To what extent should a TikTok video be a measure of fit? Should an engaging 2 minute video get a student with median scores an invite? What about 25th percentile? What about below the 25th percentile? Should it take the place of alumni or student interviews?
Building a class is important, but I think the reality is at most elite universities the volume of highly qualified applicants is simply overwhelming for the admissions staff. Difficult decisions have to be made on limited data. Add to that the fact that the admissions officers are more likely to be 20-something alums who majored in less marketable fields and quickly tire of reading applications that remind them of their former classmates who are off making money or in an exciting professional or graduate program and the value of a “love letter” becomes easy to understand. It provides validation both in self and in choices made. That’s unfortunate, I think. It reduces the talent, dedication and hard work that is necessary for 4 years of sustained achievement to the relative value of a single appeal to emotion. It’s no wonder the college essay "consulting’ field is so lucrative.
Does anyone know anyone that got in last week or this week? I haven’t seen anything on this thread. Do y’all think they stopped accepting people or if they are waiting for after their reply date May 1st?
Unless you are personally working in any of elite universities admission office, I feel like you are just speculating on the decision process. And do you have source on the component of the AO staff and do you have their resume? Do you know the hierarchy of the AO and how they make the holistic decision? I feel strongly that you are demeaning the AO staff by describing them as 20-something alums who major in less marketable fields. Are you implying that they can’t get really lucrative job and so they hang around at AO to kill time? You have no grounds for such a baseless accusation.
Dang, little war going on here.
It was certainly not my intention to malign either the talents or motivations of admissions officers. My opinion is based on experience visiting and talking with admissions representatives and the fact that many colleges that have publicly visible biographies of admissions counselors. Is it your position that they are not disproportionately 1) fairly recent graduates, 2) alums of the schools they work for, 3) more likely to have majored in humanities than Econ or STEM, and 4) woefully underpaid? If so, we will have to agree to disagree.
The point I am making is that high achieving students are not evenly distributed among personalities, interests or backgrounds. Reading applications, even from truly exceptional students, that have a frequently repeated commonality must be tiring. An essay that convincingly conveys something different or expresses an emotionally-driven interest in a field that isn’t an obvious path to a high income carries some appeal. I don’t understand why that is controversial. What should be controversial is how that diminishes the majority of what an applicant has done over the previous 4 years.
@jgladney - I think many parents on this thread likely placed too much emphasis on S20 or D20’s academics & found our kids on the WL. I know all the kids on the WL are solid academically (mine is NMS, National AP Scholar w/ Distinction, 4.0 UWGPA, handful of National, State & Regional Medals, etc.) like those of NE Boarding Schools but likely didn’t highlight leadership or soft skills as well or perhaps weaker in this area. The high academic achievers will likely do well in college but the leaders in industry, government, etc., are not those who were at the very top but usually elsewhere in the spectrum and I think that’s what the holistic admission does - to pick a good mix of D1 (1st decile) through DN (Nth decile, N<10 and closer to 1 the better) kids who will represent their alma mater well. P.S. David Hogg of Marjory Stoneman with 1270 SAT got into Harvard not based on 4 years of academics but 1 year of activism. Does he have less appeal to the AO than other qualified candidates with better 4 year stats? I don’t think so. ?
I think some of you here ignore that if someone has been added to the waitlist of such a prestigious university, by definition, the applicant was extremely qualified. If all this dilemma and, to a certain extent, jealousy, started because one student managed to get off the WL because of a tiktok, it is important to remember that the video was just the cherry on top. He or she must have had many impressive ECs + stats to back her off; let’s just say that the tiktok demonstrated the fun part of her personality and perseverance. This personal insight might have befriended the AO who in return were more happy to remove him/her from the WL.
All of us on the waitlist deserve a spot. We are more or less all equally likely to get accepted. The defining factor might either be a funny video, a heartfelt and impressive LOCI, or simply having to fill up a certain quota. Either way, it’s never too late to strengthen the application with little things to help build your case.
An inside account of the admissions process would be very interesting. I am highly dubious, however, that these youthful underpaid underpowered humanities graduates, if they exist at all except in someone’s overheated imagination, are off on frolics of their own without direction. For someone who is a fairly recent graduate this gig sounds like it could be a lot of fun, and those grads would bring a very recent experience of what it takes to be successful at this place. They might even have noticed during their own time that, gasp, Chicago has some peculiarities that appealed to some and put off others. They will have seen some who struggled and will have noticed that this was not good for the strugglers or anyone else at the school. That’s invaluable information that the rest of us, looking only at test scores, gpa’s and EC’s in the abstract, would not have. You could call it an informed intuition.
