Reply to DS Wants to Transfer, DH Pushing Back

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "DS Wants to Transfer, DH Pushing Back"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t know why your DH pushed so hard for Emory over Tufts. They are basically equivalent schools. Now, Normal freshman adjustment is being seen through the lens of him going to his second choice school.

[/quote]
Are they equivalent? [/quote]

Emory is ranked higher but the student body from a brainpower perspective is completely interchangeable. A lot of Northeast MidAtlantic students, a strong jewish population, very smart kids who didn’t get into an Ivy or a better ranked school.[/quote]
You can say this about Northeastern or Tulane. All of these schools have high stats that's not what separates them. [/quote]

Exactly. All of this argument about tiny differences is ridiculous. The median SAT scores for Tufts, Emory, Northeastern, Cornell, Harvard and Vanderbilt are all in the 99th percentile. For Boston College and Tulane, it's the 98th percentile. There's essentially no difference in the ability levels of students at these colleges.[/quote]

+100[/quote]

There is no difference between the students in schools ranked 25 - 45 or so. Why are you all so hung up on USNWR rankings? The academically quality and prestige of these schools are interchangeable. [/quote]
For one Emory is ranked 20 or 21 depending on the ranking so your own criteria wouldn't apply. And  two there's a big difference between USC and Brandies. Emory is a top 20ish school while Tufts have never been ranked that highly. However I do agree that the difference isn't large enough for DS to stay if there truly unhappy. [/quote]

a) Where did USC and Brandeis enter the conversation?

b) The median SAT score for USC is 99th percentile. For Brandeis it's approximately the 97th percentile. How is that a big difference? I mean. I agree there's a big difference between the two, but it's got nothing to do with the quality of the students or the academics.

c) Rankings are only relevant to applicants who believe that the criteria used are the most representative of their needs. USNWR has pretended for decades that their criteria reflect everyone's needs, but they don't. Use different criteria and you'll get very different results.[/quote]
USC is ranked 27 and Brandies 42, so I was saying there is a big difference between schools ranked 25-45. Emory is ranked higher on multiple rankings however.... Either way if OPs son is on the verge of depression then he should leave. I'm sure Emory doesn't want that. [/quote]

I'm glad we agree about the mental health aspect of this.

I do think it's important to continue to address the misunderstanding about rankings, though, because so many people here seem to place so much weight on them, and that is a huge part of what is leading to a generation of stressed out, depressed kids. Consider this: USNWR has Emory at #21 and Tufts at #30 in my 2021 Best Colleges guide. Here's how they differ on some of the more important individual criteria they use to come up with those rankings, with Northeastern at #49 added for emphasis.....

Criterion                                       Emory                      Tufts                  Northeastern

Opinions of college officials               4.1                         3.8                          3.5
first-year retention %                       94                          96                           97
6-year grad. rate                              90                          94                           89
% classes under 20                          62                          68                           68
% classes over 50                            13                            8                             6
student/faculty ratio                         9/1                         9/1                        14/1
25th-75th SAT percentile             1360-1530               1390-1540           1390-1540
Frosh in top 10% of class                  84                           80                          75

How does that all add up to any of these colleges being stronger than the other? The distance between colleges near the top of the list and those further down appears large because there are so many of them that are excellent, leading to very comparable schools necessarily being separated by numbers that some take to imply a difference in quality. The reason Emory is perennially higher on the USNWR list is because they use criteria and weights that are favorable to Emory. And those criteria do not include the quality of classroom instruction, because it's not measurable. USNWR only tries to infer it from other factors.

We need to stop using this as an absolute measure of quality. It's not.[/quote]
Emory's reputation score is much higher. Which is what prestige is. [/quote]

A reputation score based on the opinions of people who 1) are unquestionably biased, 2) are almost certainly influenced by the very rankings to which they're contributing, 3) have first-hand knowledge of at most a handful of the schools they're rating, and 4) are limited by the 5-point scale on which they make their ratings, a scale where Duke's score of 4.5 implies that half of the raters gave it a 4, which implies that they believe it's around 80% as capable of educating your child as Princeton and Harvard are. Ridiculous.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics