@TheBigChef: I responded to a similar comment on the service academies a while back on another thread:
The service academies are not academic institutions per se, so you really cannot compare them to civilian colleges on that metric.
Seriously do I need a platoon leader that is computing the odds (and doing a nice accurate job of it) of him and his troops taking the hill (and surviving) in front of them…or do I need someone who is just going to do it.
I love Villanova, I really do. But before they won two national basketball championships, they were within reach of my above average kids. Now not so much.
Has anything really changed beside basketball ticket prices?
“Sadly, I agree with the above. There are many people who say Berkeley today isn’t what it used to be.”
People have been predicting and/or bemoaning the decline of the UCs in general and Berkeley is particular for decades. But somehow the Univ. of California keeps defying gravity. Didn’t we just finish a thread of more than a thousand posts about how UCs have gotten so competitive and the defacto (not theoretical) admissions standards so high that tons of top in-state students cannot get admitted - much to the distress of their tax -paying parents?
If UC Berkeley itself has gone downhill, high-end in-state applicants apparently have not heard about it.
@CU123: Platoon leaders are generally drawn from the leadership bucket not the academic bucket though, of course, there can be overlap. Our armed services are very strategic in how resources are used. Our son is finding that his skills and those of his fellow cadets will be used where they can be of most benefit. He will not be taking any hills.
Back to the discussion…
Oberlin.
@ChoatieMom you may think that, but it may not be the case…
I think the premise of this thread may be flawed. If each of the top 30 schools dropped one spot to make room for #31 to jump all the way to #1, we’d have a single “up and coming” school but none that were viewed as falling out of favor. Obviously the same is true if a single school jumps from 71 to 41.
Around here it does seem like Pitt is comparing favorably to Penn State of late. I’m not sure if Pitt is on its way up or Penn Stare is on its way down. I think it’s the former.
@ChoatieMom:
I agree that a lot more than academics has to go into admissions at a service academy and I would bet that the majority of kids who score a 36 on the ACT wouldn’t make it through the first week at West Point or Annapolis. That said, I was a little surprised by those ACT numbers at West Point (which are noticeably lower than the scores at the Air Force and Coast Guard Academies, I couldn’t find the numbers for Annapolis). With respect to my main point, I just get the sense that the service academies are not looked upon as favorably today as they were when I was in high school back in the mid 1980s. Maybe it’s just shifting political winds, a general decline in patriotism and increasing divides in the country.
PSU and MSU are different situations compared to places like Baylor. The victims of Sandusky and Nassar weren’t assaulted by athletes/students, and most of them weren’t students at the universities (none at PSU). I think that distinction makes the crimes committed by Sandusky and Nassar less personal and threatening to potential applicants even though it doesn’t make them less heinous.
I don’t think Michigan State is going to take a major hit from the Nasser scandal. Its undergraduate student body is 87% in-state, and although there’s some overlap, most of its students can’t get into its main in-state rival, the University of Michigan. So if not Michigan State, what’s the alternative? Most students aren’t going to go OOS. There’s Michigan Tech, a good (and probably underrated) engineering school, but that’s not for everyone, both because of its narrow focus and its remote location… There are commuter schools in metro Detroit (Oakland U, Wayne State). There are second-tier directionals (Eastern, Western, Central, and Northern). Grand Valley State near Grand Rapids is a pretty decent school that’s lately attracting more attention from Michiganders, but these schools don’t have MSU’s instantly recognizable nameplate, national profile, and breadth of programs—not to mention Big Ten sports, a big part of MSU’s appeal. And many people in Michigan are just fiercely loyal to MSU. Often it’s a multigenerational thing, with entire families having a significant part of their identity tied up with Michigan State and its sports teams.
The $500 million settlement is a blow to MSU’s budget, but I don’t see the faculty running away from the place en masse, either. People in the MSU community are angry and embarrassed that such horrible things happened within the walls of MSU, and that the people in charge were unable or unwilling to prevent it or to stop it. But that anger is directed at the individuals involved, not at the institution as a whole.
No you won’t see most faculty running away but the top faculty with offers are much more likely to leave.
“Top faculty with offers” are always a flight risk. I don’t see that changing, unless the budget hit is so severe that it impinges on their salary and benefits, research opportunities, or teaching demands.
I was thinking of Oberlin too. When a school has an ‘incident’ or series of them that bring attention to the school, it can make applications go up (Villanova’s basketball wins) or just attract a different type of applicants (Baylor football). I don’t think it changes the number of acceptances, just the type. Schools get through the bump, but may come out different in the end. Oberlin may have more high stats applicants, but no diversity at all.
My kids wouldn’t have applied to Oberlin before all the controversies about the names of food in the cafeteria or about how liberal is liberal, but they definitely wouldn’t have applied after all those things came to light. Neither D really likes controversy. It also caused one daughter to put all ‘those’ schools in the same ‘no way’ category. Too liberal, too small, too rural, too judgmental.
https://oberlinreview.org/16469/news/college-passes-enrollment-goal-for-class-of-2022/
Oberlin surpassed its enrollment goal for the class of 2022. Students of color and first generation students were both up slightly.
Based on trends, I’d expect the following to decrease in USNWR ranking:
WUSTL – Has been in a continual decrease since 2010, dropping from 12th to 18th
Lehigh – Has been steadily dropping each year or 2. Was 31st a decade ago, now is 46th.
UT Austin – Steadily dropping from 45th in 2012 to 56th today
And the following would be expected to increase:
Chicago – Steadily increasing from 15th in 2006 to 3rd today, although with only HP above, not much room to further increase
Vanderbilt – Consistent slow increases from 19th in 2008 to 14th today
Northeastern – One of the largest increases of all and still going, from 162 two decades ago to 96th one decade ago to 40th today
I don’t know how smart or accomplished the service academy students are going in, but coming out they are looking pretty bright. When it comes to producing Rhodes scholars the academies are in some pretty good company here.
Number of Rhodes Scholars 2003-2013 (Source: rhodesscholar.org)
1 Harvard University 347
2 Yale University 233
3 Princeton University 201
4 Stanford University 96
5 U.S. Military Academy 91
6 Dartmouth College 61
7 Brown University 51
8 University of Chicago 50
9 University of Virginia 50
10 U.S. Naval Academy 46
11 University of North Carolina 43
12 M.I.T. 42
13 Duke University 40
14 U.S. Air Force Academy 37
15 University of Washington 37
16 Williams College 35
17 Reed College 31
18 University of Wisconsin 31
19 Cornell University 29
20 Swarthmore College 28
I didn’t follow the Oberlin mess when it was going down… have read part of the old thread about it but not all of it. It seems otherwise like a good fit for my middle kid so I guess I’m hoping that the issues have been resolved there. I guess we’d better look into it more before going too far down that path. In any case, that’s the sort of thing that would have a much larger impact at a small school than a big one.
There have been some racial incidents over the past few years that I wonder whether they’ve had an impact in enrollment numbers… places like Mizzou, UC Davis and UCLA (antiSemitism).
I also wonder whether legalizing marijuana in some states has had any effect on where kids want to go to college. Are applications up in Colorado and down in Nebraska?
yeah, Swarthmore had a (slightly) significant decrease in apps after a lot of “drama” in 2013; but they also instituted an extra essay; my kiddo applied around then and did the extra essay; they removed it the year later and apps went way up. Hard to exactly pinpoint causes and effects.
@Data10 Contrarians would say the opposite of you in #36. One can’t expect continued increase or decrease. As they say in the investing world, “past performance is not indicative of future results”, especially on the upside where competition is stiff. 