2019 USNWR Ranking

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/9/10/uchicago-third-u-news-rankings-third-time/

I was hoping U of C would go down a few notches. Then we shall have less “tailgaters” applying. Not to mention there will be less post from people with UCDS.

I maintain U of C is an acquired taste. Only certain types of student would enjoy and benefit from it. A higher ranking simply draws way too many students that are simply chasing prestige.

2

Totally agree! Was happy to see it at #5 till I noticed that - nah, it was tie with two of the schools above. But it is holding its own. The UCDS-impaired might just have to get used to the new “normal”.

Glad to see MIT in the top 3 as well. That makes sense.

3

Depending on the weighting, we might be seeing the impact of weighting socioeconomic diversity and Pell Grant graduation rates. Support measures for low-income and first-gen students leave something to be desired, and that (rightly) affects rankings.

I predict endless debates on these boards about why we’re really number 3 (no tie) ≤ X ≤ 5.

4

I have no desire to debate the position of the ranking. To me all rankings are stupid and subjective. U of C is No.1 in my books FOR ME. It can be legitimately No. 50 for another person who hates the core and abhors winter and detests the life of the mind. Everyone’s utility curve is drawn differently.

5

It looks like the ‘Outcomes’ (social mobility, graduation and retention, and graduation rate performance) has been increased in their equation.

Did they get rid of ‘acceptance rate?’ It sounds like it is no longer a factor. So colleges no longer have to compete for the ‘inevitable 0%’ acceptance rate? Lol :wink:

Agree with @85Bears46 that the ‘number’ is in the eyes of the beholder.

6

Yes, they got rid of the acceptance rate as a factor

7

Now that USNWR dropped the acceptance rate as a factor and UChicago held its previous rank, does this mean the perennial criticism that UChicago is gaming the rankings by keeping its acceptance rate artificially low through heavy use of EDs and other tactics will go away?

8

Hopefully it means they will stop sending 1000 pieces of mail to unqualified (and qualified) prospective students.

ED is still a win win for colleges - for yield management and selectivity. Just because its not a factor in the ranking doesn’t mean potential students don’t look at it carefully. So they can keep accepting a ton of ED - and reject all the rest in RD.

9

The “1000 mails” is one thing that I think that the University is doing right.

As a matter of principle, I believe that UChicago should not be reserved for people who are “in the know”. These, people who already know of UChicago, are generally people who are like most of us - academic and economic elites (10%). There are tons of deserving potential students out there that do not know of UChicago and would be absolutely the perfect fit for the school. Mass mailers are cheap and effective. The school should continue to find those students, even if it means irritating those who don’t like the witty mass mails for multiple reasons.

I am especially for mass mailings to underrepresented regions of the US like the Southeast and the Southwest regions. Throw in the Canadian territories for good measure. :wink:

10

Was Stanford the one that suffered the most from the removal of the acceptance rate as a criterion? Seems like it.

11

I dunno- from my days in marketing I was taught that direct mail had a less than 1% response rate. Perhaps someone currently in marketing can affirm or correct that. Consider what you do with the catalogs that show up in your mailbox…
The few catalogs that are effective (Lands End, LL Bean) are written in a very specific way- which the U of C mailings are not. My 2c- they are a waste of money.

12

Although I personally hate direct mail marketing and agree that they are generally ineffective, this use may be an exception. There is an interesting study done by a joint Harvard and Stanford team on whether top colleges were attracting the top students - link below. The study concluded that “the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and non-selective
four-year institutions to which they actually apply.” The gist was that colleges effectively target and reach only students in well known, concentrated areas leaving the majority of the top students outside those areas untapped.

The study mentioned the challenge of colleges reaching out to these students who generally live in areas that do not have enough population density to warrant personal recruiting visits. Direct mailing was one of the suggestions to reach these top students that aren’t applying. These undiscovered high achievers are all literate, so well designed direct mailing and use of social media might be the best chance of connecting with these students that historically have not known about or applied to schools like UChicago.

Is the current mailing campaign targeted enough to reach some of these students who might not have known about UChicago? Hard to say without seeing the details. Anecdotally, when I first became aware of and interested in UChicago as a high school student in the '80s, very few people from my area of SW Florida had even heard of it. When my son was accepted this year, most people both inside and outside of his school knew about UChicago and what a great college it is. The dreaded mailings may have a role to play in this increase in public recognition along with USNWR. Places like Stanford and Harvard may not need to increase name recognition since they’re part of the general public’s knowledge base, featured in media and already well known. UChicago has always had the academic cred but not the name recognition. If the mailings are a part of what increases that name recognition and allows the college to increasingly attract talent, then they’re probably a necessary evil.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18586.pdf

13

Is anyone else shocked U of C finished in the top 3 this year? Any ranking that incorporates “social mobility,” outcomes (presumably, monetary outcomes), and pell grant recipients would seem to box out Chicago from anything better than a top 15-20 finish.

How did this happen?

14

Nah.

