Tufts ranked 28th in annual college report

Tufts was ranked 28th in U.S. News & World Report's annual "America's Best Colleges" edition, which hit newsstands Friday. The University tied with the University of North Carolina for the second year in a row.

Princeton University topped the list for the third year in a row, while Harvard and Yale tied for second place.

Tufts was also recognized as among the universities with the "Most Diversity," "Best Value," "Most Selective," "Highest Graduation Rates," "Least Amount of Debt," and "Best Undergraduate Engineering Program."

Two Tufts students were also mentioned in the magazine, as Kaity Colon and Kate Elder were quoted in a feature article about how to survive one's freshman year of college. Colon told U.S. News & World Report that "there will be classes where you'll work your behind off and you will get a C." Colon said that because college is an intellectual jump from high school, she had to change her study habits to return to getting A's and B's.

Elder recommended that students join an extracurricular activity to meet more people and to ease the transition from high school to college. Elder became active in the Leonard Carmichael Society and said it "was an instant group of friends."

Amid the usual controversy over the validity of the rankings, many prospective Tufts students say the rankings will have little to no effect on their college decision. "I've looked at [the rankings], but in the top 50 it doesn't really matter," high school senior Lauren Janowitz said during a visit to the University on Saturday. While the rankings are "a place to start from," she does not think they necessarily reflect the quality of each school.

"They're all really good schools," Janowitz said.

The public's perception of Tufts is more important than its ranking, high school senior Matthew Bellof said. "Tufts has a really good reputation," he said.

But others, like prospective student Alexandra Hartz say rankings do affect college decisions. The rankings "affect where I could get into and where I look," Hartz said. "My parents base which school is better on how they're ranked."

A recent poll of over 500 high school seniors published by independent polling organization Arts & Science Group, which focuses on higher education issues, found that many high school students have heard of or read the rankings. But the poll also showed that while some use them as a tool in their college searches, others consider them inconsequential.

Of the students polled, 21 percent said the rankings were "extremely valuable," while 18 percent said they were "not valuable at all."

Prospective college students most often turn to current college students, admissions representatives, parents, and college catalogs in gathering information about different institutions. Students found news magazine rankings to be "unreliable," and used them "largely to validate and inform pre-existing college interests and evaluations," the polling group reported.

U.S. News & World Report uses basic statistics _ acceptance rates, freshmen retention rates, graduation rates, endowment _ and "peer assessment" to formulate its rankings. The peer assessment portion for a given school is based on opinions gathered from top-level university administrators of other institutions. A quarter of a school's ranking is based on these assessments, which are designed to evaluate the "intangibles" of each school. Tufts' peer assessment score was 3.6 out of a possible 5.0.

About 65 percent of the peer assessment surveys sent out were completed and returned.

Tufts and 248 other universities were ranked in the category of national-doctoral universities. Liberal arts colleges, regional master's degree universities, and regional bachelor's degree universities were ranked in separate categories.