Note that when colleges self-select peers for institutional purposes they tend to be “aspirational.”
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Yes, but schools who were reciprocal in their actions when choosing Tufts back include:
UPenn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, JHU, WashU, Northwestern, Duke, Brandeis, Georgetown, NYU, Wake, GWU, Lehigh, Southern Methodist, BC, and BU. I agree with most of these schools, but I don’t see how Tufts is very similar to Columbia or Southern Methodist.
^ I would put Tufts below the ivies, stanford, mit, caltech, chicago, duke, jhu, northwestern.
It is not that @prezbucky is out of date as much as the fact that he just travels in the wrong social circles. 
Here is the “short list” of schools that Malia Obama visited for a major in Filmaking (in alphabetical order)
Brown
Barnard
Columbia
Harvard
NYU/Tisch
Princeton
Stanford
Tufts
UC Berkeley
UPenn
Wesleyan
Yale
Sources at Harvard have confirmed the fact that she will be enrolling in the fall and that Yale came in last place.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/which-schools-are-on-malia-obamas-college-list/
I think of Tufts as a LAC with some grad programs. There are exceptions, but one of the main things that drives academic rep – rightly or wrongly – is research output: what innovations are you coming up with to improve the world?
Now, many undergrads never take part in those things – probably most don’t. So the applicability of such work and plaudits to the undergrad experience/rep/quality is dubious. Sure, you might work with a famous researching, groundbreaking prof – maybe that takes place at the tippy tops – but outside the top-20 the likelihood probably drops. You might be in a class with some grad students who could share cutting-edge stuff, but again – it’s possibly inconsequential.
When you’re a school that focuses on undergrads, like (I think) Tufts does, that’s great for the undergrads. But fickle as it is, academic rep in the university world seems to follow the research impact, awards and money, and – more recently – selectivity, test scores of admits, yield, and other admissions variables. That, too, is not necessarily an input into the quality of teaching, IMO – maybe you have better classroom discussions, but kids still don’t teach.
I think as a LAC, Tufts is top-15 or top-20, easily. Heck, Tufts was a LAC and there are schools that still call themselves LACs, like Wesleyan, that have grad programs. Because what LACs are judged on isn’t research output or faculty awards, but quality of undergrad programs… quality of the undergrad experience. That’s probably where Tufts excels best: in those LAC measurements.
When the OP posed the question, I answered it like I see it: how it probably is, not necessarily the way it should be.
In terms of USNWR selectivity factors…GPA, scores and acceptance percentile…tufts ranks in the top 20 on the university list. Its students’ stats would place it in the top 5 on the LAC list. If going to college with bright peers is important to a student, then tufts is a good choice.
For my son, an English major/Econ minor, that’s important bc many of his classes have had fewer than 20 students, and are heavy discussion. He sat in on English classes at most of the schools on his list and the schools that most impressed him were tufts, brown, WUSTL & Emory. (He almost applied ED to JHU but did an overnight…met humanities students who felt under-appreciated and sat in on 2 Writing Seminars classes where no one spoke, such that a prof got irritated and dismissed the class 10 mins early. He thought he’d be miserable there.)
Many of the kids in my older son’s NYC private school and my younger son’s westchester public school had lists similar to Malia’s. In campus vibe and in student body, tufts is similar to brown and Wesleyan. Lots of cross applicants. My youngest son applied to tufts ED2 after being deferred from Brown (where his older brother attended, and he, too, applied to tufts). Just before he heard back from Tufts, and still had the opportunity to convert his application to RD, he was accepted early to WUSTL and USC as a merit finalist. He still chose to keep his Tufts app as an ED2 binding bc he preferred it over WUSTL and USC. He was also recruited by UPenn’s Kelly Writers House but he really didn’t like the overall pre-professional vibe at Penn, and knew he’d choose Tufts over Penn, so that didn’t sway him, either. He’s now a junior and is thriving academically, extracurricularly and personally. Best decision. It’s good to know what type of college atmosphere you’re looking for bc while all these schools offer a decent education, they really are different in terms of vibe and the types of students they attract.
Tufts has a 14 percent acceptance rate and is gaining prestige rapidly. A personal example: I applied ED1 to tufts and was rejected. I applied RD to Hamilton college and Lehigh and was accepted at both. I would definitely put Tufts a notch above Lehigh and some of the other schools Prezbucky mentioned. All of the schools being mentioned are highly rated universities, but as of now Tufts has caught up to Georgetown, WUSL, and Emory.
@prezbucky, there’s actually quite a bit of research going on at both the tufts main campus and at the medical school. I spent a long weekend with my son a few weeks ago at the beginning of his spring break. We took him and a few of his housemates to lunch. He’s the only non-engineering student in his apt. His friends are working in labs both on campus but also off. One of his friends is a chem-e/computational bio major and is working in a lab at the MIT Broad institute. Others are working at Harvard labs on the Longwood campus. So tufts students are able to work either in on campus labs or at neighboring university labs. Taking the T is really easy. Tufts is just 2 stops away from Harvard square and 4 stops away from MIT.
