Went to an admitted students reception last weekend and Asst. Director of Admissions Marjie Betley was present. She said that UChicago received “around 28,000 applications” this year (compared to 31,411 last year) and had an overall acceptance rate of “around 8%” (compared to 7.6% last year). Assuming these admissions statistics are wholly accurate, what would cause UChicago to have a lower number of applications/higher overall acceptance rate? Is this a sign of an upwards trend in terms of % accepted, or do you think she was just rounding?
Not significant enough to show a trend. Tiny variation.
Hmm, interesting. Clearly, it’s not just rounding wrt number of apps (could be wrt % admitted). If the acceptance rate did increase, it means that the higher yield from ED didn’t fully compensate for the decrease in number of applicants. At which point the questions become (a) why did applications decrease (by about 10% if the stats are accurate)? (b) was the move to ED1/ED2 counterproductive © if so, is this just a short-term effect? Answering (b) requires a theory of what ED is supposed to produce. It’d be interesting to see the numbers broken down by type of application, but UChicago doesn’t typically release that info.
So isn’t this because Chicago got less total early apps (because fewer people want to commit ED, and EA looks even more difficult), and, based on a softer brand and a notoriously low RD rate, RD apps stagnated?
ED may modestly increase the caliber of student entering, but if Chicago wants to gain thousands more apps, it probably needs to strengthen its brand and its position as a “dream” school that lots of 18 yos covet (admit celebrities! have big time basketball! woo senators’ kids! start an association of some sort with Stanford, MIT, and Duke, and piggyback off other schools’ success!)
That is a serious drop in the number of applications. A ten percent drop when other universities are reporting good increases indicates some softness in the brand. For example Penn reported a 4% increase with a total of more than 40,000 applying
Here’s a theory:
So, regular decision apps are probably the best sign of a school’s general appeal. Early apps (EA or ED) still tend to come from more affluent students, whereas the regular pool sees the broadest cross-section of students.
Chicago’s strategy was, up until this year, to have an aggressive but laissez-faire EA policy, “We might not be your first choice, but why not throw your hat in the ring?” Lots of students applied ED or EA elsewhere, and still utilized Chicago as a kind of “top school backup option.” Chicago received 11,000+ EA apps for many years.
In the RD round, Chicago’s softer brand and more niche nature (as being a “harder”) school were exposed, and the school typically didn’t receive more than 20,000 RD apps. In contrast, many of it’s peers received 30,000+ RD apps.
This year, Chicago switched to ED + EA, and this greatly constricted the number of early apps. I think @Chrchill pointed out somewhere that about 9000 applied early. That’s a big drop. Many students didn’t see Chicago as their #1, so didn’t apply ED, and others, potentially, shied away from EA because they presumed an escalation in difficulty to get in EA.
In the regular round, Chicago once again received a lackluster number of applications - 21,000 or so, in comparison to the 30,000+ most of the big name brand schools (those in the Ivy League, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, etc.) received.
Add it all up, and you get to 28,000 apps overall and a stagnation (not a bad thing) in Chicago’s admissions trajectory.
Interestingly, the school perhaps most similar to Chicago (without all the humanities) is MIT, and MIT continually gets fewer applications than its peers, because it’s seen as something more of a “niche” school.
Source: http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats (MIT gets about 20k apps total)
People are much more likely to “throw their hat in the ring” at Harvard or Duke or Brown than they are at MIT (or Swarthmore or Chicago).
If Chicago wants to change this, here’s a strategy:
1.) Increase resources and their marketing machine and focus even more on RD applicants. Chicago already pours a lot into marketing, but they could always do more. Hire admissions officers/marketers who travel in November and early December (typically a slower travel time for admissions offices), and send out LOTS of fee waivers. Change the order of the essay prompts, so that the “bland” essay prompt (“just write about something”) is listed #1 rather than #5.
2.) Identify areas of soft recruitment, and team up with the big dog in that region. So, start hosting joint admissions fairs with, say, Harvard in the NE, Duke in the southeast, and Stanford on the west coast. (Interestingly, Penn did this about a decade ago - it teamed up with Harvard, Georgetown, and Duke, and received a big bump in applications because of their new traveling road show.) Offer to pay all venue rental fees (which universities typically split) for hotels/ballrooms to host admissions sessions. Host these sessions near the top home school, so the home school doesn’t need to travel far, and pay for everything. (E.g. host with Harvard in Boston or NYC, host with Duke in Atlanta or Charlotte, host with Stanford in San Fran or LA.)
