The total numbers look bad and hopefully they learned something and will fix it. But I am wondering how they would know why applicants did not apply?
The silver lining is that Total applications is an “easy” problem to solve using marketing awareness campaigns vs yield.
@JBStillFlying If you take Duke’s RD yield (37%) as representative of UChicago’s new EA/RD yield after the introduction of ED, and assume a 98% yield for their ED1/ED2 rounds, you can calculate that they admitted approx 1,250 in the ED1/ED2 rounds and approx 1,000 in the EA/RD round. My guess is they got approx 5,000 apps for the binding ED rounds combined, which would yield an admit rate of approx 25% for the ED rounds and approx 4.3% for the EA/RD rounds. This all assumes that the information about the 28K apps and 8% admit rate are true.
“This all assumes that the information about the 28K apps and 8% admit rate are true.”
If you like stats and numbers, this is quite an interesting thread. However, until the 28K and 8% are confirmed, the analysis is incomplete. Do we know when U Chicago will make the announcements that all the other schools have made regarding 2021 admissions?
@JBStillFlying said “they didn’t do “sizzle” in the prior years - why suddenly now?”
Maybe “sizzle” isn’t the right word - but Chicago, if it wants to inflate its apps, needs to develop some type of “hook” to woo students. The hook, or hooks, could come in a combination of forms, but they should be the draw that causes applicants to toss an app our way. All the big “dream” schools have this - Stanford (sports, west coast, silicon valley, so many things), Columbia (NYC, Ivy-ness, etc.), Duke (big-time basketball), Harvard (well, it’s still Harvard, boston is a big draw), Penn (social Ivy, offers something for almost everyone).
Chicago’s chief “hook” right now, is (for some) the quality of the education, for some the high ranking, and for some mix the location (but NU is also right near the city, so this dilutes Chicago’s advantage a bit). So, as @HydeSnark has pointed out, there are students that come to Chicago who come just for the ranking - and who don’t even know about the core. There are others who are all about the Chicago Schools of thought.
As seen over the past several years of data, it looks like Chicago’s current application total has more or less plateaued. For the past three years, they’ve received around 30,000 apps. That’s certainly a big number, but not when you look at Stanford (now topping 40,000 apps), Harvard (40,000), Columbia (getting close to 40,000), and a few others.
The new benchmark seems to be 35-40k (preferably 40k) apps a year. Chicago’s already pretty much maxed out on advertising, on UChicago swag and gift-giving (which I might add, is the primary “sizzle” that Nondorf sold - he really upped the marketing).
To keep up with the joneses, Chicago has to take the next step - e.g. the nine steps (which are open to editing, of course!) I outlined at the start of this thread. Then it can grow even more out of its perceived niche, and appeal to an even wider swath of students. Once you start building a little more hype, and make some mechanical changes to encourage more apps, the apps will come.
(Keep in mind - this is all about optics - I don’t think Harvard’s class was much worse when they “only” had 30k apps as opposed to 40k. This is the game the top schools are playing, though, which is why admissions is such a grinding race.)
On a related note, if Chicago really wanted to up its marketing game, it could start wooing 8th and 9th graders. Send recruitment materials out to middle schools and 9th-10th graders. Invite top students to come to campus for math camps, debates, etc. Sponsor “UChicago Awards” for excellence in a range of schools. Then, when these kids apply to college, send out fee waivers. Rearranging the order of essays helps here too.
I feel as if Chicago’s position in admissions is similar to its standing in life sciences/med school. To stay on track with its (aspirational?) peers, it needs to work twice as hard. It’s trying to make up ground on competitors that are moving VERY fast.
@Cue7 - given that UChicago lost 9.5% of it’s apps in 2014 and bounced back the next year, they might not need to change much this time around.
@denydenzig - help me out, please. When you say “5,000 apps for the binding ED rounds combined”, are you calculating those applications which were rolled over from EA?
@JBStillFlying I think you hit the nail on the head, as I can’t say the bad press on all the crime didn’t make me have second thoughts on sending my D there. With the correlation of the 2014 numbers to back it up everything else is just overanalyzing/a little bit of panic. Chicago doesn’t make the top 10 list for most dangerous cities in the US, but perception is enhanced by the media. In fact if there is a city to avoid in Illinois, its Rockford, according to USATODAY there number six. Next year will tell us if its a trend.
@JBStillFlying Short answer yes. This number is a guesstimate of the number they received in ED1 and ED2 (converts from EA and new ED2’s). That number could be as low as 4,000 depending on how aggressively they admitted. I am assuming they admitted between 25% to 30% of applicants between both rounds
Assuming there was this decrease, it’s a combination of crime headlines and ED1/ED2. Even so, if the net result is a yield increase and admit rate remains at 8 percent, it will help rankings.
