Assuming the 28K (12K) number is correct, in addition to bad crimes and their coverage in Chicago there is another reason I can think to contribute the drop of this year’s application number.
We know this year’s EA/ED/EDII number is actually strong (12K+ which should be a record) but the RD number sucks. In 2014 the RD number was the same around 16K.
For EA/ED/EDII I think a majority of applicants have known/researched the U. They have already weighed the crime factor, the weather factor, the core factor, etc. They have applied anyway.
But for the RD applicants it is a different story. They might not have had time to research but known something of it (like rankings, crimes and weather, etc.). Chicago is just one of the many compatible schools one applicant has time/money to try luck. Using sort of market concept there are too many options (schools) and limited resources (time and money) usually the most efficient (schools) ones win (large shares).
E.g., there are three compatible schools out there an applicant only wants to spend energy on one the other two will lose. Interestingly other peer schools are gaining applications (many have record this cycle) while Chicago is losing ground. Is that possible many potential Chicago applicants have gone to its peers?
@marlowe1 at #54: I agree with your views. UChicago can’t lose it’s identity trying to be like the big kids. It is what it is and it needs to continue its outreach by confidently promoting that identity. That doesn’t mean being closed to new ideas but they have to be creative applications of what makes the school unique.
We know many academic-types who are very familiar with UChicago’s culture, philosophy, and pedagogy. They have received grad degrees there and sent their kids to the undergrad. program. They believe that many top places have sacrificed their rigor for the benefit of more money and the result, among other things, is a student community that doesn’t allocate the proper focus to the intellectual. A few of these pessimistic-types even believe that the Liberal Arts in general is lost, having descended into silliness. However, do they believe it’s still preserved at UChicago. Yes, you can take some silly stuff - even as part of the Core - but they still teach the hard stuff, many students do opt for those over the silly, and - most importantly in my view - even the silly stuff is taught at pretty much the highest level of critical thought. So for “silly stuff” it’s not really silly but rather an alternative perspective that will challenge your thinking (rather than validate your current views).
W/O getting into too much detail, I can verify this last thought with at least one data point: I am a college classmate of a prof. who happens to specialize in the “silly stuff” as part of her overall body of work in a rigorous discipline in the humanities. I know her to be brilliant and I recall her getting accepted into the top uni. in her field. She’s been a full prof. at UChicago for a number of years now. If my daughter opted for one of her courses, I’d be pretty confident that she would be in good hands intellectually.
@Chrchill at #56. If it’s above 45 degrees you will see Chicagoans in bermuda shorts and flip flips. I kid you not.
I do recall a beautifully warm spring where I was actually wearing bermuda shorts! Something like in the 70’s in March. Very unusual.
When I first visited the school in 1985 for accepted student’s day (graduate school) we were presented with 4 seasons in one day. Quite amusing. It was April, I believe.
Another cold April was in 1996 when I was 4 months preggers with my oldest. I remember walking along from the train station to work in short sleeves (due to higher body temp) and everyone areound me was wearing trenchcoats, scarves and gloves.
People come to Chicago for the opportunities, not the weather. However, the lakefront is super cool all times of year, and wonderful in the summer. You’ll see tons of people out really enjoying themselves. In the Midwest we really appreciate our good weather!
@eddi137 at #60: I was wondering whether UChicago is deliberately putting more emphais on “applying early”. They clearly like those early applications (they say they are higher quality etc.) and the application isn’t exactly something that you can throw together at the last minute. Wondering if RD will become primarily for deferred EA’s.
However, that existed last year too and application were 3,000 higher than this year. Something changed a lot of minds.
Throwing a general comment out there, too: Not sure I’m buying into all the “confusion” surrounding the new application choices as an explanation for the drop. EA/ED is slightly more complicated than last year’s EA simply in that you have to let them know your level of commitment. Same for EDII/RD. But my guess is that last year’s EA’s would have been this year’s EDI/EA’s, and last year’s RD’s would have been this year’s EDII’s/RD’s. They just segmented by commitment level, nothing more.
@fbsdreams, I agree with you that opting to apply RD decision w/o any sort of prior commitment signal (even EA is signalling more of a commitment than RD!) could have discouraged some from applying. The odds of acceptance for those new RD’s would have been very low and likely UChicago was only picking out hooks/special applicants at that point.