3.) Extend the RD deadline to January 15 (not Jan. 1), and market hard with fee waivers and advertising over December and early January. Send out little Christmas gifts (UChicago scarves?) with fee waivers, and note how, for those on the Common App, applying to Chicago is as easy as checking another box.
4.) Hire or create an internal buzz firm to gradually raise the “hotness” profile of the school. Seek connections in Hollywood, NY fashion, etc., to woo and increase the number of celebs/power players on campus. Brown does it, so why not Chicago? Source: https://www.rt.com/usa/252885-sony-emails-ivy-league/
If Brown’s president is meeting with CEOs at Sony and other multimedia conglomerates, why can’t President Zimmer do the same?
(Similarly, court the Obama children hard, along with other notable kids (Bill Gates’ son took a tour recently, for example).
The internal buzz firm could then liaise with sites students like (Buzzfeed?) to spread the word.
5.) Engage in more class engineering - aim to have percentages of the class that are adept at different things. So accept the math nerds, the humanities geeks, first gen standouts, etc., but also have some deference to those with a lot of social acumen, other human capital. Aim for maybe a 85/15 split. (85% of the traditional nerds, first gen kids, socioeconomic diversity, etc., and 15% jet-setting, status-conscious, frat-frequenting, kids.). Provide more admin support for frats - allow for more active fundraising to renovate frat houses/sorority houses. Expand student club rooms and student group spaces too. Students could then produce after-parties to student group shows that lots of other students would want to attend. Grease the wheels on social activity for the 15-20%.
More buzz combined with a more genuine party scene can lead to news opps like this: Malia Obama at a Penn frat party! Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3780071/Malia-Obama-pictured-near-large-bong-UPenn-frat-house.html
6.) Combined with #5, develop some “easier” majors - maybe in fields like psychology or gender studies. Open up B-school classes in marketing and communications to undergrads, and offer certificates in this area. Tuition money from the 15% could go toward the hiring of adjuncts/extra profs to teach these classes.
7.) Open up campus during the summer/early fall to serve as a recruitment opportunity. Pay to host the nike basketball camps, adidas soccer camps, etc. to bring different types of people to campus. Start a sports data analytics institute that collaborates with Chicago grad Nate Silver’s 538 - and get more posts on ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Host big time sports-academics conferences. Get Coach K (a Chicago native) to lecture a couple times a year on campus.
8.) Open up the Gleacher Center (Booth’s downtown campus) for undergrad use - and partner with Northwestern’s Medill School and IIT to offer journalism and engineering certificates to Chicago students.
Oh, and one more:
9.) Establish partnerships (dare I say, a “league”?) with Stanford, Duke, and MIT. Host a conference every year that rotates through these four campuses. Have teams compete in academic competitions, maybe athletic scrimmages, etc. Pay for travel and establish an endowment to ensure the long-term health of this league. Call it… I don’t know, something prestigious sounding? The quad league? The 4 schools league? The Quadrennial Club?
Chicago only needs to get about 6,000-8,000 more RD apps a year to put it in the top end of total apps received. The above strategies could bring in that and MORE, easy!
(Chicago falters because it doesn’t have the cachet and can’t offer as wide array of opportunity as the other major city research Us - Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Duke, etc. Those schools can literally offer something for everyone. The above plan would lead to some modulation of the class, but would keep Chicago’s core atmosphere the same - or, at least, we’d still have a Chicago that is 85% the same as now. That’s not a bad trade-off!)
@Cue7 Wow. That is quite a suggestion list 
BTW, I think somebody who went to the Admit Weekend in December said that Nondorf said they had received 12K+ apps for that round. So the drop off was not there. It was in the RD round.
@denydenzig - ah, you’re right, it was 12k+ apps in the RD round. So, Chicago took a huge hit in the RD round (generating only about 16,000 apps - in comparison to 30,000+ at peer schools). That only highlights the importance of adopting my nine step plan! I’m sure, with those steps, the school could generate another 10k RD apps EASY, and 36k+ apps total.
@Cue7 why would there be fewer apps in the early round? They offered EA.
Could be that new RD applications were smaller given that there were three rounds of applications prior to that. And with the large number of deferrals on the EA round candidates might have been discouraged from applying (last year’s effective rate was around 4%, IIRC from prior CC conversations. With committed ED’s taking up slots, the perceived effective rate this year might well have been notably lower).
