They did this because they were the first school to rig the USNWR ranking system. They smaped EVERYONE to get applications up in order to reject most of them. I don’t believe USNWR uses that metric any longer. When my son was younger, Vanderbilt was the spam school. He started getting stuff in 9th grade. 
Colleges really can’t win. If they have a quality product and offer a terrific academic experience but somebody’s chiroprachter has never heard of them, we get “Why is X such a secret”. If they invest in raising their public profile, it’s called spam and rigging.
There is NOBODY in academia (grad school admissions committee’s, law school admissions folks, medical school committees) who hasn’t heard of Wash U. There is NOBODY working for a major corporation in recruiting who hasn’t heard of Wash U, even if that company does not send a team to recruit (you can only spread your resources so far). There is NOBODY on the Nobel, Pulitzer, Guggenheim, Fulbright, Marshall, Rhodes selection committees who has not heard of Wash U.
For anyone on this thread with an axe to grind- go back to whining about how expensive it is to attend Northeastern or Drexel now that they’ve cut back on merit awards, or go back to asserting that “Nobody” goes to Rutgers since it’s just like HS. Or that only a fool would give up a free ride at Wayne State to pay in-state at U Michigan since everyone knows that they’re pretty much identical.
This is seriously ridiculous.
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You make an excellent point, every entity and department you mentioned, I am sure has heard of WashU. My point, depending on where you live, 16-18 year old high school students are not as familiar and will not be quick to include them on their college list.
The only disagreement I have with your post, if a school has a top notch program and produces rock star graduates, if I’m head of recruitment, I’m sending my people to that school every year.
Again, nothing of a slight just surprised that I knew nothing about this amazing school prior to my daughter applying.
I have worked at companies which made the reluctant decision NOT to send a team to Wash U (as well as to other fine colleges) during years where were focused on hires for locations not in the midwest. There were rockstar graduates from Wash U we DID hire, but opted not to send a team based on a particular year’s recruiting priorities. Recruiting calendars are not the holy gospel, and we tweak based on a particular year’s needs and a schools historic yield.
There is no way I can send a team (nor would I want to) to every “rockstar” producing college in the US. It’s a poor use of corporate resources- and Covid has proven that we can develop a balanced class of hires using Zoom, virtual Q&A’s, making more aggressive use of other virtual tools. Who knows what recruiting will look like in five years but I’m betting that travel budgets will be slashed.
I’ve hired outstanding grads from phenomenal places without stepping foot on campus, and that trend is only going to accelerate.
Heck, most 16 year olds have never heard of Missouri M&T, Harvey Mudd, Rice, Swarthmore, Reed, St. Olaf, Wesleyan unless they live near or have a relative who attended those schools. All of those places produce rock stars. Fortunately, the opinions of a bunch of teenagers do not substitute for data for most hiring entities. If it did, everyone in America would be recruiting at Notre Dame, USC, and whichever college got awarded “Best Party School” or “Most attractive undergrads” by some tiktok star…
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Exactly. WashU is a bit of a Rorschach test with respect to schools tagged with the “elite” label because it is relatively new to the national scene. I’ve seen it described as pre-professional obsessed and less intellectual. The school as produced as many or more Rhodes Scholars from their undergrad programs since 2000 as JHU, Cornell and Northwestern. Going back a digging through press releases, it may have produced more Rhodes Scholars than NU and Cornell combined. That’s one data point that doesn’t prove X is better than Y, but it does demonstrate a critical mass of intellectually curious students with the proper support in a strong ecosystem.
I’ve seen people say it’s a school full of rich kids based upon the Opportunity Insights study. Looking at the actual data, the school has a lower proportion of obscenely rich students compared to its peers. What it tends to have more of is students whose parents earn 150K-500K. And fewer sub 60K kids. Why? There is a very limited number of students that can make SES adjusted admissions cutoffs at those schools. The kids with those backgrounds tend to a) go to the biggest brands, b) be recruited athletes (not important at a DIII school), or c) come from the local area, which is easier in metros larger than STL. And they’ve made strides here.