@CU123 at #45: me as well. Very concerned that a lot of the violence was in the neighborhood just to the west of HP. Some of that will obviously spill over. CPD and UChicago police do a great job, but news reports of the tension between the chicago cops and the mayor haven’t helped, nor have reports of less active policing as a result of that tension. My one consolation is that it’s simply not as dangerous as it was when I lived there! Also, if D ends up in Snitch, her sphere will be very small indeed! (Class/Reg/dining hall/dorm, pretty much LOL).
Also, does anyone recall how many last year applied EA? 31,411 total applicants for class of 2020 and I would like to see what that looks like broken down into EA vs. (new) RD applications. Sorry if it’s been posted recently and I can’t find it.
This from another post — UChicago’s on a roll–new Dean of Booth from Stanford, new Dean of Harris from Harvard, new Director of Smart Museum from Stanford, new Comp Sci Chair from Berkeley,
Yep. And this is merely anecdotal, but my husband and HS sophomore are currently at Uchicago’s big Open House for prospective students. He texted me this morning that Rock. Chapel was standing room only! Crappy weather too (what else is new for Chicago in the spring? :)) ).
BTW! You should be thrilled that a Harvard College alum shows so much love and enthusiasm for UChicago …
What does crappy spring weather in Chicago mean please …
@CU123 only real reason why my son didn’t EDI and switched to EDII was due to my initial concerns.
As you could imagine, he was ready to commit from our first visit in July.
I do read the UCPD daily event logs and nothing ever happens on campus.
Many of Cue7’s suggestions are sensible. However, several of them would sully if not destroy the University I know and love. These are the ones that really got my goat:
–Woo movie stars
–Manufacture easy courses merely for the sake of their easiness
–“Engineer” a class that has 15 percent of “jet-setting, status-conscious, frat-frequenting” kids
The concept that underlies not only these but some of the less objectionable suggestions is simply appalling to me - a conscious goal of enhancing “fodder for applications [the University] would reject” so as to “inflate its apps”. All this not for the sake of improving the cohort of accepted students but simply driving up the metrics by which a school gets to call itself super-selective and be in the same league as HYPS. Ugh.
If you relentlessly apply the business model to a school this is what you end up with. Yes, a school is a business (of a sort). Yes, the University under Nondorf the Magnificent has already gone some way down this path. That doesn’t mean we have to pursue that logic to its ultimate and bitter end. The time has come to stand athwart this recent history and shout, “Stop!”
In the end it is a matter of one’s idea of a university. In a pluralistic world there will be different ideas. The kids who go to particular schools and the scholars who teach them will have different preferences. Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale are fine institutions. There is an idea behind each of them. Perhaps that idea is compatible with the practices described above. The idea of the University of Chicago is not similarly compatible.
@fbsdreams It’s good to check the daily logs but there have been some incidents just off-campus, including armed robbery in broad daylight on the block I used to live. 56th and Kimbark - not far at all from the campus. Very bold and very alarming. While we witnessed one high-speed chase through the 'hood, and my hubby’s car was stolen very early one morning, we never had to worry about armed robbery! A lot of students live in the area too (mostly graduate students at the time).
The concern is that as unsolved violent crime increases around HP, the thugs are emboldened enough to venture in and do some real mischief. Haven’t heard of an uptick; however, by the time that’s established, those incidents are in the rear-view mirror and you have to worry about stuff that might be even more alarming. One mom’s opinion.
@Chrchill my apologies. Should have said “typical spring weather in Chicago”.
@JBStillFlying no need to apologize :). Seeriously, was I wrong in cizuakiainf gorgeous spring in Chicago? The birds celebrating after a long winter ?
@JBStillFlying the crime logs show that armed robbery is very common off campus; threat or brandishing of weapon and took phone and ran off into waiting car seems to be a common occurrence. Usually when it’s a single individual and it will be reported multiple times within minutes, most likely the same criminals.
https://incidentreports.uchicago.edu
For what it’s worth, all the students we met and spoke with always travel in groups, especially late at night.
Unfortunate to say, but it is a common problem for any large city these days.
This just in from WSJ —
Harvard University topped the exclusivity chart with a 5.2% acceptance rate, as the school offered spots to 2,056 of a record 39,506 applicants.
Columbia, Princeton, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell also boasted their largest freshman applicant pools in history, and acceptance rates dropped to 5.8%, 6.1%, 8.3%, 9.2% and 12.5%, respectively.
Dartmouth College was the only Ivy to see a decline in applications. The school received 20,034 for the latest cohort, compared with 20,675 for the Class of 2020. Still, it accepted slightly fewer students, so the admit rate declined to 10.4% from 10.5%.
Now I know you are just being facetious, although Duke has a talent program called TIP for students as early as their 4th grade, I think:-)
@JBStillFlying Last year, if I remember correctly around 12,000 applied EA, and 10 percent were accepted