The true engines of social mobility are places like SUNY and the UCs. They try to enroll as many qualified students as possible, even to the detriment of their average GPA or test scores. So these schools exist on a completely different level in the rankings from rich, mid-sized private universities that manage their class stats carefully.

Our competition in the top 20 consists of other schools that aren’t great at attracting, admitting, and retaining low-SES students. Marginally better than us, in many cases, but not great.

And USNWR’s formula cares about this stuff, but not that much

15

Social mobility determines only 5% of overall score. Furthermore, high school counselor ranking contribution went down a notch which may have worked in UChicago’s favor.

16

Not so sure that U of C gets hurt on the measure of social mobility. See this piece from the NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/university-of-chicago

Among 12 peer schools Chicago ranks third (behind MIT and Cornell) on the “overall mobility index”, which is a measure that “reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at the University of Chicago moved up two or more quintiles”. The stats range from a high of 16 percent to a low of 8.7 percent, with U of C grads at 14 percent.

It’s true that U of C finishes dead last in “median parental income” and “students with parents in top 20 percent” (and next-to-last in "students with parents in top 1 percent), but that only means that it has more kids with more potential to raise themselves.

I don’t know and don’t care how USNews is measuring “social mobility”, but I don’t see anything in these stats to show how that measure should in principle hurt the U of C. Unless it’s the “chance of poor students to become rich”, where Chicago is dead last. But that kind of proves the point of a Chicago education in my mind: It raises more kids of modest background into the professional middle or upper middle classes. It doesn’t attract the kind of kid who has it in mind to become a tycoon. For me that’s not the most important measure of social mobility at any school, least of all one like the University of Chicago.

17

USNWR looks at (A) Pell Grant recipient graduation rates overall and (B) how those rates compare to the school’s overall graduation rate

18

To the NY Times graphic - if you look at the footnotes, they clarify that the measures of access are for students who mostly fall in the class of 2013. The outcome and social mobility measures are for the classes of 2002-2004.

So it’s a great study, and an important topic, but given the significant changes in the U of C’s target market and demographics over the last 5-10 years, I’m not sure how reflective it is of current students.

19

You may be right, Dun. It is the kind of thing I keep hearing every time actual statistics are presented. I keep asking what the evidence is for these great changes of student demographic and culture. It is all intuitive. However, I have a different intuition which leads me to believe that there’s something sticky in Chicago’s perennial cultural and educational attitudes. I’m also wary of special pleading: I detect a thumb on the scales in many (though not you) who make this point about a great sea-change having occurred so as to invalidate all previous statistics. They long for a transformation of Chicago’s ethos and want to find this everywhere they look. You, I think, fear that very thing. Don’t give in! Fight!

20

That’s a fair point.

What data we do have, though imperfect, seems to back this trend up. The Maroon’s Class of 2020 survey has data on family income (the class of 2021 article doesn’t include a detailed breakdown, so I’m using the 2020 figures). The survey had a response rate of about 1 in 3 students - pretty good as such things go. Political pollsters, by way of comparison, are overjoyed if they get a response rate of 5%. This allows some comparison with tax data for the class of 2013.

Link: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2016/9/14/class-2020-survey/

Per the NY Times interactive, about 58% of the Class of 2013 had parents in the top 20%.

61.78% of respondents in the Class of 2020 survey reported household incomes over $150,000. Another 14.83% reported incomes between $100,000 and $150,000. The 80th percentile for household income in the U.S. was about $117,000 in 2015, so it’s not outlandish to say half of the 100-to-150K group - a tad over 7% - had household incomes above the 80th percentile. That would put the share of households in the top 20% at approximately 69% for the class of 2020. With less conservative assumptions about the distribution within the 100-to-150K bucket, that might be 70% or 71%. The error bars around this estimate are pretty wide - but it’s evidence, however tentative, for a wealthier class of 2020 compared to the class of 2013.

This table from the Washington Post, based on data reported to U.S. News and World Report, compares the share of students eligible for Pell Grants in the class of 2014 and the class of 2019: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/pell-eligible-share-of-freshmen-at-top-colleges/2245/

Chicago’s class of 2019 had a Pell-eligible population of 12% of the student body - a 3% drop over five years. That was lower than Harvard (16%), Princeton (17%), Yale (17%), Stanford (13%), MIT (15%), Columbia (17%), Cornell (15%), UPenn (14%), and Brown (13%). Even Northwestern (15%) had a higher share of Pell Grant recipients. Our 12% was tied with Duke (also 12%) and higher than Notre Dame (10%) or Cal Tech (11%).

US News & World Report data for the Class of 2020, a year later, shows another drop in the Pell-eligible population - to 11%: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-schools. That put us below Duke (13%) and Cal Tech (12%), in addition to every school I mentioned above except Notre Dame (still 10%). UChicago had the third-lowest share of Pell Grant recipients among top-25 schools - just ahead of Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis (also 10%).

None of these data are definitive, but every individual piece of information points in the same direction, and what longitudinal comparisons we have (courtesy of the US News numbers and the Post’s ranked table) suggest socioeconomic diversity at UChicago has dropped and now lags most of our peers.

I have my thoughts on this, but that’s a topic for another day.