@SAY Again, more numbers. Just because “30% don’t graduate” doesn’t ultimately mean that you will too.
@SAY, the U of Chicago had an extremely low graduation rate (and low yield) back in the day as well (something like 3 decades about, roughly half of those who entered graduated and the other half dropped out or transferred out). That’s because it wasn’t terribly difficult to get in but the academics was tough. I don’t believe the classes have gotten less challenging at the U of C, but the quality of the student body has risen, so the graduation rate is much higher now.
The same dynamic that was taking place at the U of C likely is currently taking place at Reed.
So yes, if you go to Reed, you should be sure that you can handle the work, but if you can, you’ll likely do as well as if you went to Pomona or CMC.
Stanford you can’t be serious so I assume you are a student. As I said you or anyone else are free to attend the school but one shouldn’t be surprised that it effects how the school is viewed by prospective students/familes.
Actually, @StanfordSwag makes a very cogent point that you missed.
@SAY, I have to wonder if you majored in something quantitative/scientific/logical. Is the answer no?
There’s a study that shows that folks who are not from a disadvantaged background who get in to an Ivy/equivalent but attend elsewhere end up doing just as well as those folks who got in to an Ivy/equivalent and went there instead.
What does that say when “elsewhere” in general is less selective and have on average worse incoming students than Ivies? That seems to tell me that, on average, the intrinsic qualities of a student will determine his/her success, not the student body that surrounds a kid (on average because some folks will be affected, but some would be affected for the better–being a big fish among mediocre fish–and some would be affected for the worse). If that’s the case, then stuff like “average drop out rate” and “average test scores” don’t actually tell you much about whether a school is actually better or worse for any particular kid. Yes, the average student at State School A would be worse than the average student at Ivy B, but any particular kid would would not suddenly morph in to Mr. Average State School Student if they attend State School A nor would they magically morph in to Mr. Average Ivy Student if they attend Ivy B.
Substitute Reed for School A and Pomona for School B if you like.
But you’re right, most people are sheep, they seem to believe that the magic morphing actually occurs if they attend School A or School B, and that affects how they view schools A and B.
Purple I have nothing against Reed and in fact I know nothing directly about the school. Your explanation seems reasonable but it does exactly explain why Reed is ranked so much lower due to the lower quality of the student body. But today the quality of the student body and the ranking of the school are very closely linked so it seems unlikely that Reed can duplicate the path followed by the U of C unless it can quite dramatically raise it’s selectivity. As you may know a few years back the new President of the U of C made a decision to increase the number of applications.
2007
"Despite its long-standing, unique rejection of the Common Application and its marketing of an “Uncommon Application,” UChicago followed the lead of its new president, ex-Brown Provost Robert Zimmer, who encouraged the change. Discussions on changing the application began early last summer and continued through the fall, according to Vice President and Dean of College Enrollment Michael Behnke.
“We took note of the fact that two of our major competitors, Northwestern and (the University of Pennsylvania), had decided to accept the Common Application. That led us to do a little digging, and we discovered the impressive recent growth of the use of the online Common Application,” wrote Behnke in an e-mail to The Herald."
Behnke said the university’s transition to the Common Application was part of an effort to improve UChicago’s ability to compete with other top schools by increasing the number of applicants. “We received 10,340 applicants this year. That is considerably lower than the number received by our peer institutions. We do not expect the same jump in the number of applications as many peers experience,” Behnke said. “We do not try to be all things to all people, and our especially challenging essay questions will continue to make that clear. I do expect, however, that we will be somewhat more selective.”
AND HERE WAS THE RESULT.
2013
Applications to the College set a new record this year, with 30,369 students from diverse backgrounds submitting applications.
The total represents a 20 percent increase over last year’s figure of 25,307, continuing a longstanding trend of growing interest in the distinctive intellectual environment that the College offers
So this is why all the ranking do place such an emphasis on student selectivity and yield, and this leads to a very high graduation rate. The bottom line is that ranking are overrated but they do tell you something and after all college is now very expensive and both parents and students are just trying to make the best decision with relatively limited knowledge. It’s far from perfect but I don’t think you can blame most students/parents for generally choosing the higher ranked schools. After all it’s going to be hard to argue that a student who chooses Pomona over Reed is making a bad decision and I don’t think that makes them sheep. They are just making a rational decision based on the available information. The other funny thing about colleges is that generally speaking the higher ranked schools have much bigger endowments and give better FA.
@SAY, yep, the U of C went from disdaining the game to gaming the rankings harder than all but a handful of schools, and they certainly have achieved the results that they wanted.
I personally don’t think the U of C is any better or worse than it was before, however (I’ve always held them in high esteem).
There are other schools who have also gamed hard (and thus moved up the rankings) but which I still don’t think much of despite their efforts (because the opportunities they offer and the grads they turn out don’t really match the rankings that they gamed to achieve).
@SAY wrote: “Clearly very high acceptance rates tells you that top students for whatever reason do not want to attend these schools.”
First of all, 40% isn’t a “very high acceptance rate”.
Even leaving that aside, you seem to assume that applicants to any given school are evenly drawn from across the population of all applicants. This is not the case—many schools’ application pools are self-selecting. If School A’s applicant pool is smaller but higher-achieving while School B’s pool is larger but on average lower-achieving, school A and School B can admit classes of exactly the same size and quality with School A’s acceptance rate being quite a bit higher than School B’s. (In fact, School A can have a higher-achieving incoming class with a higher acceptance rate than School B under those circumstances.)
