. The name was changed to Tufts University in 1954, although the corporate name remains "the Trustees of Tufts College". For more than a century, Tufts was a small New England liberal arts college until its transformation into a larger research university in the 1970s. Tufts is a charter member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). In 2017, the university accepted 14.8% of undergraduate applicants from a pool of 21,101