People are asking what programs the school is known for. I’m not a fan of “rankings” per se, but the peer assessments of various departments at the grad level are pretty good indications of overall faculty/program quality at the undergrad level for the smaller schools where rockstar faculty are likely to be engaged with undergrads. WashU isn’t ranked among the top 6-7 of anything (major hard/social science specialties, visual arts, architecture, engineering or business). Then again, not a lot of schools are. They are well regarded in everything though.
And personally, I don’t think going to X because it is ranked #6 in department Y vs. WashU’s #20 is particularly compelling. 17-18 year olds change their minds more often that not. What starts off as chemistry can easily change to anthro or neuroscience. The “brand” at WashU is really about exploring with a high caliber of fellow students and faculty in a supportive and collaborative environment. And I have multiple stories where amazing faculty took a personal interest in me (as a good, but not incredible student) within my major.
Most of what I’m reading here is that WashU doesn’t tend fit a preconceived profile of what a “top tier” school looks like, so they hunt for reasons why the school isn’t good enough in a particular aspect to warrant more recognition. Decision makers know it, and highly regarded schools come in all shapes and sizes.
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Love your perspective and insight! As I am excited about the possibility of my D attending the school. The community within the University seems very genuine, which goes to my “fit” comments.
Hopefully if my D attends, more POC in our area and students from her HS will put WashU on their radar.
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Just because WUSTL bought high achieving students with merit aid in the early 2000s and sent tons of free application spam to students they knew they’d reject, doesn’t make any of the rest of what you said untrue. They are not unique in that approach. Schools still do it. They were the first though. Wash U was a good school prior to rankings and it’s a good school now. My post more about the folly of rankings and the pressure they put schools under than it was about Wash U per se.
They were not the first- I believe that distinction either goes to Northeastern or GW which predate Wash U by several years. NYU followed (hard to believe that in the 1960’s NYU was a commuter school for local kids who couldn’t get into any of the more rigorous colleges in the area). Wash U was well behind these other colleges.
The folly of rankings is only a problem if you care about the rankings. Or if you expect the rankings to tell you something meaningful about college A vs. college B when they are separated by four spaces. Or 14 spaces.
WashU’s got storied histories in biochemistry, radiochemistry, and comp-sci subareas, well-known coast-to-coast to anyone in the business. You can trust their MDs and they do a spot of history of science, too. It’s been a quiet player for nearly a century, though some of us still think of it as wustl, its early internet name.
UMich’s a much more recent arrival on the national scene, thanks in part to Mary Sue and the president or two before her, who quite intentionally positioned it as a public Ivy and managed to make it happen. Not easy in Michigan.
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Wash U is a top school. It’s not a tippy top like HYPS though, and that’s the root of the problem. The top schools excluding HYPS are all great so it comes down to fit. Or better said it comes down to perceived fit.
Perceived fit is driven by marketing, and that’s where Wash U’s problem is. Sure, it’s easier to market USC and LA compared to Wash U and StL, but Wash U still has to find ways to distinguish themselves.
The placement rates are high but on-campus recruiting is more limited than the T20 Coastals for certain types of companies. WashU places lots of alums at the so-called Tier 2 consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte, etc. (fewer at the McKinsey/BCG type but not zero) and many F500 companies. The CS program does well out here in the Bay Area (esp since Square founder is WashU alum and the son of a long-term prof). And of course the grad admissions track record is pretty stellar esp for law, medicine, etc. Your student may have to hustle just a bit more to get in front of employers who don’t visit, but since there are alums in every one of those companies, it can be done with some tenacity. Again the stats speak to the high graduating salaries and the high placement rates. Happy to answer more Q’.s
If WashU was in Boston or Philly it would probably not face even this issue. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have risen as fast as it has with so much ‘local’ competition vs. being a crown jewel in MO and the midwest…
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WashU receives over 30,000 applications per year so to say it is not on many 16 to 18 year olds list is just not true. My S21 received no spam or mailings from WashU but did receive them from almost every Ivy and other T20.
