Will schools like Wake and Tulane fall in popularity as they fell in rankings?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Because the dating/Mating pool of wake/Tulane alums is different than uf/fsu/mn alums

You are misreading the social product provided by schools

Dcum had threads on this almost a decade ago and it’s what separates dcum college forum from other college forums

It is/was a lot more all encompassing about schools and non-academic factors and less pc (well in the past)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Why? The rankings do not indicate quality of education. For an upper middle class family, a significant percentage of the rankings criteria (specifically the part that hurt these schools) is absolutely irrelevant.

DP but I feel like for most educated, upper middle class DMV families, rankings matter. The truly wealthy will send their kid happily to SMU and the middle class will be thrilled with a Maryland acceptance. Just looking at the Senior college class pages in May, numerous people backed out of their initial college choice once they got into one higher ranked. I don’t think I saw anyone go to a lower ranked school off the waitlist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Why? The rankings do not indicate quality of education. For an upper middle class family, a significant percentage of the rankings criteria (specifically the part that hurt these schools) is absolutely irrelevant.

DP but I feel like for most educated, upper middle class DMV families, rankings matter. The truly wealthy will send their kid happily to SMU and the middle class will be thrilled with a Maryland acceptance. Just looking at the Senior college class pages in May, numerous people backed out of their initial college choice once they got into one higher ranked. I don’t think I saw anyone go to a lower ranked school off the waitlist.

SMU is massively underrated to be fair

[Anonymous]

what is SMU?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Yes. Agree. Spending $90,000 on lower ranked school makes no sense. Nor does spending $60,000 on some OOS school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wake wasn't really relatively popular compared to lower ranked schools like BU, BC, Tufts, Northeastern.

I'm not sure why it was ranked so high in the first place, but it has appeal to some kids.

I don't think they will suddenly switch to large public.

Wake was more popular last year at our private than any of these schools other than BC. I don’t see that changing. I expect all of these schools will be just fine.

We are not talking about you or your specific school whatever that is.
Northeastern was the most popular according to Bethesda data.

Wake was ranked higher at like 28 29 but still was way less popular than the lower ranked schools I mentioned, and it had much higher acceptance rate.
However I agree that it'll do fine regardless of the ranking drop and most of the target audience won't suddenly change to the large publics ranked higher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Apply ED to the 15-25 schools if you're smart.
The problem is families like yours waste your ED bullets on ivys. ED1 Rice, ED2 Emory to maximize your chances at a top school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:funny that some of you all think that the drop in ranking means that the quality of education is an issue. You cant tell me that all those public schools that have climbed up offer better education than these. It's a known fact that Diversity is an issue at some of the privates like Wake Forest and few are on Pell Grants.

Where is anyone correlating the drop in rankings with some new drop in quality? Clearly we all knew that they just changed the algorithm.
Some are just saying that perhaps the new ranking (somewhat randomly) correlates with long-standing quality.

Again, I think we can all agree that the rankings mean nothing---except that there are plenty of people that make college lists off the rankings.
There are kids in the class of 2025 who will look at US News for the first time in their lives next summer and make their lists accordingly.
Many of their parents have not given a single thought to college rankings since they themselves graduated in 1996.
They too will look at the rankings for guidance.

Didn’t we all always know once moving beyond the T10 private universities, it’s either large, public research institutions with big lectures, TAs and limited admissions to popular majors, or medium to small private universities with smaller classes and more of a focus on undergrads? There really is no new info here.

All of these schools has a 20 percent or lower acceptance rate last year. With admission so difficult at the T10, the T50 schools will continue to get plenty of applications.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Because the dating/Mating pool of wake/Tulane alums is different than uf/fsu/mn alums

You are misreading the social product provided by schools

Dcum had threads on this almost a decade ago and it’s what separates dcum college forum from other college forums

It is/was a lot more all encompassing about schools and non-academic factors and less pc (well in the past)

But DCUM is not representative of the population at large. It's not even representative of the DMV. Most people are not
applying to college in any sort of sophisticated way. For example, there are a ton of kids in northern Virginia who apply to every Ivy.
Now any nuanced reader of DCUM would know that makes no sense. But plenty of people don't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

I would say it's more going to affect the upper end of the "donut hole" families. There will always be those uber wealthy families that'll pay for whatever school their kid(s) want to go to, rankings be damned (i.e., Trinity College in Connecticut, GWU, Southern Methodist, Miami, etc. are schools that come to mind as having loads of $$$ students but aren't super high ranked) but those families who are on the bubble where cost IS a consideration and ROI does need to be taken into consideration may pass.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Why? The rankings do not indicate quality of education. For an upper middle class family, a significant percentage of the rankings criteria (specifically the part that hurt these schools) is absolutely irrelevant.