Whatever the reason, a one time drop of 10% is not a blip. The only thing that changed was the admission strategy so perhaps they inadvertently tanked their reputation in the experiment. Or . . . .is this not a big surprise for them? Obviously with ED you don’t need as many applicants. They didn’t do serious damage to their admit rate if it’s around where it was last year (my guess is somewhere in the 8 - 8.5% range, based on the way that admissions person described it. Given all the rapid changes at UChicago Admissions this, indeed, is a blip and by no means cause for alarm) and it also means yield must be higher. Seems to me they might well have been targeting fewer applications so they could devote more time to each one. Fewer applications of higher quality seems like a great goal. And it’s a new starting point. They can grow slowly and carefully from that 28,000 number, rather than deal with their status of “Flavor of the Decade” and all the crappy applications that might bring in. Nondorf has been at this awhile.
So . . which is it - an “oopsie” or a “whoop whoop” for Admissions? One way to find out, besides asking them of course!, would be to see if Nondorf keeps the strategy next admit cycle. Or if Nondorf is there next Admissions cycle. Because a 10% drop in your applications either had to be planned or is a giant black mark.
Yup - I was incorrect in my first post - EA/ED apps stayed about the same. It looks like RD apps took a big hit.
This all goes back to my 9 step program! By instituting those changes, UChicago could always get a healthy amount of RD apps, whereas now it does not.
(Some of those changes, btw, are so easy to institute, and don’t cost that much - e.g. having a Jan. 15 RD deadline instead of Jan. 1, AND presenting students with more fee waivers. That could easily generate another 2-3k apps alone, as it’s so easy to check boxes on the common app.)
Regarding that 9-step plan, Booth is already open to Undergrad, they have plenty of ‘soft’ majors including the ones you mentioned, and many of those other ideas sound a tad flashy for UChicago. New ideas are great but they need to be in keeping with the mission of the school to be successful. Could be that growing reputation more carefully and consistently is smarter than snapping an image of the Obama girls or the Gates kid doing a bong hit somewhere in HP. Being known as the anti-safe-space school might tank your RD admissions in the short run but UChicago probably didn’t want those kids anyway 
Can’t wait to hear the spin from the admissions office on why the number of applications dropped.
I dunno - all Chicago is looking for is more RD applications that it can readily reject. It gets enough quality applicants (out of its pool of 28k), that if they get another 6-10k of “fluff” applicants, they can keep up with the joneses and drive the admit rate down. (Which would fit with Nondorf’s goals. He’s a realist when it comes to application inflation - he knows his boss wants it. Source: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Application-Inflation/125277 - and Nondorf is quoted as saying: “Don’t kid yourselves, the [university] presidents and trustees want you to have more applications.”).
The quickest way to get additional applicants is through the process I describe above. Extending the deadline, making it as easy as possible for students to apply, and then creating a pocket of space for those, say, 15% that bring a dose of variety to campus.
Admissions moves really fast, and 18 yos are fickle. Growing the reputation carefully and consistently isn’t going to move the needle quickly enough. By the time Chicago gets to, say, 35,000 applications, Stanford with its west coast flash or Columbia with its NYC sizzle might be at 45,000 apps.
(Oh, and a point re Booth/easy majors - if Chicago’s already developed this, more power to them. Then we can negate that step. I wasn’t aware of easy majors at Chicago though, but maybe this has changed. Furthermore, build in some watered-down hum and sosc classes that spread via word of mouth and voila! a happy space for the happy 15%. Chicago already has easy science core classes - like Core Bio or “Rocks for Jocks,” so why not have some easier hum/sosc core classes? Keep the percentage of these classes intentionally LOW, so as to not dilute the strength of education by a noticeable amount. We don’t want hundreds of Chicago students graduating each year who can’t write. If we graduate a couple dozen offspring of CEOs/senators a year who don’t have trademark Chicago rigor, though, who’s really going to notice? These people are going to be successful and wealthy - and will probably think fondly of their charmed time at Chicago - anyway.)
The changes I describe above are fairly easy to implement, and don’t really change core values, if we pay attention to the percentage of the class impacted by the changes. That’s why I’d be happy with a 85/15 split. 15% is enough to be impactful, but not enough to create a wholesale change in culture.
