One thing about the RD round is this is mostly for applicants for whom UChicago is not there first choice and the hardest part about applying are the essays which UChicago requires two more. Applicants aren’t really all that excited about writing another couple of essays especially if it’s not in their top 3.
Admission rate* is largely a function of number of applicants.
*(at least at the level of selectivity UofC has been operating at)
@exacademic but they didn’t really drop in their admission rate.
@CTLawyer your points are well taken but the latter point would more likely affect the early pools, not the regular pool. However the early pools this year were larger than prior, if I’m not mistaken.
At some point places like Harvard and Stanford which look like they will have below 5% acceptance rates will start seeing a negative effect as top students realize they may not get in and looking to other colleges to ensure they go to a top school. Again the more schools that go to ED the more pronounced the effect. Game theory comes more and more into play especially as RD rates drop closer to zero.
I see RD really being something that allows the deferreds from the early pool to specify continued interest. How does a new applicant compete with that? Perhaps what is becoming more apparent is that the top schools want you to show you want them. Yields might actually be more important than numbers of applicants or even admit rates.
Right (admission rate didn’t drop – so no prestige payoff/bragging rights there. Might even have risen). Which means the news is applications decreased significantly (a bad sign if you’re playing this particular status-seeking game).
UofC already had impressive yield w/o ED (66%). Raising it by adding ED is no achievement if you don’t simultaneously lower your admissions rate (i.e. increase your perceived selectivity).
I think the premise that UChicago changed admission plans in order to have bragging rights might be incorrect. Same with @Cue7’s premise that they want to increase applications for the sake of increasing applications.
Desiring an increase in yield might have more to do with long-term favorable outcomes associated with that than it does jumping from #3 to #2 on the USNews ranking system. The college might be looking a lot longer term than this coming September.
Who said anything about this coming September or about rising to #2? UChicago wants the College to be seen as an HYPS peer. It has median scores that make that credible, it markets heavily and adopted the Common App to attract more applicants and has invested in the College in various ways (dorms, career services) to entice admittees to enroll. It has also engaged in a variety of efforts (FA, admissions reforms, outreach) to attract more first-gen and/or low income students. Those efforts all pay off and UChicago rises in the rankings. It ends up with a single digit admissions rate, but that’s still higher than HYPS – and Columbia. What does Columbia have that Chicago doesn’t? ED (well, and NYC and Ivy-ness, but those are changes Chicago can’t make). So let’s try ED – increased yield should lower our admissions rate. That logic assumes that the number of applications remains constant (or increases). Which was a reasonable assumption – applications have been increasing in recent years and the publicity from the rise in USNWR ranking seemed likely to attract more candidates. But it didn’t work out that way.
What HYPS has is the large population centers from which to draw. UChicago while being in a large city doesn’t have near the population within 500 miles that any of the HYPS have and probably never will. So I doubt they will ever beat them out in total apps. I mean look at UCLA, over 100,000 applications.
@exacademic they certainly did do all those things but perhaps not with the motivations you are attributing to them. For sure they want a higher yield - Going ED demonstrates that. No doubt they are targeting HYPS as the standard they have to meet in order to be well considered as a peer school. This will be a difficult task as I have posted on other threads. My issue is with your timing and your conclusion that they needed more apps for next year or it’s an oopsie. Why, exactly? If their goal was to maintain selectivity and increase yield, do we have any indication that these were NOT achieved?
Again, we don’t know either way. Losing 10% of your applicants should result in the firing of the head of admissions unless the decrease was expected. And if they change their admission plans next year then we will know that in retrospect it was definitely a mistake. If they keep the same admission plans we will know differently. I can come up with as many narratives for why a 3000 application decrease would be welcomed as you can for why it’s a disaster.
Isn’t the goal every year to increase selectivity AND increase yield? Schools never want to maintain anything - they want to improve on all these metics.
That’s why this year was a little hit or miss for Chicago. For the past like five years in a row, they increased selectivity and yield, every year. Nondorf must be wondering why we couldn’t generate more than 16k RD apps. Even Dartmouth got more than that, and they are in the middle of nowhere with a sinking USNWR ranking and myriad scandals/student life issues.
Now Chicago is running into a wall because they’ve gone about as far as they can go, absent something else (like for Columbia, NYC and Ivy-ness, as @exacademic put it, or at Stanford, west coast-ness and silicon valley).
It’s why Chicago needs to start developing that something else - that sizzle. My nine step plan presents an approach just for that!
(Honestly, the biggest part would be to just extend the RD deadline, provide more fee waivers and advertising, and make it easier to apply. Those who really want Chicago are going to do the good, tougher essays. Those who are just checking a box won’t, and they will be easy for the ad comm to reject. A win win for everybody! (except applicants, who never benefit under the current system)
Finally, @JBStillFlying you mentioned that Chicago does joint sessions with other coalition schools. I’m not talking just about that - Chicago also travels with Columbia, rice, and a few other top schools. I’m talking about somewhat lavish admissions receptions with a top dog in a region - pay for a good show and a nice spread, promise fee waivers and an easier application, and applicants would swarm. It’s not hard.
(And please, it wouldn’t impact the strength of the incoming class - Chicago would just be looking for fodder applications it could reject - just as Nondorf discussed in that higher Ed article - presidents want more applications, and with a little more money and sizzle, Chicago could get a lot more. Those who really want Chicago will still pick the tough essays, write thoughtful responses, etc. the school just needs more fodder applications - both to keep up or surpass the joneses, and to keep trustees happy. I imagine the year Nondorf can tell the board that Chicago is more selective than Yale will be a good year for him. Don’t think otherwise.)
