Why is Tulane ranked so low?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Tulane University
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If CC has explained how colleges are selected for the “top univerisities” sub-forum grouping, I haven’t seen it. The “top universities” selection may primarily relate to popularity among CC posters and forum traffic, rather than eliteness or ranking on some website. Tulane received ~44k applications for the class of 2024, which was more than Harvard. With this many applicants, I would not be surprised, if it is a popular college among CC posters.

However, having a large number of applications and a low admit rate does not mean it is the same as another college that is thought of as “elite” by CC posters. If we want to determine how Tulane ranks or Tulane’s eliteness, we need to define how we are measuring those criteria. Any meaningful college ranking should explain what criteria they are using to do the ranking, so we can evaluate why Tulane is ranked at a particular number under whatever combination of arbitrary criteria the ranking is using.

What’s far more important is thinking about what you like/dislike about Tulane and whether it does well in the criteria that is important to you. An applicant who cannot explain why they like Tulane besides it being elite or ranked at a certain level is likely to be at a strong disadvantage in a holistic admission system. I interview students for a HYPSM school and regularly come across kids who cannot seem to articulate what they like about the school beyond it being a “good school.”

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If like/dislike determined whether a college was elite, U Chicago may lose it’s “elite” status, considering all the hate it seems to get on CC ?

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I’ll say it again. Tulane is a “top” college on CC. Tufts is not listed as such. That’s nuts., and says a lot about how CC chooses its “top” list. I have reached out about this in private messages to CC admins MANY times. Never got a reply. That’s what makes me think that colleges pay to be put on the list. Tufts wouldn’t do that.

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She’s a top singer.

No, I don’t really like her voice.

Both right. Sorry, why does this matter?

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25

My parents are immigrants from Bosnia and they really care about rankings :\

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If you do a search on cc this was explained in the past.

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The trick, then, is to find the right rankings. On Princeton review, Tulane is highly ranked on a large number of categories, including quality of life.

You could also explain context. There are 2,000+ non-profit, four year schools in the USA. A college ranked as #40 is in the top 2% of all colleges in the USA. Only 3% of all college students in the USA attend a colleges which are ranked higher.

I’m not sure that your parents have any concept as of just how many colleges there are in the USA and how many undergraduates there are. They are also likely unaware as to how many non-academic factors go into admissions to the highest ranked colleges.

Most of the academically most accomplished high school graduates do not attend a T-20 or whatever designation a person has for the most popular colleges in the USA.

There are about 500 students a year who get a perfect SAT score, 3,700 who get perfect ACT scores (so maybe 4,000 total since there is an overlap) and perhaps 1/2 of these have a 4.0 UW GPA. Yet these 8,000 or so students are not all attending the T-20 colleges - the large majority of these are attending a college without any T-20 designation. In fact, you can find a fairly large number of such students at colleges ranked at 100 or lower by various ranking systems.

The point is that students with top academics find their places in a very large number of colleges, and that the majority of students with top academics who apply to the most popular colleges are rejected, and the reasons for their rejections are not based on academics.

The second point is one which @privatebanker has often made - there are literally hundreds of colleges in the USA that provide a world-class education, and at which even the most academically talented students will be able to be challenged, succeed, and thrive. I’ll add to this that the rankings weight their factors so as to artificially magnify differences between colleges, so that the real differences between colleges, even based on the often meaningless factors used by ranking systems is generally lower than the actual variance in these factors.

It also takes a lot of manipulation of methodology to make sure that the colleges with the richest and most influential alumni stay at the top of the rankings…

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Sigh.

If any prospective applicant would like to hear about how my D is receiving an “elite” education at Tulane, feel free to message me. If you would prefer to read perceptions from those with no direct experience or knowledge, feel free to continue reading this thread.

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@MomDadDogCat – I’m sympathetic as the daughter of immigrants myself. I agree they are typically ranking obsessed as this is often their definition of success and measuring stick for good parenting :slight_smile: Things here in the U.S. are a lot more fluid here and MWolf’s post is very accurate on the ground realities. Many ‘top tier’ students have the intent of going to graduate school, and therefore don’t want to spend $75K a year on their undergrad, so you will see them go to state schools or colleges that offer generous merit.

Can you have a discussion with them about what a high ranking means to them, or what are their concerns?

Are they concerned you’ll go to Tulane and be the smartest kid there and be bored without any challenges?

Do they just want bragging rights so they can casually bring it up in conversations with friends? (“What’s the weather like in MA? Johnny is going to Harvard.”)

Do they think you will not be able to find a job upon graduation unless you go to a top 20 school?

Rather than try to explain the variation of rankings to them, I would suggest at getting to the root issue. Like @pishicaca, we have kids at Tulane that can give you a true examples of what learning is like at Tulane. I can say definitively that my son has plenty of friends at Tulane that were accepted to T20. They quickly stop talking about it a few weeks into their freshman year.

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Just want to know what you people are predicting for the soon to be released 2021 USNews Rankings.

God, I hope Tulane breaks into the mid 30s. That would be make my decision so much easier!

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Honestly there has not a lot of movement in the top ranks. Think about it logically. If a school moved from say #42 to #38, what do think changed? Do you/your parents thing the school magically became ‘better’ than four schools in the past year? No. If any school moved up, it’s because they were able to manipulate some numbers in their favor, or the USNews rankings changed their scoring methodology.

What happens if in 2022 Tulane moves down in rankings ? Would you just withdraw from the school and transfer to a higher ranked one?

The ranking system WILL CHANGE. Many top schools are no longer requiring test scores. Standardized testing is seen as a bias against the underprivileged, which I agree with. The socioeconomic stats will be much more heavily weighted in the future. These are learning institutions that need to start putting their money where their mouth is and show how they are giving back to society.

