Six students from Massachusetts received Rhodes Scholarships this year, according to an article in the Boston Globe. All of them are enrolled at Harvard University.
Bryan Graham (LA '97) was the last Tufts student to receive a Rhodes scholarship.
Ivy League schools, such as Harvard, however, enjoyed a higher share of scholarship awards prior to 1997. From 1987 to 1996, approximately 37 percent of Rhodes scholars were Ivy leaguers, but since then, that number has dropped to 25 percent, another article in the Boston Globe said.
Non-Ivy league institutions are aiming to boost the number of prestigious scholarships and fellowships awarded to their students even more by opening fellowship advising offices or devoting more staff to work with students, the article said.
Tufts' resource for these oppurtunities is Scholarship and Enrichment Programs Coordinator Kate Nash, who, along with Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, solicits recommendations from faculty about which students would be a good fit for each scholarship.
"In addition to reaching out to these specific students, we also send out general information about the selection processes to the undergraduate community," she said in an e-mail to the Daily.
Although Rhodes scholarships have proved elusive for Jumbos, Tufts has performed "extremely well in the Fulbright competition," according to Nash.
The University had 12 Fulbright Fellows last year, and 17 the year before. According to its Web site, the Fulbright program awards more than 1,200 grants to U.S. students overseas.
The Rhodes and Fulbright awards are two in a long list of competitive scholarships and fellowships available to graduating seniors, which including the Marshall, Cooke and USA Today awards.
Rising seniors and juniors can compete for the Truman, Beinecke, Goldwater and Udall awards.
According to Nash, the last two years have been "fruitful for Tufts students, with 21 award winners in the 2004-2005 academic year and 18 winners last year.
This group included Tufts' first Truman Scholar in 11 years, its first Goldwater Scholar in 9 years, and its first Beinecke Scholar in 4 years.
Such scholarships can also help on presige, and both reinforce and attract academic strength.
A Boston Globe article spotlights Wheaton College, which saw three students receive Rhodes Scholarships in the past 8 years.
It has also seen a marked improvement in its applicant pool. "The average GPA of an incoming student has increased to 3.5 from 3.35 six years ago," the article said.
Apart from Wheaton, other colleges like Simmons, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of New Hampshire are opening fellowship advising offices or devoting more staff to work with students, with the hope that winning the scholarships will bring more institutional prestige.
The correlation between the number of scholarship recipients at a given school and the quality the education at that school, however, is spurious, according Elliot F. Gerson, the American secretary for the Rhodes Scholar Trust.
"The notion that the number of Rhodes Scholars is a proxy for the quality of education is a stretch," he said in the article.
Nash added, "One has to look at general trends to see that the university a student is affiliated with, whether it is a 'smaller college' or Ivy League institution, does not factor into competitiveness. What matters is the strength of an application, and what a selection committee might be looking for in a given year."
According to Nash, Tufts does particularly well with scholarships that emphasize the natural sciences, active citizenship, such as the Truman scholarship, and "globalism," like the Fulbright program.