@JBStillFlying I do not think Chicago has deliberately put more emphasis on Early this cycle than the last few years. Anyway you can see the Early numbers are almost the same around 11K (increased gradually). Since this cycle they have kept the EA so it still gives an option to MIT/Cal Tech/GW/Notre Dame applicants. Why not throw into Chicago if one is already on hook to MIT/Cal Tech?
The RD landscape is different and Chicago has always struggled on that front. You can see Duke, Penn, NU, Columbia, Brown, etc always have much more than Chicago in RD. One of my thinking mentioned in a previous post is that other peers have more appeals to common applicants and attract more (an applicant will not apply to all of the comparable schools). But suppose there is a fixed number of applicants to all schools we should see some other schools’ number drop besides Chicago’s. I do not know if any Chicago’s peer has fewer applicants than last year. Maybe the total number of applicants to comparable schools is increasing but Chicago does not take an advantage of it.
@eddi137 this year EDI/EA applications were about 13,000 according to reports from accepted students events. 9% accepted. Last year’s EA was about 12,000 if we are remembering correctly. They probably did increase gradually and any boom or bust in the UChicago numbers would be on the RD side. Not positive about this but it makes sense. UChicago is the type of place that if you are crazy about it you will apply early. If you are not crazy, you will not apply at all!
Was posted upthread that pretty much everyone’s applications increased except for Dartmouth (which decllined very slightly). No report from Stanford, but I think they are no longer reporting admissions. So we’ll never know if they are continueing to decline, or turning around and rising again.
12,000 applicants for EA last year and 13,000 (EA/EDI) this year based on reports from admitted student events. That’s an increase of about 1,000 kids.
Last year’s total applicant # was 31,411 so that means about 19,000 new applications came in for RD.
This year’s total number, based on reports from admitted events, is 28,000, meaning that about 15,000 new EDII/RD applications came in. Now some of the RD is going to be cannibalized into new EDII; however, the drop in those “Jan. 1 deadline” applications is actually 4,000 not 3,000 as we were thinking.
Stanford just announced. 2,050 admits out of 44,073 apps. I just realized that even if Chicago had filled the entire 1,600 slots with ED with a 100% yield, the admission rate this year would have been 5.7%. Stanford was 4.65%
This rat race is getting insane. God help our kids.
At some stage you have to wonder if anyone can really pick the good kids anymore. When does the number of applications to an admission office so overwhelm the staff that now you start to pick based on “group traits” instead of “individual traits”. How many applications can a “Holistic school” handle before it all goes south?
They will read your app. but that doesn’t mean they won’t be doing a lot of pre-sorting first. Especially given that everything is electronically transmitted. They can cut through an entire swath of candidates that way simply by doing this pre-sorting, then reading through the essays to see if there is anything that would sway them from their original conclusions. The ones who are a definite “ding” or a definite “admit” are the easy ones. The hard ones are all in the middle and will require a closer look. That’s basically how it has to work for the large volume institutions. The smaller LAC’s probably do a lot more discussion and committee selection.
I read about the process for UChicago somewhere and every app. gets several sets of eyes on it before it lands on the desk of a higher up. What they don’t tell you is that your application is probably still “batch processed” and by the time it shows up on a director’s desk there are comments and recommendations already attached to the file. Probably key words and sentences are circled on the essays (though I have no way of knowing this). The director might take a minute to review, then away it goes (more than likely than not in the same group it arrived in).
This year, with the introduction of ED at UChicago, they were probably able to process a whole bunch of EA’s very quickly simply by picking out a few that had special characteristics and deferring the rest. Easy breezy. They could then devote the rest of their time on the ED’s (very important as they were planning to admit a good number of the class from this group). RD’s - same as EA’s, and by then they definitely knew what they were looking for because the majority of the class had been selected so they select the remaining admits based on what they need to complete the desired profile of the class.
Upthread, some posters mentioned that this dip downward in trend has historical precedent - in 2014, Chicago had a dip in applications, and then it rebounded the next year.
The problem is, with schools like Stanford and Harvard setting a hard pace, two years with net 1 or 2% growth can be a bad result indeed. In two years time, H and S, and some others, will have seen 10-12% growth.
In terms of total numbers, two years from now Chicago might have around 32k apps, and Stanford will have 50k+ apps. In its effort to be tightly clustered with Harvard Stanford et al, then, Chicago will instead have simply lost ground.
Put another way, Chicago could no longer look like the “hot” school, as it did 3-4 years ago.
And, if this pace remains consistent, nondorf doesn’t look quite like the guru as he did 3-4 years ago. When you tell the board you get 30k apps, and your aspirational peers are getting 40-50% more, with a budget and staff probably not much bigger than yours, it’s not looking all that impressive any more.
