Hi all,
Like a lot of alumni on here, I've spent the past couple years hoping to see Wesleyan's US News ranking go up. When the 2021 class profile went up, they reported that their incoming class had great SAT scores, a low acceptance rate and a decent (66) percentage of students in the top 10% of their high school class. I assumed this boded well for next year, but sometime in August, Wesleyan stealthily updated their top 10% metric, editing the page to say that the class consisted of only 60% of students in the top 10%. They'd updated the percentage of "students reporting class rank" from 34 to 40, which none of their peers do -- every other top LAC reports a very low percentage of students reporting class rank. It seemed like Wesleyan had artificially lowered that statistic by hunting down and including students who were not in the top 10%. That seemed bizarre and self-defeating, so I assumed that couldn't be the case.
Last week, they released their Common Data Set. In it, they report their highest SAT scores in a few years, which is a great thing to see, especially with the advent of the new test. However, the top 10% ranking has plummeted -- they're now listing it at 47% (!) with 52% reporting. This is drastically different not just from their peers but from their reporting in previous Common Data Sets, when they took the first statistic (from 30 to 40% of the class or so) and left it at that. Had they done that this year, they'd be at 66% of students in the top 10%, which is normal for their peer group and normal for Wesleyan's admissions statistics in past years. If they report 47%, that's a massive drop that foretells (I'd think) a massive hit in the US News rankings.
I'm struggling to see why they're doing this. Is this what they're reporting to US News? Are they really going to kneecap a big selectivity statistic for no discernible reason? I know there are people on here with insight into the administration's thought process, so I'm curious to hear what they have to say. Just looking at the numbers, it seems like they're about to incur a massive, self-inflicted wound, for no good reason. I hope that's not the case.
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