The choice is not between kids who have all these killer objective stats and those without them who are attempting pass themselves off by a few pretty words in an essay. Underlying these gripes about the essays and the supposition that they are meant to identify the “Chicago type” is a notion that it is all flim-flam because all schools are objectively pretty much the same. If you believe that, you would see no reason for any of them to want to recruit other than the most objectively stellar applicants. I don’t believe that about Chicago. And yet the numbers show that it recruits a class filled to the brim with objectively stellar students. If all those failed AO’s have it out for the high achievers whom they purportedly loathe and want to punish, then they’re doing a pretty poor job of realizing their ambition.
It’s also possible that the offer and the submission of the TikTok video were unrelated and the timing was purely coincidental.
Wow! I never would have thought my posting about my daughter getting off the WL would have brought about so much discussion. I was trying to share a unique way she showed her continued interest. I appreciate the comments by many like @HMom16 , @cmurin0 . To get TO the WL at UChicago is something to be proud of and honestly we never imagined she’d get off (and maybe in the non-COVID19 world she might not have as I believe more will come off list this year than other years). Anyone who applies to a top school should know it most likely will be a crap-shoot and there is not guaranteed admittance just because you have x, y, z top stats, etc, etc. Good luck to those still waiting!
To what extent is an extra .1 GPA or 20 points on the SAT a measure of increased fit? How many 3.9/1550/tennis players who want to be a doctor does any one school need and would it be the same school if admissions were purely academic with no holistic factor?
It’s a rare school that discloses enough data that outsiders could make good guesses about this level of granularity. But for any potential applicants considering their college app, it’s not a bad idea to remember that AOs are first and foremost people. They get bored, they have preferences, they have dislikes, they have feelings… and in a competition as tight and tough as admissions where the rules are not clearly defined you’d be wise to remember that when you craft your application.
Best of luck.
Do you guys think UChicago is still taking kids off the waitlist. Last year they didn’t take anyone off after May 1. Is that going to be the case this year?
@cyl267 I strongly believe that they will be taking more people off the waitlist in the upcoming months. Both domestic, but especially, international students will not be willing pay 65k for online courses and thus opt out for a less expensive school. If not for this financial burden, the fear and uncertainty caused by the virus could easily convince students to enrol in a college closer to home and family to be readily available in case of an emergency. We live in uncertain times so the stats from previous years are definitely not relevant to us 
cyl267, I do think it worth noting that I contacted my officer and was told that the they are waiting to see how many students matriculate and then they will take more off the waitlist and that this could possibly take till early May in their words. Although, they had already started taking kids off in early April so I do see reason to worry but also reason to hope.
Does an international waitlisted student asking for aid have any chance to be admitted (including Z-list) in current realities?
Has anyone gotten off the waitlist in the last couple of days?
I have a question for international students who got admitted. Were you informed by email or call? I was wondering how it works.
Re: Who the admissions officers are
Once upon a time, I actually knew, or knew vicariously, a meaningful handful of junior Chicago admissions staff. Based on the ones I knew, at least back then, @jgladney 's characterization was not far off in its grossest outline: they were 20-something recent graduates with majors (including math) that did not in and of themselves generate lucrative job offers. None of them took a job with Admissions because they couldn’t find anything better, but several of them sought the job because they couldn’t decide yet what exactly would be better for them, and all of them moved on within a few years to careers that were not in college admissions.
However, the notion that they were easily bored with applications and resentful of people like their more successful former classmates is waaaaay off. All of them loved the heck out of the University of Chicago. The most important qualities all of them had were, first, a strong desire to proselytize about how great UChicago was, and second, a natural, broad-minded empathy with and appreciation for a wide spectrum of teenagers. (Some later became teachers at those fancy East Coast prep schools and elsewhere.) They came from a pretty wide set of backgrounds. None of them was remotely stupid – all of them had done well at Chicago. They understood that there had to be a mix of students in a class, and that the mix would include lots of people who were not like them, and with whom they might not be best friends. Like almost all UChicago students, they had enormous respect for mathiness, even if they were not mathy themselves (but some were). All of them were hired during the Nondorf regime, and were excited about his leadership and what he was doing with admissions.
(Parenthetically, one current, high-ranking admissions officer – not someone I ever met – has hundreds of posts on College Confidential, first as a student and later as an official Admissions Office representative. I have a sense that naming names could violate the TOS, although this person repeatedly waived anonymity. It would not be hard to trace the history here with a little work, if anyone really wants a sense of the personality of one specific participant in the process.)
^ @Cue7 - your cover is blown!