What Makes a College Popular

College Search & Selection
21

Popularity can be somewhat tentative, as manifested by some comparisons with the use of published resources from earlier years:

– Wheaton College (MA) had higher SAT scores than Notheastern.

– Bryn Mawr had higher scores than Tufts.

– St. Lawrence had higher scores than Bowdoin.

– Reed had higher scores the University of Chicago.

– Oberlin had higher scores than Duke.

– Amherst had higher scores than Princeton.

– Trinity College (CT) had higher scores than UC-Berkeley.

– Connecticut College had higher scores than the University of Southern California.

– Colgate had higher scores than Vanderbilt.

Some colleges may be out of fashion. Others may have substantively lost ground. Others may have held their own while simply being exceeded by colleges that have risen sharply.

Btw, I realize that some CC readers may not find older data interesting or potentially relevant. This post was for those who do. Colleges on either side of the above comparisons were chosen for their notability, a positive recognition.

(SAT scores do not indicate popularity by themselves, but are used here as a discrete metric that makes for convenient comparisons.)

22

@merc81 I can see a potential death of the non-elite LACs in terms of popularity, with a reshaping by adding in much more of a science focus for survival. But not sure about comparing Colgate to Vanderbilt, etc. I would say Colgate has become more popular than it was, and so has Vanderbilt.

The other point of interest is the apparent gap between usnwr “prestige” and popularity / recognition around the country, many more people know USC, UCLA, Michigan and Duke rather than WashU, Rice, Emory, etc,

23

@ClarinetDad16 : Most of the comparisons were constructed fairly neutrally, so their relevance will vary and be open to interpretation. In terms of LACs and STEM, I think they may have a PR problem in terms of communicating their mission to the general public. Relatively few would be aware, for example, that schools such as Bowdoin, Swarthmore and Hamilton graduate math majors at over 5X the national average. However, these schools would be unlikely to match your definition of non-elite.

24

Among high-scoring children of upper middle class, college-educated parents, LACs are quite popular.
They are popular enough, anyway, that one of the least selective NESCAC schools (Connecticut College) is rejecting 2/3 of its applicants.

However, most college-bound HS students apparently don’t want the kind of education that LACs offer.
The most popular major nationwide is business. According to research by ACT, Inc., 2012 U.S. HS graduates who took the ACT attended college a median distance of 51 miles from homes (http://www.act.org/newsroom/how-far-from-home-do-us-students-travel-to-attend-college/). Local institutions and “practical” majors are popular.

The higher the ACT scores, the higher the median distance travelled to attend college. At many of the most selective schools, a business major isn’t even offered. However, as the ACT scores get higher and the college-selection net is cast wider, the number of students gets ever smaller. Highly selective colleges may be respected (or “prestigious”) but it’s hard to show they are broadly “popular”. If they really were, then taxpayers ought to be clamoring for the government (or private benefactors) to build more colleges that are similar to the most selective schools. In fact, very few of them have been built in over 100 years. The colleges that many CC posters consider “best” (or most prestigious) occupy a niche market. Sometimes there are movements up or down within that niche (in terms of application numbers, or magazine rankings), for reasons that may be rather hard to generalize. NYU may be more popular (in some sense) than it was 40 years ago because crime rates are down and NYC has become a safer, more attractive city. UChicago may be more popular (within its niche) because it has increased its marketing efforts. Other schools may suffer a drop in popularity due to negative publicity from some events (like the Duke lacrosse scandal, if that had any effect).

25

I think number of applicants would be a far better indicator of popularity if it weren’t for the common application. Students would be careful about which schools they truly wanted to apply to because each application would take time and consideration. You could factor in such things as number of OOS applications for state flagships. As it stands many students apply to schools they are less interested in merely because they can. I suspect that many students apply to multiple Ivy League schools not because of their popularity but simply because they want to get into an Ivy League school. If they had to apply to each of them individually it would probably would provide a better indication of just how popular each Ivy School was.

26

SMH at the idea of number of applications as a measure of popularity. So UCLA is 3x more popular than Harvard? Apples and oranges. Just like they are both fruits, the schools are both universities and that’s about it. Public/private, highly selective/exceedingly selective, low avg. price (unless OOS)/high avg. price, and on it goes, including the fact that a large number for whom Harvard would be a “popular” choice don’t apply because they know getting in is hopeless. So there is that self-selection to take oneself out of the “survey”, a highly biasing factor. Moving to the broader picture, a fair number of schools don’t charge for applying, the essay requirements differ which creates higher and lower barriers to applying irrespective of the “popularity” of the school in a given student’s mind, there is offering ED vs. only offering EA and/or SCEA, and many other factors. Applications have far too many variables to be a useful measure in any way.

Besides, the whole idea is squishy, like asking what is the “best” college. One cannot quantify such an undefinable and subjective notion.

27

@fallenchemist you can shake your head but in one way or another college selection is a popularity contest.

Some variations on it are prestige and that impacts about 100 schools and a small fraction of students.

A much larger group focus in on popular schools.