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The graduate/professional schools at Tulane will always drag down the overall rankings of the University.
If Tulane was an LAC, it would be the best in the south. However, to to “elite” in the university rankings, you have to have elite grad programs.

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I’m not suggesting that Tulane does not have its share of focused academic superstars but I think that it appeals to really smart kids who tend to balance academics with other interests including social ones more so than do the “elite” schools that are known for their intense academic rigor over all else. As for @Eeyore123 supposition, I agree that the graduate programs, while good, are probably a bit of a drag on the “elite” rankings and yes it would certainly be among the best LACs but places like Davidson or W&L would still be in the mix. And, of course, if you were to compare other Universities of similar size and undergraduate liberal arts focus in the south (such as Wake Forest) in the context of the rankings of LACs, I’m not convinced that Tulane would be at the top. Personally, I can’t think of a better place and my kid loves it. It’s been said so often but it is all about fit and really, elite or not, there is more opportunity available to get a great education at any of the reasonably competitive schools than any student can take advantage of. If Tulane won’t impress your parents’ friends at a cocktail party, well, that’s their issue. If you focus on your own priorities and ignore the noise you’ll be fine wherever you land.

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My son, who is a Tulane graduate, turned down both USC (with scholarship) and UC-Berkeley to attend Tulane and has never regretted it. The school was considered elite by the firm for which he currently works (a top 4 international consulting firm), and he is doing quite well. He loved his time in NOLA.

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Tulane an elite school. My roommate choose to Attend Tulane over UVA, USC, Tufts, and Dartmouth. Had a great time so far at the school highly recommend.

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Tulane is no doubt elite at the undergradute level but is falling sharply at the graduate level in recent years. Tulane stays high at the college ranking but out of of top 50 in law/medical/business graduate school rankings.

In terms of faculty research, Tulane is also losing its edge. Just look at the nature index ranking 2021, Tulane is now ranked 410th worldwide. I use the nature index ranking as proxy because it is the least subjective and is highly correlated with QS/Times/Shanghai/CWUR/US news world university rankings.

Most of top 100 US colleges have way better world research rank and graduate programs than Tulane.

Size becomes very important in this game. Otherwise, you need gigantic endowment or government funding.

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USNWR’s rankings are the most publicized and therefore get the most attention. So, here’s how Tulane has ranked over the past 25 years:

2021 - 41
2020 - 40
2019 - 44
2018 - 40
2017 - 39
2016 - 41
2015 - 54
2014 - 52
2013 - 51
2012 - 50
2011 - 51
2010 - 50
2009 - 51
2008 - 50
2007 - 44
2006 - 43
2005 - 43
2004 - 44
2003 - 43
2002 - 46
2001 - 45
2000 - 44
1999 - 36
1998 - 34
1997 - 36
1996 - 38

What this shows is that Tulane has actually been on the rise for the past half dozen years, back to where it was in the late ‘90s - early 2000s, i.e. high 30’s - low 40s after almost a decade of decline.

Let’s look at the colleges ahead of Tufts in the top 40. 16 are private universities in the Northeast, i.e. states in the Boston-Washington corridor. That’s a disproportionate 40% of the top 40 in a region that has about 20% of the nation’s population. There are only a dozen other private research universities scattered around the the rest of the country and Tulane is #13.

So, 12 of the research universities ranked 20-40 are public universities and half of them are various campuses of the University of California system.

There are a lot of historical reasons why private research universities - mostly in the Northeast - dominate the top 20 and beyond. But that’s the way it has evolved. It’s also a fact that private research universities anywhere were seen as “elite’, meaning the schools where the elite (rich) folks in society sent their kids. Tulane was one of those, and it was one of the rare ones that wasn’t on the East Coat or around the Great Lakes. Historically that’s where the money was in this country.

The fact is that if you were making up an “Ivy League of the South” (meaning states of the old Confederacy), Tulane would be on that list. So, in that sense it’s an elite southern university. But over the years the “Public Ivies” have muscled their way into elite status and schools like Tufts and Wake Forest emerged from small college status to research universities while others like NYU and USC saw tremendous growth over the past 60 years to also become nationally prominent.

There’s another thread here about whether elite schools should expand. The fact is that elite schools HAVE expanded - not in their enrollments but in their number. Newsweek recognized this trend 15 years ago with an article titled, “America’s 25 New Elite ‘Ivies’”. Tulane hasn’t changed, it’s just that a lot more schools have joined their ranks so that they’re now part of a more crowded field. The nation’s population has doubled since 1960. And not only has the number of “elite” students also doubled but colleges have come around to including the elite talent that has always existed but was formerly unrecognized among the poor and minority populations. So their are simply more colleges becoming what the Ivies and their kin once were.

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It’s interesting to see how the rankings have changed since the first list in 1983. Tulane wasn’t even ranked among “national universities” until 1996.

Here’s the 1983 list:

  1. Stanford
  2. Harvard
  3. Yale
  4. Princeton
  5. UC Berkeley
  6. Chicago
  7. Michigan
  8. Cornell
  9. Illinois
  10. MIT (tie)
    Dartmouth (tie)
  11. Cal Tech
  12. Carnegie-Mellon (tie)
    Wisconsin (ti)

That was it 48 years ago. A baker’s dozen + 1.

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Note the 1983 rankings used completely different criteria than current rankings. They were based solely on something similar to USNWR’s marginal/distinguished survey. The 1983 rankings did not include the usual long list of criteria that are mostly well correlated with endowment per student. That relates to why there are so many publics in the list above including UCB, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

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Exactly. The criteria have changed several times over the decades. Regardless of the criteria, Tulane was never thought of as elite by any measure in the sense of the top 10 or 20.