Reply to Any other alums who think their school has gone off the deep end?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My SLAC has gone crazy left and doesn't even tolerate conservative or republican points of view. So I don't give.  That doesn't mean much in of itself but there are sufficient alumni who feel this way such as it has really made the endowment suffer.  The other problem is that the institution went from highly selective to almost 50% selectivity rate -
 due to lack of quality applications - which just disgusts a lot of alums.  It was once a great school but no longer is.[/quote]

[b]I'm having a hard time coming up with any SLACs that used to be highly selective but now have a 50% admission rate. So I'm going to call this one fake news.[/quote][/b]

Well, off the top of my head there's Occidental College.  It used to be on the same level as Pomona and Stanford in California.  Now it has a 45+% acceptance rate.[/quote]

W[b]hen was Occidental on the same level as Stanford and Pomona?[/quote][/b]

On and off since 1907.  In 1907 Oxy produced its first Rhodes.  Pomona then suggested they combine into one college.  Oxy turned Pomona down.  Oxy then produced 9 more Rhodes Scholars.  In the early 70s it was highly competitive.  Most students applied also to Pomona, Stanford as well as Oxy (fewer California students went east then so the selections in California for a top student were not as great as they are today) and UCLA.  USC was considered a third-rate party school, and Pitzer even lower.  The joke about USC was that the students stood in line the first day comparing notes as to their test scores and when UCLA turned them down.  Much has changed.  
[/quote]

[b]So Occidental was last highly competitive (stats to verify that?) approximately 45 years ago, but it's fall has been the result of social awareness from the last 5-10 years?

That's not how that works.[/quote][/b]

Didn't say that and if you knew anything about the history of Oxy you would know that was a stupid remark.  Oxy starting falling apart after a series of catastrophic presidents, weak boards and bad real estate investments.  The last solid President was Richard Gilman.  He maintained control of Oxy's liberal faculty.  John Brooks Slaughter took over in 1988 and was disinterested and let the liberal  faculty take over.  The college also suffered catastrophic loses in real estate holding in Orange County, CA real estate and the mortgage bank crisis.  The endowment never recovered from the Slaughter years.  After Slaughter was shown the door, most alums, and certainly all republican and conservative families had stopped giving. Ted Mitchell and a conservative vice dean were brought in in 1999 to try and repair the endowment, get control of the faculty and repair relationships with conservative alums.  Mitchell quite in frustration in 2005.  After Mitchell, Susan Prager was president for one catastrophic year (2007-08) until she was shown the door.  Jon Veitch was brought in in 2009 to try to regain control of the faculty and get alums to start giving again but has proven unpopular and has failed at both faculty control, alumni outreach and endowment effort.  The school never recovered.  Whereas the endowments of Pomona and Occidental were once equal, Pomona's endowment is $2 billion dollars.  Occidental's endowment today is only $3371.1 million.  Veitch recently started a campaign to push the endowment up to $400 million but had to cancel.  Due to lack of funds, Occidental College's football program was scrapped this year (2017). [/quote]

What does this have to do with the subject of this thread?[/quote]

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