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Most Bothersome Wake Forest Development in the last 12 months? Pit/Tunnels Adjace

Rafi said:
Did you take a class with her? I did, and she was the most memorable and one of the most dedicated teachers I had at Wake. She accepted everyone off the wait list, knew everyone's name by the second class, and when she had to miss a class she made it up on a Saturday morning at her house.
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I worked very closely with Dr Angelou as a student outside the classroom on a project, and only had the same experience as other students who were 50th on the waitlist and no chance of ever joining her class as personal experience, but glad you had a good experience personally. Likely the small school was the right fit for a poet and mind of her great talent, and we should be so lucky to have our school associated in any way with her name. It simply wasn’t mine or my cohort’s experience that we benefited from her faculty.
 
Rafi said:
Did you take a class with her? I did, and she was the most memorable and one of the most dedicated teachers I had at Wake. She accepted everyone off the wait list, knew everyone's name by the second class, and when she had to miss a class she made it up on a Saturday morning at her house.
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Same
 
TownieDeac said:
I worked very closely with Dr Angelou as a student outside the classroom on a project, and only had the same experience as other students who were 50th on the waitlist and no chance of ever joining her class as personal experience, but glad you had a good experience personally. Likely the small school was the right fit for a poet and mind of her great talent, and we should be so lucky to have our school associated in any way with her name. It simply wasn’t mine or my cohort’s experience that we benefited from her faculty.
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So you did not end up taking a class with her? On the first day of class, there were 20-40 people on the waitlist that just showed up, and she let them all in. I thought that was pretty cool.
 
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At the risk of potentially doxxing myself, I'll chime in here really quickly. For context, I am a current staff member at the University who grew up in a Wake family. My current position is one that will be directly impacted by the change in the USNWR ranking (you can assume of that what you will).

- These changes in the ranking metrics have been known for some time. It was unclear how far we would drop, but anyone who was following what was going on knew that this was coming to some degree. I wouldn't be surprised if Dr. Wente's e-mail that went out to the community was pre-written except for the particular ranking.

- Most of Wake's problems about specific USNWR metrics stem from trying to compete at an academic level with schools that have endowments multiple times our size. In many ways, we're the Little Engine That Could of higher ed. No one is to blame here; it's a product of being a smaller school (smaller alumni donor base) with a dedicated niche calling for the first 75% of our existence (North Carolina Baptist education does not naturally generate outside funding interest). Neither our size nor our history are anything of which we should be ashamed. It feels slightly strange saying this, because we're still in the top 1% of higher education institutions out there in terms of resources; it's just that the schools that we view as our academic peer institutions tend to be in the top .1% or top .01%. If you want to discuss problems with Wake Forest as an entity, a solid 90% of our problems stem from this fundamental issue (including a great many of the points made in this thread already).

- Wake will likely see a reduction in incoming undergraduate applications, or perhaps a slowed rate at which the rate of incoming undergraduate applications will increase compared to previous years. There are a lot of high school students out there who default to these rankings when looking at college options. For better or worse, these rankings are considered shorthand for academic prestige in lay-person circles.

- Semi-related, teenagers will remain teenagers. Teenagers sometimes act impulsively. It happens.

- One would hope that most professional administrators know that these rankings are highly flawed, and that kneejerk reactions are not necessary. The rankings were highly flawed in previous years, but we didn't care because they tended to be overly kind to schools like Wake. These changes put in place by USNWR are entirely arbitrary, and the previous metrics that had been put in place by USNWR were also entirely arbitrary, even when they favored us.

- I do not think Wake is one of the 30 best overall academic institutions in the country.

- I think Wake might very well be one of the 30 best academic institutions in the country for undergraduate education specifically.

- Wake is still the exact same school that it was on Saturday. The Chapel hasn't fallen down or anything. The quality of undergraduate education will remain high. Men's soccer will still lose to Stanford when it matters most (but maybe they won't this time?).

- The only people truly affected negatively are people who try to use Wake's reputation and their relationship to the school as a substitute for any sort of genuine personal accomplishments or discernible personality when bragging to friends. Unfortunately, this likely includes a fair few of the power-brokers in Wake's decision-making leadership (and potentially a fair few posters in this thread as well).




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DeacDiggler said:
Townie can’t you see you’re WRONG
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Ha. This started with Townie telling me I was wrong. His quote, "I’m very proud she was associated with the university but I don’t think the above can be claimed." I was just wondering if Townie tried to get in off the waitlist - curious if that was a one-time move by her or something she did consistently.
 
quzybuk said:
- The only people truly affected negatively are people who try to use Wake's reputation and their relationship to the school as a substitute for any sort of genuine personal accomplishments or discernible personality when bragging to friends. Unfortunately, this likely includes a fair few of the power-brokers in Wake's decision-making leadership (and potentially a fair few posters in this thread as well).
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I think it affects a lot more people than that. What about the current students applying to med school, law school, grad school, etc? Those graduate programs typically consider that ranking of the school the applicant came from. What about the professors? They want to work with the best students they can recruit, and as you state, students use the rankings to choose schools. The professors also want to recruit great faculty to work with, and being ranked high can help in that recruitment.
 