Also, gross admit rate isn’t really even always interesting. If you look at the IPEDS data, for example, you’ll find that some schools have incredibly varying admit rates for different classes of students, and the gross rate you see published everywhere isn’t actually informative at all.
Admit rate has always been a problematic and often misleading statistic. These days, with certain colleges spending massive money to increase the size of their applicant pool specifically so that they can have a lower admit rate, it’s even more so than it used to be.
I don’t really disagree but now it’s ranked 4th and has a near 90% graduation rate so it clearly worked and just about every other school is doing much the same thing. I do think however your underestimating the difference in the atmosphere among the students at high yield schools versus schools filled with students who only are attending because they didn’t get in to their top choices.
@SAY, the atmosphere may be different, but alumni achievements don’t seem too correlated with yield.
BTW, only 26 national U’s have a yield over 50%, and 15 of them are non-elites like Georgia Southern, Nebraska, UNLV, New Mexico, NDakota, NDSU, SDSU, and Florida A&M.
I don’t know about you, but I’d personally take schools with a yield below 40% like Rice/UMich/Cal/JHU/Tufts/WashU/CMU/Emory over schools like BYU and Alaska-Fairbanks where the yield is about 2-3 times as high.
I have no desire to get involved into this argument, but as a Reed student, I’d like to clarify that this:
Is not true. A huge portion of Reed’s class comes from ED, which means that a huge portion of Reed’s class is comprised of people whose first choice was Reed.
But we don’t even need to talk about ED. Anecdotally, I applied RD, but Reed was my first choice, together with UChicago. A friend of mine chose Reed over, funnily enough, Pomona. I think that’s a rare one, though, because the overlap in applicant pools is not actually that big. The overlap between Reed and UChicago, however, is huge (for Reed, that is–I doubt it’s huge by UChicago’s standards), and there are many Reed students who were also admitted to UChicago, including another close friend of mine. I also know people at Reed who chose it over Middlebury, Barnard, Amherst, and various other ‘higher ranked’ schools for different reasons.
Which is not to say that there aren’t people who came to Reed because they couldn’t get into Columbia or whatever–I’m sure there are many–but SAY’s assertion is far from accurate.
ETA: Okay, I’ll make one more point. I strongly disagree that a student body’s ‘quality’ is a function of the acceptance rate, but presently Reed does seem to believe it needs to become more selective, so it has been doing different things to attract more applications. Applications this year jumped to over 5000 from less than 3000 a couple of years ago. Reed is very bad at releasing admission data in a timely manner, but I think they expect this year’s acceptance rate to be below 30% for the first time ever.
FYI, my reply to another thread:
It’s instructive to understand the weighting of criteria that goes into the USNWR rankings.
Two factors make up 1/3 of a college’s ranking score:
- 22.5% of a school’s rank is determined by the outcome of a poll of HS guidance counselors + college admissions deans, provosts & presidents. It’s about as objective as an election for Homecoming Queen.
- 10% of the ranking is determined by “financial resources per student”.
‘Nerd’ components of a college’ ranking only comprise 1/9 of a college’s score:
- 8.1% SAT/ACT scores
- 3.1% highschool top 10% GPA
A college’s admit rate only counts 1.25%.
Just like in high school, the Queen Bee girl with the richest daddy always gets elected Homecoming Queen.
People obsessed with rankings also appear oblivious to the obvious: USNWR is a moribund publication which only survives by selling the annual college rankings. Of course they have to manipulate the statistics. They couldn’t peddle annual issues if the rankings remained static. It’s an enterprise whose profit model is built off of status-obsessed customers.
Ghostt if you read my posts I have clearly stated that Reed seems like a fine school and that it’s students get a fine education. Reed as an example was brought up by Purple not me. My point is only that while no ranking is perfect and that 5-7 places in any ranking means nothing that overall the rankings do have some meaning and student/parents are not irrational or sheep for choosing to attend the higher ranked schools. For whatever reasons Reed long ago chose not to participate in the rankings so it should be no surprise that the school’s rank has fallen. College is now a huge expense and it should not come as a surprise that parents/students want the “best” value for their money whatever that means. I think you guys are really blaming the messenger(USNWR) when it’s really the students/families and the schools that are driving this admission craze rather than the silly rankings. After all USNWR didn’t force the U of C to change their policy. The president did this and I’m sure he/alumni considers the results a huge success. The fact is that every top ranked school is quite selective which is part of the admissions mystique that the schools use to attract students. This is just prestige marketing just like you see in every part of life rather than something evil or sinister.
Well, Reed is a particularly good example of problems with a numerical ranking approach. Reed has some unusual characteristics, and attracts a particular type of student. You will not see students on CC identifying a college list that has the usual suspects plus Reed. Indeed, I would suspect that Reed has an unusually high percentage of applicants considering it to be their first choice.
To put a finer point on it, anybody who was consulting US News ratings to decide whether to apply to Reed or to Washington and Lee is a dummy.
@Trisherella isn’t that basically just the SEC + Big 12?
^^^ Bates has fabulous food, foliage and DIII football…
@SAY, actually, you first brought up Reed. Look through the thread.
@BTMell @Trisherella Does food mean campus food only or are we including the surrounding city? Surely no D3 program can rank ahead of a D1 program? Most of the 1-AAs can barely compete as is.
(yes, my plan is to completely derail this thread)
Bwahahahaha Well, I was thinking campus food and of course, no D3 program can rank ahead of a D1 but NESCAC football is a lot of fun. Good team spirit. Bates is routinely ranked in the top 10 for their dining services. It’s pretty much fabulous. And fall in New England? The best!