@Cue7 I would agree that, all else equal, they want to increase yield and selectivity every year. But they completely overhauled the admissions plans. If you are wondering how to increase RD, not sure that the answer would be to offer three early plans beforehand and while I’m no admissions expert, my hunch is that Nondorf probably knows that too. They have totally stacked the odds against the RD pool. That’s very different from prior years.
My guess, however, is that it’s something outside of the admissions process that resulted in 3,000 fewer applications this year. How come no one (except me) has mentioned the impact of the “no safe space” letter? Could that have had an impact? Perhaps not on the early pool as those kids likely were gaga for Uchicago, had done their research, etc. The numbers there were up. Perhaps it was the more - for lack of better word - marginal candidate who might have opted not to apply? (not meaning they were marginal in terms of stats, leadership, and overall application, but perhaps marginal in their enthusiasm for what UChicago is about).
So I return to my question earlier: you increase yield, you maintain selectivity, and you get rid of 3,000 marginal applicants which frees up Admissions staff to focus more thoroughly on a better overall pool. Where is the mistake?
The mistake is not finding a larger crop of marginal applicants for Chicago to summarily reject, while doing everything else you say.
All schools seek a strong core of applicants, and fodder applicants. Chicago needs more of the latter, to go along with the former. They didn’t get as much of that as they needed this year.
Also, I’d think the no safe spaces would have more impact on early apps - in today’s news cycle, an article that came out in September would be a distant memory for those applying in January.
Again, the ad comm might have gotten a little complacent with regular apps. The safest bet with a big policy change would’ve been to extend the RD deadline, offer more fee waivers for the RD round, and market hard after students submitted their other apps. That probably could’ve yielded 2-3k more apps. Another strategy would be to entice more foreign apps through fee waivers and marketing.
Chicago did one change (changing early policy), without the other safeguards I presented above. And they got a little scathed.
Expect Nondorf to come back strong next year, with at least 20k RD apps. And he only has about a year to course correct - Penn and Duke are already hot on chicagos heels with near 8% accept rates! If in two years Nondorf tells the board that Chicago has gone from the sixth most selective school in the country to, say, the 12th, that’s not going to look good.
And 12th they’d be - with current admit rates in, it looks like, in 2 years, we’ll have a dozen schools with sub 8% accept rates. (HYPMS, Columbia, brown, Duke, penn, cal tech, and possibly northwestern and maybe Vanderbilt or Hopkins).
There is a very simple way to bring in tons of apps in the RD round. Only for the RD round announce a small number of full tuition scholarships based on a lottery. Anybody can win. Not based on need. If you apply and get in, there will be a public drawing on April 5th. Then sit back and watch the apps roll in. Call it the “UChicago College Opportunity Lottery (UCOL)”
Better still announce tiers of the lottery
Two full tuition
Four half tuition
Eight quarter tuition
The only issue with #34 above is that it’s WAY too honest for any OA. LOL.
Complacent - I’ll entertain that possibility only because it sounds like something they’d mess up on. Perhaps they did underestimate, didn’t do their proper marketing. Etc. but if they need that amount of marketing or outreach to ward off a 10% drop . . . doesn’t sound good for UChicago. Perhaps they decided to go complacent with that pool to see what happens. Who knows. Still thinking it was an “outside factor” as that’s a big drop. My hunch is that they were not targeting admit rates per say but more yields while working to ensure that admit rates don’t rise sharply. That holds it’s place long enough for them to re-target where they need to in future years. IOW, we are saying the same thing, just potentially disagree on how much of it was intentional vs. unintentional.
Yes, the other schools are hot on UChicago’s heels. It’s a tough race. What goes up quickly can crash, which has been my concern. On a broader note, who else is expecting USNews to have five schools tied for first and eight-10 tied for 6th?
Also @Cue7 - they didn’t do “sizzle” in the prior years - why suddenly now?
Interesting. Just ran across this article from 2014. Apparently something like this has happened before:
Yes! In 2014 the application number dropped about 2.5K from 30K to 27.5K from 2013.
There were numerous explanations regarding that symptom. One common factor for both years was very bad press coverage of Chicago crimes (last year was very high in the recent memory).
The very alarming Chicago crime coverage could easily turn off some applicants.
I could see crime, repulsion at lack of safe spaces, and dissolutionment over all those essays for how many spots exactly(?) all working together to turn off quite a few RD’ers.
So let’s make sure we have the numbers correct. Last year they admitted 2,498 out of an applicant pool of 31,411. 1,591 enrolled. Therefore, admit rate was 7.95% and yield 63.7%. Rounding to 8% and 64%, respectively.
Preliminary numbers for this year are “about” 8% of 28,000 applications admitted (assuming a 1:1 mapping of applications to applicants. In other words, your application isn’t counted twice if you are deferred. Is that correct?), so 2,240. If they enroll 1,600, that’s a yield of 71.4% (round to 71%).
So yield might jump 7-8 points. In 2014 according to that article it jumped 9 points, and 6 points the year prior. Never a dull moment with this school. Actually, 2015 and 2016 must have been quite dull as neither admit rate nor yield moved much. Nondorf probably felt that two years of stability was enough to warrant another shakeup. Perhaps they concluded that UChicago had kind of maxed out its yield/minimized its admit rate under the old plans. A re-optimization would entail changing up those plans to nail down commitments and allow yields and admit rates to move organically to their new positions. From there it would have a few more years of high rankings to assist in its marketing efforts. They need to get RD applications back to the old levels in order to see that happen.
Does the total admit number of around 2,240 lend any insight into how many were admitted EDI, EDII, EA?