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[quote=Anonymous]100% honest & Troll-free

I just finished reading this entire unbelievable thread.

I’m recuperating from cancer surgery, which, other than incarceration, is the only sane excuse for spending half a day reading this.

I went to a public high school in a seedy Boston suburb, then to undergrad in the area. I was Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting before he was (the drinking age was 18, and yes, we would occasionally slither into Harvard bars for sport).

This might take a couple posts, but I’ve got plenty of time (I hope!).

1. Colleges are incredibly multifaceted—moreso than corporations, airports, maybe even some small countries. To glibly say one is “better” than another is a grotesque simplification. For example, Boise State is a far “better” place to go than Princeton if you want to study accounting as an undergrad.

2.Just because somebody gathers a ton of data and numerically ranks entities by their chosen criteria, it doesn’t follow that there are significant differences between #4 on in the ranking and #87. I think you could make a case for, say, it being possible to get a roughly equivalent education at us news colleges 20-70. Certainly the hair splitting over Tufts’ peers is an outrageously optimistic view of the numerical ranking’s use in deciding qualitative relationships…Especially if u know how hard it is to get tenure-track positions these days. It’s tv probably unlikely that there is something the faculty at Tufts knows that the profs at UC-Irvine or University of Louisville don’t know (ESPECIALLY as it applies at the undergraduate level).

3. The Tufts name… I never, ever heard anyone pronounce the second “t” in Tufts. When I first mentioned that there was a college named Tufts to my foreign-born wife, she thought I was kidding.

4. Never underestimate the gravitational pull of the Boston/Cambridge area on college-age kids. I think many here are over-analyzing the flaws & merits of Tufts. I bet a lot of those who ED there aren’t comparing it to Northwestern, Cornell, and Georgetown using spreadsheets full of data. Kids that age aren’t usually driven by stark rationality. A military recruiter once told me the trick to selling young people on something is to find that one thing that gets their juices flowing. No matter how complicated we think the college-selection process is, I bet in the minds of a bunch of those who ED to Tufts, the selection process is “Good college near Boston? Cool!”    They couldn’t care less what departments are ranked (especially nutrition & conflict resolution!!!); they are more excited about being able to party with classmates they know who will be going to BU, Brandeis, & Northeastern. [/quote]

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