Also, my son, who as I mentioned above is an English major/Econ minor, took a physics course for non majors and although it’s supposed to be physics-lite, it was taught by both a tufts prof, who’s a leading cosmologist, and a MIT cosmologist. He absolutely loved the course, and found it challenging.
Finally, because of tufts’ location, lots of kids get amazing internships in boston. For example, one of my son’s friends majoring in IR had a year-round internship in the Boston office of a MA senator. This is one of the advantages of going to a school near a city. Tufts has a beautiful campus but has easy access to Boston and Cambridge. Its own neighborhood square…Davis Square…is also a wonderful place to spend some downtime–great restaurants, movie theater, shops.
I find it difficult to think of Tufts that way. Tufts was arguably a LAC in the past. But now it has as many undergraduates as, say, Johns Hopkins or Lehigh. And there are more graduate/professional students than undergraduates.
@obsessedwcollege “Tufts has a 14 percent acceptance rate and is gaining prestige rapidly.”
True Tufts has a 14% acceptance rate and its student profile is improving rapidly. However, is it gaining prestige? It has been falling in world rankings for 5 consecutive years (from 53rd in the world (2011) to 135rd (2017) according to TIMES) and almost every other world ranking and has stayed at a constant 27-28 on U.S. News National Rankings for the past 5 years or so while schools like Northeastern have had their ranking skyrocketed. I know that rankings are not the one and for all indicator of prestige, and I may be criticized by relying on U.S. News or TIMES here, but both rankings are what public opinion (on the street) usually relies on to determine a school’s prestige. (Not talking about environment, fit, class size here, only prestige).
Tufts has a medical center with a fair amount of status, a med school, a dental school, a veterinary school, add to that a college of engineering and of law and diplomacy. How could any one consider Tufts a LAC? It’s a LAC like Harvard or Yale are LACs.
@obsessedwcollege, not certain that you can compare Tufts and Hamilton as they are very different, albeit great environments. Congratulations on Hamilton as it has been a top-15 LAC for years and is a wonderful place; we have twin DD’s that may both be attending Hamilton next Fall - both are still sorting through a handful of acceptances and then will be pursuing a couple waitlists as well, but Hamilton is in a very small group of top choices.
Less like a lac than Dartmouth, perhaps?
One thing I get from Chardo’s link is that The College of New Jersey has delusions of grandeur. B-)
Tufts seems to be in a peer group with excellent schools like Brandeis, Bucknell, Colgate, Wesleyan, Wake Forest and Rochester.
They probably aspire to be with Brown, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Rice, WashU, Emory, etc.
Lots out outdated and skewed opinions on this thread. Tufts is always going to suffer in comparisons to large research universities because . . . (Drumroll please) it is not a large research university. It is a small university with a liberal arts college at its core. The best way to look at Tufts is to compare the size and quality of the undergrad experience to others without considering factors associated with graduate education, which the popular ratings seem incapable of doing. The ratings are also backward looking on elements like “prestige” as measured by people’s oudated views and don’t capture rapid improvements in the quality of a student body for example.
One thing that is undeniably LAC-ish about Tufts is its membership in NESCAC, an athletic league that otherwise consists entirely of undisputed LACs. But I suspect that this says more about the kind of school Tufts was in 1971, when NESCAC was formed, than it says about Tufts today.
A related question: is there some sort of rule that every university in Boston has to play in a different athletic league? Seriously:
BC - ACC
BU - Patriot
Bentley U - Northeast-10
Brandeis U - UAA
Harvard U - Ivy
Lesley U - New England Collegiate Conf
MIT - NEWMAC
Northeastern U - Colonial Athletic Assn
Suffolk U - Great Northeast
Tufts U - NESCAC
UMass Boston - Little East
Wentworth Inst Tech - Commonwealth Coast Conf
Think of the wasted opportunities here. Boston is allegedly both a “college town” and a “sports town”. OK, so where is the local college football rivalry, like UCLA-USC ? Wouldn’t schools like Brandeis, Tufts, and MIT be more naturally aligned with each other than with schools like Emory, Hamilton College, or Catholic University? For example, a little conference realignment could yield a gripping end-of-season Tufts-MIT rivalry game that could completely sell out Steinbrenner Stadium or Ellis Oval.
@Corbett I think it shows how little Boston academics care about sports, despite the town caring a good deal itself for professional ones. It is quite funny.
That said, the beanpot is a big thing (Harvard, BC, Northeastern, BU) in most sports, particularly hockey.
Head of the Charles…
@Corbett, most NESCAC schools, including Tufts, play many out of conference (more local) teams. Guessing it has to do with exactly what you’ve noted. Even in the 70s, in my sport, Tufts met up with 4 of the schools on your list during the regular season.