more than a thousand students. It gives false hope for no reason. It's actually better to be rejected because it gives closure. Waitlist can mean anticipation till mid summer for some people. Just my humble opinion.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I expect to see prestige on the Duke board blasting them for giving BB scholarships based on ability rather than need. I'll be looking for your post.
[/quote]
Don't Stanford and NU give money to football players too?</p>
<p>Thank you, prestige. I think. I'm a bit wary because "feisty" is usually also associated with "old coot" but I'll take my compliments where I can get them. And just for the record, I don't think WashU, or any institution, is above reproach or that the humans in charge are infallible. But I don't think they ought to be demonized either.</p>
<p>it was indeed a compliment... no "old coot" references intended.</p>
<p>The Ivies do have the luxury of not bribing applicants to attend, including athletes. And no jokes about football...because in fact the Ivies offer more varsity Division I sports than any other schools, and are often nationally ranked (Harvard has the largest number of Division I teams of any school in the country.) Right now, for example, Cornell is ranked number one in lacrosse and Ivies end up in the top 10 in hockey, soccer, skiing, and a host of other sports as well. </p>
<p>One of the very good things about the Ivies is that everyone's financial needs are met, and a student from a poor or middle class background will not be discriminated against in admissions, as Wash U and others do. Increasingly, as well, the financial aid is in outright grants, with little or no loan burden on the students. </p>
<p>No one has said Wash U is not a good school, and I think most posters have it right. It is competitive with Emory, Vanderbilt, Rice, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and a host of other excellent privates which are the best schools in their respective cities. What rankles many is the ratings manipulation that is so manifest that it seems to dwarf the other attributes of the school's efforts.</p>
<p>Nice post Ventk. Although I may disagree with thier business practices, I still agree that they are a great school with great programs.</p>
<p>
I've written about that before. Rather than go through it again, I'll link to a Chronicle article about it. </p>
<p>Thanks SweetLax. I wanted my 2000th post to be meaningful and I guess it was. </p>
<p>WashU is a fine school. You can't confuse prestige, USNWR rankings, and academic quality. I disagree with the USNWR rankings, but I havn't met anyone who doesn't look at them with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, this WashU bashing does nothing and is a waste of time.</p>
<p>However, I do support USNWR debates because it's a fun topic to debate about. WashU is overrated on that ranking IMO. However,when you actually look at it, WashU should only be a few spaces lower with Emory and the like. You can't argue against it's rank when you factor in it's endowment (which is larger than several Ivies).</p>
<p>Actually, when I look at it, WashU is ranked right where it should be on the USNWR list. Of course, you're entitled to your opinion, as I am to mine.</p>
<p>Jazzymom--I don't have a child attending Wash U., but I have visited it and I agree with you--it's a very fine school, extremely flexible curriculum, very nice location and facilities and all the kids I know who attend are extremely happy. In my opinion, USNWR rankings are based upon criteria that favor wealthy, established, often eastern schools and I think that the actual rankings are often quite arbitrary. However, people pay a huge and often unwarranted amount of attention to them and thus, given Wash U's location and lack of history, I really have no objection if Wash U. is trying to improve its ranking. It is by no means the only school doing so.</p>
<p>Venkat--I have also visited Emory and it has many similarities to Wash U. I actually didn't like it as much, but that was just a personal feeling. However, I can see no reason for your claim that Wash U. is "a few spaces lower" than Emory and the like. I don't even know how you would go about making such a distinction--both are fine schools, with great strengths and intelligent, motivated student bodies.</p>
<p>Don't be offended redcrimblue, but I have to prove you wrong. The Ivies do give scholarships based only in merit disguised as "Dean's scholar" or other names to the ones than want in, and they also invite these kids to fancy dinners with the deans, send them t-shirts (always the wrong size :(), and give all expenses paid trips to visit them (my S was one of them). I won't call these "bribes" but a good business move.
And Wash U do give full rides mostly in grants to the students it want in (I know at least a couple of kids in my S's residential college with full rides because their financial needs).
College education is a business as every other business, every college wants the best students they can get with the less possible cost for them (they don't need to look at the financial records to know the students status, zip codes and parents occupations give them enough information). In this game, colleges and students are the winners, if the student makes the right choices, he/she will get a great education and many future opportunities, and the school that educated a successful student gets free advertisement and more "clients" for the years to come.</p>
<p>The skepticism about Wash U comes from well-founded questions about how a school with a 4.1 peer assessment can supercede schools (in overall rankings) with far higher rankings in this area. Ten years ago, Wash U was not even a blip on the list of elite schools. This is not to say that it is not a wonderful institution. But it has ascended to its current USNWR status by unabashedly using smoke and mirrors. No debate about that.</p>
<p>Simple: the school excels in areas that are not determined by the prestige factor. Does a lack of a very high PA (as a 4.1 is already very good) mean the school is bad? I don't think so.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I don't even know how you would go about making such a distinction--both are fine schools, with great strengths and intelligent, motivated student bodies.
