I’ll buy that. :))
@Cariño I don’t know why you’re trying to show me the rankings; they are irrelevant. I never said that UChicago is not or should not be highly ranked; all I’m saying is that they saw the need to aggressively market themselves to compete with their peer institutions, and that’s why they have inundated possible applicants with mail.
This USNews ranking does not include grad/PhD program quality – it only attempts to measure the quality of the undergraduate level.
Harvard, Stanford and MIT have more robust international academic reps than Yale and Princeton because they have huge research output and resulting reputations. Princeton focuses on undergraduates, not so much on grad/PhD programs, and it is reflected in the USNews undergrad ranking.
When the focus of a school with that large of an endowment is on undergraduates, it is bound to result in a heightened experience at that level.
@anxiousenior1
My point is that UChicago is and has been an amazing school for many many years academically, but…they have improved the student life exponentially just recently (the best housing system in the US, only comparable to Yale’s). The only way they have to show that and attract the attention of top students is through marketing. My daughter was a top student that had an Ivy on her horizon. That was obvious according to her performance over 12 years of school. We never thought of UChicago as an option. The information she got from them really attracted our attention. From the first visit two years ago she fell in love with that place, and even after she got into 7 other amazing schools (3 Ivies), she decided on U of C. According to the type of kids from her school (a top private prep school) who are attending (all of them absolutely remarkable in different ways), I truly believe that the marketing has made a difference on the quality of the group of students who are attending this fall.
In all seriousness. With world university rankings placing UChicago in top 5-6 in the US (even without engineering in a rankings that are STEM biased, which is why Cal Tech and MIT lead in those) and USNWR yet again placing it in third, it’s time for even the doubters, critics and haters to wake up and smell the Humus.
@Cariño
That’s great for your daughter! But I don’t understand how you can criticize the statement that the average high school applicant is not really aware of UChicago when you yourself and your daughter never really saw UChicago as an option two years ago. This is exactly the reason that they had to up the marketing game: because they were not gaining ground against their peers who have their own reputation set in stone.
all ivies do not give merit aid. UChicago can, and is very generous for top students.
@anxiousenior1…Fine…you win…but my point is that this highly criticized marketing strategy is legit, and works!
I think Stanford should deserve to be in top three.
personally… I would love to see Chicago go higher to 1 or 2… …
but USNWR will change the metrics to game the results they want to see (some variation of HYP). USNWR games the system just as much as Chicago… or HYP or just about any college out there (except for MIT and Caltech imo).
let’s not kid ourselves.
Some people see a conspiracy in everything.
For all those Caltech fans who were not following the US News rankings around the turn of the century, Caltech was ranked #1 (by a significant margin) for the one year when Bob Morse was not in charge.
All it would take for Caltech to return to the top would be the removal of the “logarithmic adjuster” that US News applies to the “per student spending” criteria…
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crapshoot/1999/09/cooking_the_school_books.html
In general, the US News rankings are a lot like hot dogs - they tend to taste better if you don’t really know what is inside of them…
sometimes conspiracies are proven true ^^^^ lols:)
Bottom line, the USNWR rankings are significantly measuring the ability of a school to ENROLL, RETAIN and GRADUATE top undergrad students in large numbers.
Chicago used to have a rep as a dreary college that focused mostly on grad students located in a lousy unattractive neighborhood – “the place where fun goes to die.” They’ve done a lot of things to change that reality and then to broadcast their story. They’ve done a lot more than just taking out ads to jack up their app numbers so they can reject increasing numbers of kids.
Chicago is pretty similar to where Penn was. In 1990, Penn ranked last in the Ivy League at USNWR #20. The Ivy safety school in a decrepit neighborhood. Sure they managed their numbers somewhat by going all in on ED. But they also did a lot of other actual things to make their school more attractive to undergrads. Like hugely rebuilding their campus and neighborhood. Plus, Penn (like Chicago, Columbia, NYU) benefited greatly from the increased attractiveness of urban lifestyles among millenials.
End of the day, you’re not a top USNWR school if you just get top kids to apply. Top kids have to actually enroll.
Honestly, Cal Tech probably shouldn’t even be judged as a national university. It is a technical institute, it has only 900 undergrads, and all of them are studying technical subjects. It is incredible at what it does, but it is almost meaningless to try to rank a place like that against national universities with a broader focus.
@ThankYouforHelp Agreed! But we are lucky to have them. Superlative output.
“So, Morse was given back his job as director of data research, and the formula was juiced to put HYP back on top.”
This actually makes sense. USNWR is basically measuring “Yale-ness.” So no surprise that Yale comes out at the top – in fact, that result tends to validate the formula. If HYPS don’t come out near the top, most people would question the method.
If you don’t like a system that measure Yale-ness, there’s plenty of other systems you can use instead.
Back in the day the area around Penn was terrible. You wouldn’t want to walk around there at night or even day. You could say the same for a number of other schools. Fortunes have changed as those areas have come back.
Back then, I think the Ivies were in three tiers: HYP; Dartmouth and Columbia; and Penn, Cornell, and Brown. Penn and Brown have gone up significantly, and Dartmouth has fallen as the trend toward larger, more urban schools has grown. If I recall correctly, Chicago had about a 50% acceptance rate in the not-too-distant past. How times change.
“If I recall correctly, Chicago had about a 50% acceptance rate in the not-too-distant past. How times change.”
Yep. And so did Columbia and UPenn and Johns Hopkins. Parents were scared to send their kids to cities.
^ And Yale! Well, parents are still scared to send their kids to New Haven…