Rafi said:
I think it affects a lot more people than that. What about the current students applying to med school, law school, grad school, etc? Those graduate programs typically consider that ranking of the school the applicant came from. What about the professors? They want to work with the best students they can recruit, and as you state, students use the rankings to choose schools. The professors also want to recruit great faculty to work with, and being ranked high can help in that recruitment.
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I doubt many graduate programs care too much about the ranking of a school when compared to the body of work that an individual applicant produced at an undergraduate level. Wake students should still have a hefty advantage comparatively based on the overall institutional resources filtered through the smaller undergraduate student population for things like undergraduate research that can distinguish their application.
 
quzybuk said:
I doubt many graduate programs care too much about the ranking of a school when compared to the body of work that an individual applicant produced at an undergraduate level. Wake students should still have a hefty advantage comparatively based on the overall institutional resources filtered through the smaller undergraduate student population for things like undergraduate research that can distinguish their application.
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I worked on a professional school admissions committee, and we weighted the ranking of the applicant's undergrad institution. In fact, you all will like this, we had a tier system, and applicants got points based on the tier of their undergrad. This change will hurt students applying to graduate/professional schools.
 
Rafi said:
I worked on a professional school admissions committee, and we weighted the ranking of the applicant's undergrad institution. In fact, you all will like this, we had a tier system, and applicants got points based on the tier of their undergrad. This change will hurt students applying to graduate/professional schools.
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I have no reason to doubt you, but that seems like an imperfect system. Any system that gives weight to the USNWR ranking at all seems highly, highly flawed.

Not saying it's not real. Higher ed administrators have their own biases and whatnot, as do admissions professionals. Graduate programs may want to say they enrolled a student from X, Y, or Z University just to say that they did. I can see how it could happen.

But the USNWR rankings are trash, they've always been trash, and they should not be relied upon for any meaningful decision-making (and certainly not by people working in higher ed who should know better).
 
quzybuk said:
I have no reason to doubt you, but that seems like an imperfect system. Any system that gives weight to the USNWR ranking at all seems highly, highly flawed.

Not saying it's not real. Higher ed administrators have their own biases and whatnot, as do admissions professionals. Graduate programs may want to say they enrolled a student from X, Y, or Z University just to say that they did. I can see how it could happen.

But the USNWR rankings are trash, they've always been trash, and they should not be relied upon for any meaningful decision-making (and certainly not by people working in higher ed who should know better).
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When you get 10,000+ applications, you need quick ways to get to a manageable number of students. Additionally, we reviewed which factors predicted student success, and undergraduate ranking was one of the strongest predictors.
 
PhDeac said:
Judging applicants by where they could afford to go to school is a good way to weed out the poors without specifically weeding out the poors.
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The top schools in the rankings have the best financial aid, and several of them are public schools.
 
Rafi said:
Ha. This started with Townie telling me I was wrong. His quote, "I’m very proud she was associated with the university but I don’t think the above can be claimed." I was just wondering if Townie tried to get in off the waitlist - curious if that was a one-time move by her or something she did consistently.
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Didn’t try to get in off the waitlist, don’t know if many did my year—she was only teaching one class per year at that point, I believe.
 
TownieDeac said:
Didn’t try to get in off the waitlist, don’t know if many did my year—she was only teaching one class per year at that point, I believe.
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I think around the time we were at Wake her health wasn’t very good and she scaled back considerably. I had her class, and agree with some of Rafi’s points. However she wasn’t able to finish the semester due to health issues. I think her experience changed as you would expect as she got older.
 
PhDeac said:
It’s almost as if people have different experiences in the same class.

Hold up. Maybe people can have different experiences within the same social contexts. There may be something to that.
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Damn, this is profound. I'm being serious Ph, great post.
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
Re: the endowment, didn’t Wake have some pretty bad financial management back in the 90s or early 2000s that put them in particularly bad shape?
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Frosty said:
Krispy Kreme FUCKED Wake
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It wasn't just KK.

Those managing the Wake endowment didn't prepare well for the recessions and bear markets 2000 - 2002 and 2007-2009. The S&P lost over 50% in each. Numerous companies went bankrupt. Wake endowment took massive hits. The machinations with Reynolds and the off-shoring of the textile and clothing industries also negatively impacted the Wake endowment. Better management would have reduced the losses and made post recession regrowth bigger and faster.
 
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