DP but I feel like for most educated, upper middle class DMV families, rankings matter. The truly wealthy will send their kid happily to SMU and the middle class will be thrilled with a Maryland acceptance. Just looking at the Senior college class pages in May, numerous people backed out of their initial college choice once they got into one higher ranked. I don’t think I saw anyone go to a lower ranked school off the waitlist.

Maybe rich families in Texas. DMV privates aren’t sending many students there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what is SMU?

Southern Methodist university

Dallas Texas

Laura bush is an alum

Stunningly gorgeous students

Very Strong business program - to be fair all the academic programs there are pretty good

Alums look out for each other - very tight knit

If you are a preppy kid that wants to be around pretty and umc people and have a great network to tap into and likes to work hard and play hard - check it out

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Why? The rankings do not indicate quality of education. For an upper middle class family, a significant percentage of the rankings criteria (specifically the part that hurt these schools) is absolutely irrelevant.

DP but I feel like for most educated, upper middle class DMV families, rankings matter. The truly wealthy will send their kid happily to SMU and the middle class will be thrilled with a Maryland acceptance. Just looking at the Senior college class pages in May, numerous people backed out of their initial college choice once they got into one higher ranked. I don’t think I saw anyone go to a lower ranked school off the waitlist.

Maybe rich families in Texas. DMV privates aren’t sending many students there.

Sure they are. Just not GDS. But I know about 10 grads in the last 3 years between NCS, STA, Holton, Landon, Gonzaga, etc.

[Anonymous]

I hope not, because it would be symbolic of a real problem in how students choose colleges. USNWR defines a “good college” one particular way. And all of a sudden, a different way. Based on their agenda/ opinions. I would hope that before people may hundreds of thousands of dollars and make an enormously huge decision with their kids, they stop and ask themselves what *they* think makes a good college. I personally don’t agree that a college where my kids intro classes are 200 and taught by a TA is better than a college where the same classes are 25, discussion and in-depth writing and feedback is possible, a PhD teaches and out of class interaction happens— just because the school with big classes has a lot of Pell Grant kids. Or that any school has gotten 50 spots better or worse in a year.

There are a lot of rankings and a lot of data. I hope this opens people’s eyes to the fact that they need to look at the data that’s important to them and not to USNWR. Ideally the “rankings” would be a tool where a student and parent could choose the 5 data points that matter to them, be that DEI or class size or published research or *department specific* outcomes and get a list tailored to their needs.

USNWR has been jerking around parents and students for far too long. And I don’t like that they drive UD college policy on things like DEI, how aid is distributed, ED/EA policy, etc because colleges are playing the rankings game. If private colleges are taking a hit now in USNWR, it’s because they have relied on full pay ED students for too long because USNWR used yield as a factor. Enough already.

And now, I don’t have a vested interest in Tulane or Wake. I just think college prices are too high because colleges “compete” using USNWR, rather than by controlling cost, emphasizing educational quality, student body quality and outcomes. Or whatever it is you value.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So people think that instead of Wake Forest and Tufts, high achieving upper income kids are going to be applying to Davis, Merced and Rutgers? I don’t see it.

No, more like Florida State, Minnesota, etc.

Not necessarily the wealthy kids but plenty of upper middle class kids will think twice.

We fit in this demographic. We have HHI $450K. Healthy college savings. But spending $90K for a university ranked 50 or 75 seems much less appealing than spending it on a school ranked in the 20s.
Why not spend $25K for Florida and leave the rest for graduate, medical or law school?

Why? The rankings do not indicate quality of education. For an upper middle class family, a significant percentage of the rankings criteria (specifically the part that hurt these schools) is absolutely irrelevant.

DP but I feel like for most educated, upper middle class DMV families, rankings matter. The truly wealthy will send their kid happily to SMU and the middle class will be thrilled with a Maryland acceptance. Just looking at the Senior college class pages in May, numerous people backed out of their initial college choice once they got into one higher ranked. I don’t think I saw anyone go to a lower ranked school off the waitlist.

SMU is massively underrated to be fair

Agreed, even if only for mating purposes alone. (Texan)