[/quote]
I meant that WashU is on par with Emory and the like. I've always viewed WashU, Emory, and other colleges in that range to be just bellow places like Cornell, NU, and UChicago in terms of prestige. If what I said was unclear, my bad.</p>
<p>Gabriellaah, is improving the quality of students,faculty and facitities smoke and mirrors? This is the real deal. The fact that WashU has to market themselves to make this happen is simply real world. People on CC seem to want WashU to sit on their hands and simply wait for the top students to find them. WashU has invested alot of resources to earn their place in the rankings. No matter how many solicitations they may have to send out to attract students, the fact is that their student body is now competitive with the tradtionally held elite schools. They have to work harder and market better to attract these students because their reputation is relatively new, but they have the goods--- top students, top faculty, great facilities, and wonderful quality of life. </p>
<p>PS Gabriellaah, you have to stop using peer assessment as the only measure of a school's strength. I went to a top Ivy with top peer assessment but found that most of my teachers were TA's because the big shot professors were busy doing research (earning their peer assessment score) and had little to do with the undergraduates. Also, pa scores, like reputations take a long time to change. If Harvard started going down the tubes, it would probably take two generations before people would stop voting them as the top school because their status is so ingrained in the minds of both academia and laymen.</p>
<p>There's a whole thread about how Peer Assessment is arguably one of the weakest factors in the USNWR methodology. Take it out and WashU's ranking jumps up. Not that I'm advocating doing that, or removing the Financial Resources rating, which rewards WashU for having a sizeable endowment and spending it to enhance the quality of education there. </p>
<p>WashU's measurable attributes --- a high-quality student body (seen by SAT levels and percentage in top 10 percent of h.s. class),a high-quality faculty, low student-faculty ratio (7/1), financial resources to provide institution support --- are not an illusion. I believe that 150 years ago, had this same university (lock,stock, buildings and programs) emerged in a New England city-suburb and been able to have been included in a certain well-known athletic conference, it's excellence as an institution would not be denigrated as smoke and mirrors.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Jazzy and Nervous. None of the factors in USNWR are free from some level of manipulation/subjectivity. I believe that some administrators etc. who are surveyed in the Peer Assessment category will base at least a portion of their assessment on the same criteria laypeople might use--i.e. Ivy reputation, annoyance at Wash U's marketing techniques, favoring big state schools etc. Moreover, short of somehow assessing the actual educational experience at each school (which is of course, something that USNWR does not measure), I don't think that there is any way to come up with rankings that are particularly precise.</p>
<p>Bottom line for me is that Wash U. is an excellent school, continuing to make strides in the quality of the education it offers (right now, I believe that it is trying to upgrade its economics department) and the quality of the student body it attracts.</p>
<p>In the efforts to keep improving the quality of its student body, and of the faculty, Washington University will have to contend with the fact that the city, St. Louis, is deeply troubled. Today's (April 17) New York Times has a long, unflattering article about St. Louis, entitled "Hopes for a Renaissance After Exodus in St. Louis". See: </p>
<p>Here are a few excerpts:</p>
<p>"From a peak of nearly 860,000 residents in 1950, St. Louis had lost more than half a million people by 2000, a depopulation not unlike the devastating postwar exodus from Detroit."</p>
<p>"In the past few months, the public schools were stripped of accreditation and taken over by the state; the city was designated the most dangerous in the country in a national crime survey; and 15 police officers and supervisors were disciplined for giving World Series tickets seized from scalpers to friends and family."</p>
<p>"In October, St. Louis was identified as “America’s most dangerous city” by a private research firm that publishes an annual crime ranking. Though city officials and some experts criticized the ranking as simplistic, aggravated assaults with guns, considered one of the best gauges of a city’s level of violence, were up more than 30 percent over the past two years, according to the Police Executive Research Forum."</p>
<p>"This is a city that at one point was the fourth largest in the United States,” said Richard B. Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “The distance we’ve fallen from the status of being a major national city does affect St. Louisans."</p>
<p>Not that all is bad:</p>
<p>"And according to the city, the two-square-mile downtown area has over 9,000 residents — 6,300 more than in 2000.</p>
<p>“There’s a young middle-class movement beginning,” said James Neal Primm, a retired professor and author of “Lion of the Valley,” an extensive history of St. Louis. “My overall reaction is that there should be a lot more. But there is something going on.”</p>
<p>Dr. Primm’s grandson, Chris Termini, 29, lives in one of the new downtown lofts, in an area that was unfit for comfortable living just 10 years ago. At night, the sidewalk cafes are full. Joggers pass; dog walkers idle.</p>
<p>“We walk everywhere for food and entertainment,” Mr. Termini said. “It’s great.”</p>
<p>Of course, one needs to read the entire article. There is hope for St. Louis, but a lot of hurdles must be overcome. Time will tell. In the meantime, WashU has to cope with the reality and the image of the city.</p>
<p>The reason why WashU and a few other schools get more criticism than other schools which offer some merit scholarships is the amount of merit aid that WashU and others offer compared to a UoC or Duke.</p>
<p>"WashU's measurable attributes --- a high-quality student body (seen by SAT levels and percentage in top 10 percent of h.s. class)"</p>
<p>Doesn't negate the fact that WashU, indeed, has a high-quality student body, but would the quality of the student body be the same w/o the copious amount of merit aid?</p>
<p>First, let's stipulate that WashU is not really in St. Louis, but is in an outer suburb separated from the meaner streets by a huge amenity-filled park (Forest Park). It's in St. Louis the way Northwestern is in Chicago. That said, though, proximity matters and St. Louis is definitely a harder sell than bigger, more vibrant and cosmopolitan cities in the U.S. I once jokingly told my S that he could only apply to colleges in places I really wanted to visit and my short list was San Francisco (Berkeley is close enough), New York, Boston and Chicago. Maybe New Orleans, but then Katrina happened. He ignored me, BTW.</p>
<p>I do think that WashU is somewhat "geographically challenged" compared to other top universities. And it doesn't have the Ivy League label to give it a boost over this drawback, as does Cornell or Dartmouth -- which are not near any exciting city -- or Penn for that matter (since I understand Philly is also experiencing some bad publicity due to crime.) To overcome this, I think that as an institution, WashU has to continue to strive to offer an outstanding college experience and outstanding academics that will transcend reservations about the St. Louis area and continue to attract strong students and faculty. Going back to the title of the thread, I believe that's what the enrollment reduction is designed to do. If they can keep improving their facilities and the quality of the education by being able to increase spending per student, then top students, faculty, and ratings will follow.</p>