And the largest group enroll in 2 year schools or local colleges.

Just like people vote for politicians or reality shows, the most popular schools are voted for by applications.

28

^^Let’s face it, there isn’t a LAC in the country that doesn’t wish it had more applications.

29

Shouldn’t you look beyond just number of applications to measures like yield, percentage of full pay students, etc.? Applying is one thing, but forking out real $ to attend should matter more. It would matter to me if I were an administrator at an LAC.

30

Another factor is the underlying economy of the region the school is located in. University of Rochester and Syracuse had much higher profiles 40 or 50 years ago before the upstate New York manufacturing economy collapsed. At the same time, southern schools like Emory, Florida and Alabama are much more highly thought of now than a generation ago, largely due to shifts in population and economic growth. In 1980, Emory was a safety school for Duke rejects, and was on par with Tulane. Now, it is a borderline top 20 school.

31

But as I clearly showed, it isn’t “just like”. They don’t charge one person $75 to vote for Steve and another nothing to vote for Mike on America’s Biggest Idiot or whatever is popular these days, just to point out one instance where what you are claiming is flawed. Perhaps in some EXCEEDINGLY rough sense, but as any kind of finely honed measuring tool? Not even close.

32

@fallenchemist you might not like that college is a popularity contest.

You might not agree how to rank popular schools.

But it is a reality and has been so for years.

Some schools like Tulane actively market for applicants. Even give away the application fee. Offer more merit than most any school. They want people to want Tulane and all the other benefits that come with being more popular.

33

What an odd thing to say. Are there universities out there wishing they had fewer applicants?

34

I never said there wasn’t such a thing as popularity when it comes to colleges, and I certainly never said a word as to whether I liked it or not. So please don’t put words in my mouth or assert I said something I didn’t. That is just rude. I focused mostly on your assertion that the number of applications is a measure of popularity. OK, I can try and make it even clearer why your assertion that the most applications means the most popular is flawed, at least as I think most people consider popularity as a concept.

When schools like the University of Chicago went on the Common application for the first time, are you really claiming they became 50% more popular than they were the year before? And that compared to a school who had the same number of applications as Chicago the year before and did not go on the Common App and had no increase in applications, Chicago is suddenly 50% more popular than that other school? If so, I see zero use for that definition of popularity. It tells you nothing other than you are more successful in getting people to apply. To take that a step further, any given school attracts attention and becomes a high choice of a student (which would be my definition of popular, btw) and therefore gets an application from that student (in many cases, not all as I will show and therefore not part of my definition), for a variety of reasons.

The University of Michigan is popular (a top choice) with Student A because it has a great sports scene. With Student B because it is in state. With Student C because it has a super reputation for engineering. With Student D because of the business school. They all apply, but it is popular with them for different reasons, which strikes me as the far more important thing for a school to get a grasp of. Now, one might be tempted to say, they all applied so even if for different reasons it measures popularity. But then there is Student E, who has Michigan as her most popular school, the one she wants the most, but she lives in Nebraska and cannot possibly afford Michigan. So she doesn’t even apply. This is certainly not uncommon. In fact it is quite common, as we see on CC all the time, and this is a very small slice of what is going on in the rest of the applicant pool. In fact CC skews affluent so it is no doubt more pronounced out there. This happens with schools like Harvard thousands of times a year in upper middle class and middle class families, and even more often with other privates that cannot afford the generous financial aid Harvard offers.

To me it is theoretically simple to measure popularity, at least how I thought you meant the concept originally. That is, What school would you most like to attend? You would just do a survey where you asked every high school senior (or maybe just those planning on going to college, probably) the simple question “If you could attend any college in the world without having to worry about getting admitted or paying for anything once you were there, which school would it be?” If you want to restrict it to the USA, that’s fine. I think that would pretty clearly answer the question of which school is the most popular. Now I think it is safe to assume that at the top of that list would be schools like Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, Berkeley, etc. I could be wrong, who knows until someone does this. But if I am right, then it certainly strains credulity that Stony Brook, who got 42,000 applications is more popular than Harvard, who got 37,000 applications that same year. Unless you want to just say that applications are the measure of popularity BY DEFINITION. In which case I am not sure what this thread is for.

35

@OHMomof2

@fallenchemist to the contrary, I’m going to say the answer is “No.” OTOH, I can’t remember the last time a major RU went out of business for lack of applicants to fill their seats. To some extent, they are big because they are popular and popular because they are big. LACs have a much more complicated pitch to make, especially west of the Mississippi.

36

@circuitrider

I didn’t address that question. At all. Where am I to the contrary on that issue?

37

^^What is the issue?

38

@fallenchemist - perhaps you should re-read what I posted. Totally not what I said at all.

39

Really? I could quote you ClarinetDad. But people can read and judge for themselves.

40

@circuitrider

You said:

To the contrary of what? I have no idea what you are saying I am being contrary to because if it is what it seems like you are quoting from OHMom regarding number of applicants being desired by a school, I can see nowhere that I even commented on that.