EA was super low. Anecdotally, I heard that all kids who applied to Chicago from Horace Man EA were deferred. The one kid who applied ED was accepted.
Pardon my ignorance but what is “Horace Man”?
The Horace Mann school. Tippy top private in NY, with superb college admit stats.
Horace Mann is an elite private high school in NYC. If @Chrchill data is correct, Chicago needs to be mindful of the relationships its cultivated with its feeder high schools. Horace Mann tends to be a huge feeder for Chicago - it usually sends 10-15 students there a year.
https://www.horacemann.org/uploaded/PDFs/Forms/2014_College_attended_List.pdf
If, this year, it only sends a few, that’d be a drastic departure from past years.
Wow - that PDF shows UChicago and Columbia neck and neck.
Do we know how many of the EA deferreds from Horace Mann actually got in? How many to EDII vs. RD? Any insider information on this?
Back at # 109 Churchill suggested that the explanation for the high drop-out rate in previous years was a lesser quality of admitted students. I don’t believe the objective measures of “quality” bear this out. It was more the boot camp atmosphere - the absence of the amenities of student life found elsewhere and the simple unrelenting demandingness of the academic work and harshness of the grading of that work not found elsewhere. I speak as one who was there. I particularly remember a fellow from my high school, a year ahead of me, who transferred to Chicago from Georgia Tech because he wanted “more humanities” but didn’t otherwise know much about the school or city. He was a very bright guy, but he quickly got very depressed by how tough everything was at Chicago, even the humanities courses he thought would spell relief from his science courses. There were no athletic extravaganza and precious little organized social life to make up for any of this deprivation. There was the Chicago weather and a tough neighborhood. He transferred to USC the following year. Those of us who stayed the course found the life bracing, but this is hard to explain to outsiders and probably even to today’s Chicago students.
It has been stated several times that the EA/ED1 rate was about 9% of 13000 applicants. In order to get total EA/ED acceptance “in the teens” suggests that the ED2 acceptance rate was quite high. Given that this pool likely consists mostly of people deferred from HYPSM + Chicago, my guess is that it was an exceptionally strong pool and that their acceptance rate was above projections. As a result, they may have filled more of their class by the time ED2 had completed than originally expected.
@marlowe1 at #145: Agreed. You can’t measure quality based on wash-out rate. You really have to look at who got through it. One can make a subjective argument that those tougher kids were “higher quality”; however, it’s pretty clear that today’s accepteds - objectively speaking - have many options for top colleges that a good number of applicants 30+ years ago simply didn’t try for, because the college application process is a lot more voluminous than it was, and that volume allows Ad Coms to pick and choose the best for their schools, etc. Which way does the “Quality” needle swing? Hard to say.
That’s why the introduction of ED is so helpful now because it’s a signal of how many want to self-select into the school. Playing with the numbers a bit, it appears something like 2000 might have applied EDI. Well, isn’t that about the same number of self-selecting students who used to apply in the “olden days”? (assuming that admit rates were about 70% and yield about 50%).
The College has tweaked the Core Curriculum and expanded its academic offerings, but given its particular focus on the intellectual and the “liberal arts” as an authentic approach to being well-educated (a concept that most other liberal arts programs had abandoned with glee a few decades ago) UChicago can’t have changed all that much from what it used to be. And so will continue to attract the same kind of student. Those kids aren’t going to be very different either in terms of being “qualified” or being “quality”. The big coup that the college has pulled off is having found a lot more of them!
We do not know final numbers of Chicago admits from Horace Mann, only the hearsay that only ED got in and EA’s were deferred. .
@hebegebe AGREE
@Hebegebe at #146 - it doesn’t make sense. Taking the smallest “teen” - 13% - well, 13% of 13,000 applications alone is 1,690. Did NO ONE else apply EDII? And I know they admitted a LOT of kids ED/EA/EDII but no way did they admit 1,700 before RD.
they took 9% from ED1 and EA
I wish US News would change its criteria for ranking and get away from numbers of applicants and yield.
As a mom of an “average excellent” Junior, my child is staring down the barrel of having to make a ridiculous number of applications since everyone else is too, and this is all being driven by the colleges trying to drive up their numbers in order to get ranked higher (or keep its ranking) from US News. And I’m also a bit upset at how many of my child’s Senior friends got set up for totally false expectations from all the mailings they received and courting from the schools, just to get rejected. It was clear as an outsider that some of these kids weren’t qualified, but if you are being courted, of course you would think you would get in. What a waste of kids’ time and emotional energy, all in the name of rankings.
How did we end up giving 2 companies so much control over our educational system? … US News (rankings) and the College Board (AP curriculum).
Just food for thought from a mom who is seeing what a big business education is, and is shaking her head at all these machinations that seem really stupid to me.
We really should examine where we are going with all of this.
@Chrchill please post a scenario that shows 9% EDI and EA, and an overall accept rate for EDI, EA, and EDII that is in the teens. The numbers don’t seem to work out, but maybe I’m doing something very wrong.
@JBStillFlying I am not nearly as gifted as you . Just reporting data. 
@melvin123 it’s a straight numbers game. The rankings do not matter per se. There are simply more students than open slots.
Do your best to increase your odds and hedge the your bets, but the top 100 schools all have substantially more apps than class size.
EA/ED/EDII all demonstrate the desire to attend at UChicago and that is actually factored into the ranking system of applications. I posted it a few times through multiple threads.
However at the end of the day, there is @1500 slots. Even if only 10k applied, better have some though out alternatives.
Personally, I feel for these kids. 1600 SAT’s being rejected left and right from the top schools. A decade ago they would have their pick.
The number of perfect SAT/ACT scores has also shot up over the past decade.
13000 RD @2% =260 admits
13000 EA/ED1 @9% = 1170
1750 ED2 @40% = 700
Given that ED1 assumed to have been about 700 also. Leaving 470 EA. Assuming 1750 ED1 at the same 40% rate as ED2.
1870/14750 ~ 13%
But who really knows, a lot of assumptions here.
Hahaha ED2 at 40% accept rate. And this could actually be the real number.
@CU123 your total applications comes to 27,750. But I thought it was 28,000 total APPLICANTS (not applications). Obviously they are counting more applications than applicants because of the deferred option. My daughter, for instance is part of the 13,000 EA/EDI round but also part of the EDII round. Is she in both your numbers?