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To your point about location, that definitely hurts. Even when comparing the school to many locations outside of the Bay Area, LA, the Northeast or Chicago. STL is not as appealing as Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, etc. Frankly, if I were to pick 3 areas that people deciding on colleges miscalibrate when it comes to college decisions among top tier schools, one of them is location. People grossly overestimate how much “culture” they consume as broke undergrads. Academics, on campus activities, sleep and connections made where location does not matter is 95+% of a college experience. Most people need some options with respect to watering holes and restaurants to go off campus. Most would like some way to engage the community. Maybe you’d like a couple of museums, sporting event options. There may be a significant difference between a school in the middle of nowhere vs say Cincinnati. But there are diminishing returns from Cincinnati to NYC.
If you’re unhappy in STL or Pittsburgh, the odds are close to 100% that you’re going to be unhappy in Boston. It’s not the city, it’s the on campus fit or the student him/herself.
And I say this as someone who grew up in a large Midwest metro, went to school in STL, then moved to London, NYC and Chicago after graduating only to find myself back in STL due to the Great Recession. There’s plenty to do here. Great restaurants and entertainment at price points friendly to undergrads, layers of history, free culture, one of a kind museums (City Museum), beautiful neighborhoods and sporting events.
Putting my grad degree hat on for a moment, if someone wants to understand all of the regional/cultural/political/economic frictions the country finds itself in, St Louis might be the most American city in the country. And WashU and SLU are safe settings to explore those questions and issues.
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Sort of amazed Wash U does not push the Eliot connection (founded and run by such a family and the place of TS Eliot’s most important American lectures) more. Also the connection to the Busch family would interest many potential applicants and their families
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There was a movement in my class and the one behind it to change the name to Eliot. I like Eliot better, but I don’t think it matters.
Bottom line: it’s a crowded field among the 15 or so most selective non-Ivies. Take away the ones not known for big time sports and those established the longest at the national and international stage (MIT, Hopkins and UChicago), and I don’t think any of them are as recognized by John Q Public as they should be: Emory, WashU, Tufts, Rice, CMU. They all have the same issue. Fortunately the problem doesn’t apply to grad admissions and HR departments.
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WashU has an amazing reputation at our VA high school, and is quite difficult to get in to. USC …not so much. Kids who want CA go for Berkeley or UCLA. The current reputation seems similar to back in the 90s when I first heard of WashU: I met very impressive students in med school from there, and USC definitely had all of the typical negative connotations(not entirely fair). WashU is definitely already on the radar for D23 and we would send her in a heartbeat if that ends up her choice.
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USC gets treated a bit unfairly due to the lag between where they were 25-30 years ago vs now. In the 90s it was known as a party/social scene school for rich kids. It wasn’t extremely selective or perceived to be academic at the undergrad level. Not too different from a West Coast version of SMU, a rank and file Big Ten public or Miami. They put a lot of $$$ into upgrading their research capacity and their programs and that paid off.
That label still sticks with a lot of the public, but people who matter for a grad’s career know it.
Edit: for grins I went back and looked at old SAT scores from when I was applying. 1070 on the old scale, so 75th percentile on both sections. 1210 on the current scale, maybe a bit higher if nationally normed rather than test taker normed. It’s a completely different school.
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my experience wasn’t typical, but I abandoned campus every chance I got to go to the nearest metropolis/museums or just travel. It was at least 20 years post-graduation till I recognized that a major plus about my choice of college – I’d turned down a top school for the one I went to, oblivious to rank – was that it wasn’t actually all that great, so I could just skip a lot of classes and do fine. So I did. It was awesome. The Whitney, MoMA, the Tate, museums all over, concerthalls all over, gave me a lot of my education. As I get older, the power of Breuer’s work is more evident to me, but for me it’s not an idea; I remember what the staircase and the floors at the Whitney did to me, and that strange oppressive ceiling in the lobby. Of course, it was still relatively cheap to go at the time. $8, iirc, which was enough to make me flinch but not enough to make me leave. I keep returning to the images – just got a book about Breuer yesterday. I’d like to see that chapel of his in Minnesota.