Finally, I should add - this wouldn’t be just a one-off pic of an Obama or a Gates doing a bong hit in HP. This would be a systematic and consistent feed of buzz that’ll flow in different ways. There’d be consistent courting of power players. Remember when Brown got all this buzz with Emma Watson? Imagine if Chicago could generate that, year after year after year. Start a “buzz wing” of the Communications Office and commence outreach/development of these power players. Host banquets for media CEOs and senators, and arrange for special trips for the offspring of the powerful. All other top schools have mechanisms for encouraging this. Make sure the scale doesn’t tip past 15%.
And while all that is going on? Implement the application deadline changes, gain traction in different industries (like sports/media through analytics conferences, sports camps, etc.), and establish partnerships with other schools so that Chicago can offer more - like journalism certificates and nuts and bolts engineering classes. Why wouldn’t apps go up with little hit to the core reputation? Any potential trade-off would be worth it when we’re only talking 15% of a class, max!
Oh, and I should reaffirm what I said above - host joint admissions sessions with Harvard in the NE, Stanford on the west coast, etc. AND, start partnerships, or a league of some sort with MIT, Duke, and Stanford - where students can enjoy conferences, competitions (hackathons? math competitions? A politics weekend hosted by Chicago’s Institute of Politics, only for M,D,S, and Chicago students? Subsidize travel for all?) Call the league something fancy. Gain prestige by association (it works for Penn and Brown and others!), and pretty soon, those applying to Duke or Stanford will throw an app to Chicago as well.
Through all this, make sure to reject a huge chunk of the RD apps.
Rinse, lather, and repeat. This will move things along quickly enough, and without really any blemish to the Chicago experience. If anything, it’ll enhance the atmosphere on campus!
@cue7 5. Chicago does not falter compared to Duke and Penn for major city cachet. But the constant visibility of crime statistics may have had an impact.
They might be able to drive the admit rate down gradually and permanently by increasing the number of quality applicants. UChicago doesn’t really do ANYTHING “fluff” and they’d do a very poor job of it if they tried. Sticking to the view that they might have expected a drop in applicants. If admit rate didn’t change all that much, they haven’t lost anything except the opportunity hire more admissions counselors to shift through all the “fluff”.
There are no truly easy majors at UChicago and those that major in the “softer” stuff still have the Core. But Psych and Gender Studies is the staple of any LA education these days. UChicago offers both.
I highly doubt they will convince the children of senators and CEO’s to attend if they simply weren’t up to the rigors of the place.
A partnership with an engineering program might not be a bad idea, assuming that something like a 3/2 option is still popular. Thing is, those are mostly done between small LAC’s and a larger private where there are benefits to both parties (they aren’t competitors anyway and definitely complements for this type of program). UChicago is a research uni. All other research uni’s are competitors. Why get your liberal arts at UChicago and your engineering or journalism at NU when you can do the entire thing at the latter? UChicago would need to build it’s own program from the ground up or partner with a non-competitor. Ideally, both schools would be in very close proximity (such as the RISD-Brown dual degree program) so that the entire community benefits from the collaboration. There are schools in the loop but not UChicago’s caliber - SAIC “maybe” (architecture/design). UIUC is a competitor for state residents and there might be problems with using a state institutions (esp. in financially problematic IL). So I’m drawing a blank on opportunities for engineering but this is definitely something worth considering (they collaborate with Argonne, for instance, which makes perfect sense).
Finally, about the joint admissions sessions - they do this already as well, as part of the Coalition application. Can’t remember the schools they partner with but we got a bunch of marketing materials from the group.
I’m really wondering how much the Ellison letter influenced admissions this year. Timing was interesting.
What matters is yield. Yield should be higher because of ED 1 and ED 2. But these Ed’s likely caused the drop in RD’s
Now here’s my opinion on RD. They don’t need it anywhere like they used to. With three opportunities to signal that UChicago is your first choice, they are filling precious few slots with RD. They could afford to take the hit.
Edit to add: what @Chrchill is saying. The rankings and metrics are based on admission rate and yield-related stuff, not strict numbers of applicants.
I think two things could be at work here. The first is the bad rap the city of Chicago has been getting with the large number of shootings. It was always in the news this election cycle. The other is that all these admissions options look very gimicky. They may have turned off and confused many people. A University so highly regarded doesn’t need all these options for sppkicants. This is just my opinion.