@denydenzig Realistically how can you tell who is who by looking at stats and a couple of essays of a 17yo teen, its all a bit of a crap shoot. You can look back 20 years later and see who has done what, but by what measuring stick, wealth, fame, made a difference someone’s life/lives, or some other measure. The only reason I am sending my D to UChicago is to be surrounded by academically like minded and talented students. I’m pretty sure any top 20 school would have done the trick for me. She connected with UChicago on some level and put her efforts there and luckily was accepted. Frankly it seems that most of this is about bragging rights and that’s about it. As an addendum a long time ago back when I was in the Air Force flying F-15’s, a kid came to visit my squadron, and all he could talk about was how bad he wanted to fly fighters and kept asking what you needed to do to become a fighter pilot. I told him you have to compete just like everything else. He was in his third year at Harvard, not sure what happened with him.
I actually like it. Its free press, lots of free press for one person. I mean we love that UChicago is associated with Anna Clumskky, Roger Ebert and even Tucker Max! They may be weird but if you follow them, they are UChicago in their thinking.
I think we need more famous people to get educated on how to think the UChicago way. Imagine if the harry potter actors actully enrolled at UChi, the whole “Hogwarts” association would be even “huger” lol. And we all know UChicago types love the Harry Potter genre.
What’s one developmental admit if it brings the right people to apply? Its not like we are going to be enrolling Bieber or Britney… it has to be a movie star on a movie that actually means something to us.
Heck, Id want Indiana Jone’s sons and daughters to study at UChicago. Or Harry and Sally’s sons and daughters. Or that brooding gay star of glee who is a new york times best selling author… or that closeted Jonas brothers guy who always waxes poetic in his interviews… Or the local Chicago stars, if you want african american locals - Jennifer Hudson… Pete Wendtz if you want musical bisexual cerebral rock artist…
Brian May is brainy and he is a star. I bet he would have been a great fit for UChicago Physics…
“Silly stuff” is relative. People used to look down on UChicago’s Econ+Sociology as “easy” vs the perception of the ultramathematical Econ+EfficientMarket. But Sociology got the school more Nobels and sooner than Fama got his because Sociology is relevant.
This days the “father of behavioral economics”, Thaler, is sometimes seen as “not academic enough” but his impact can be seen everywhere in government and investments… and is now seen as a potential Nobel recipient.
Sometimes “easy” is easy precisely because it is more relevant to regular people - and that is not a bad thing.
Nope Nobel for Economics tackling issues in the field of Sociology… Becker, Fogel, comes to mind.
Thaler is pretty much in the intersection of Econ and Psychology… so “easier” than the econ that UChicago is known for but just as relevant, and just as rigorous.
I wouldn’t call Thaler’s work “easier”. Doesn’t he work with a current laureate (can remember his name). The issue with applying psychology to the field of economics is whether it’s an effective method for answering the questions. There is probably a debate about this but the Nobel committee has given Thayer’s colleague and mentor the Memorial Prize in economics when the guy is a psychologist so, as we say in MN, there ya be. Economics attempts to explain general behavior while psychology focuses more on individual behavior (experimental economists, for instance, will use a much smaller data set than the econometicians). There is room in the academy for both, obviously. Given that Nobels in Economics are usually doled out a good 30 years after the seminal work has been accomplished, there’s a lot of time for history to pass judgement on the relevance of a person’s work.
Becker had joint appointments in the dept. of economics and sociology, if I remember correctly. He was obviously an economist and one of the most influential. His foray into things like the economics of crime also put him in the legal sphere. He very creatively applied economic theory to non-market situations, thus demonstrating that the field had a wide application. I would definitely agree that he forayed into what could traditionally be called sociology, thus setting new trends in that area for methodology and research.
Fogel was an economic historian and a pioneer of using quantitative methods in historical research (thus changing that field for the better, no doubt). Very controversial and influential work on the economics of slavery. I suppose that could be considered a sociological issue as well but the tangent is pretty thin. Mostly economics and history (and lots of math - sorry!).
While I don’t agree that one field is “more relevant” than another, it’s clear that some of the best economic thinkers were able to foray into areas such as psychology, sociology, history, etc. and do some pretty important work. . . . Of course, many are also game theorists, mathematicians, and general equilibrium empiricists. Not to mention financial gurus. They all worked on different questions of great importance and used the tools at hand to solve them, whatever those tools might be.