STL has a lot of serious American history, but I imagine you’re right, that the wustl kids will do less exploring and more homework.
Just my observations from a pool of intellectually curious people who tend to embrace all aspects of life: it’s not a WashU thing. The vast majority of people tend to embrace the idea of a location, but in reality close to zero of their treasured/transformative experience is location dependent.
College is about all forms of curiosity, and the bulk of the intellectual and social curiosity is academic and people centric. Penn, Harvard, USC, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, WashU…even Columbia. If I had a nickel every time I was told by a grad, “living in X was interesting, but we really didn’t…”. There are folks who spend 4 years in Southern California who never dip their toes in the Pacific. And in reality, a lot of the things people fall in love with about a location before they attend school X can be experienced just as easily surfing friends’ couches for a couple of weeks during breaks or at any point in life. I feel the same way you do about certain places and cultural institutions, but those experiences were had from my childhood through today.
Conversations that started at 11 and finished up with breakfast at 6am? Exploring “quirky” neighborhoods? Most cities have them. Deciding at 1pm you’re going to road trip to X or Y—could be anywhere (NOLA, Chicago, the Rockies)—it was about the people taking the trip with you more than the place or the activity. Those can happen at any stage in life, but that’s very much a college thing.
There are exceptions. Don’t go to a school which has poor placement/recognition where you intend to live after college. If you absolutely need surfing to feel centered, don’t go to school in Iowa. But overall, I believe prospective students would be wise to spend more time assessing the human/social characteristics of a school than the city where it is located.
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For sure. The number of grad students I work with who’ll go off to fancy/exciting locales for conferences and then never hit the town because they’re tired or just haven’t thought to – man, it makes me crazy, but it’s what they want. For me, that’s the first thing in scheduling a conference trip – what else is around? I’d never have gone to a conference in Detroit if I hadn’t been curious for 15 years about that art museum they made such a fuss about when the city was barely breathing – but I did go, and that museum was lifechanging. What an amazing place! And their symphony! Concert was terrific, but it was really the audience that was the star. It seems classical music isn’t dead at all as a popular thing – these people were all ages, all walks of life, and they were just going nuts for the stuff. Knowledgeably, too.
It’s also impossible to know at that age what the place you’re in will mean in a larger societal or historical sense. I’m glad to have been around NYC at the end of the Cold War, and I’d have missed out on a lot of understanding of what was going on if I hadn’t been. But I didn’t know that ahead of time.
While the growing-up in the hallways and dorm rooms and all was important, and my own personal Ibiza was only waking up on the Jersey shore, and the various tag-alongs to rich-kid digs was, you know, interesting, I have to say that with few exceptions those experiences haven’t been the persistent ones for me. In the end, most of the people and conversations were quite conventional, and there just wasn’t that much to them. Not a lifetime’s worth. They were nice normal bright-enough kids with a lot of money. Frequently the fathers were much more interesting, if monsters in the mold of Kushner’s dad – it was the fathers who’d made the money. Would it have been different if I’d picked the better school? Maybe. I doubt though that any class of undergraduates could’ve stood up to the city of New York as it emerged from its midcentury glory. It’s nice that a university degree came in the cereal box. But from this distance it wasn’t the important thing.
But you’re right, most people won’t wind up using university as base camp, and there’s not much reason to choose on the basis of what’s going on off-campus. I should spend time in STL, though. I don’t know it at all, and it’s an important pivot in this country’s history. East-west and north-south. I’ve been showing The Pruitt-Igoe Myth to students for years, and if that movie doesn’t make you want to go know what you’ve been missing, I don’t know that you were awake through the whole thing. I believe all the people who keep pointing urgently in the direction of the World’s Fair. And I’ve never been to the City Museum.