<p>I wonder if the university isn’t planning on increasing enrollment down the road. The Boyer quote explains that campus housing can’t sustain more students, but the new dorm plans actually call for significantly more spots. How is the college going to react when they’re done?</p>
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Bear in mind that the impact of merit aid is often blunted by financial aid. If you get any kind of need-based aid, a partial scholarship will almost certainly increase your expected family contribution. There are still some students (myself included) who receive both and pay less than they would otherwise, but merit aid isn’t as great an advantage as it might seem. Of course students who don’t get any financial aid at all will still directly benefit from partial merit aid, but when you’re already paying $60,000 (and can presumably afford it), what’s a difference of $5,000 or $10,000?</p>
<p>I am also skeptical that smallish merit awards ($5,000-$10,000) affect yield substantially. I suspect it helps yield a little but how many people are change their college decision over such a relatively small amount of money. I suspect the typically more generous financial aid policies of HYP play a much more important role in cross-admit decisions as well.</p>
<p>UMTYMP Student: You have to account for the irrationality of our subjects, who are 18 years old and likely having ego malfunctions. If you get a $20k financial aid package from Princeton and a $15k financial aid package + $5k merit package + a “you are so special we really want you” merit letter from Chicago, which college is likely going to grab your heart if you’re 18 years old?</p>
<p>Also, it’s nice to see goldenboy is really bitter. The meaningless acceptance rate was the last barrier to Duke finally being classified as totally behind Chicago. (What else did Duke have better than Chicago, more drunk students?)</p>
<p>Chicago’s acceptance rate this year will likely be 10%, although it could be 9% if the admissions office wants it to be. (I suspect it’ll be placed at 10%, so that the admissions office can push it down to 9% next year if there’s no increase in applications, creating an image of sustained momentum.) Once again, acceptance rate in and of itself is meaningless, but its effects are very visible. For one, it’s a very important factor in the college choices of inevitably shallow 18-year-olds with great academic potential.</p>
<p>@phuriku Perhaps I am totally atypical but when I was deciding between MIT and Chicago last year getting a merit scholarship at Chicago vs. initially getting deferred at MIT did not make me think OMG!! Chicago wants me more so I must be go there!!! The cost difference because of the merit scholarship mattered some but ultimately wasn’t a hugely significant factor in my decision.</p>
<p>Phuriku, I don’t think it’s fair to disparage Duke on the basis of comments made by ONE of its students. Many Dukies are happy that Chicago is finally getting the respect that it so richly deserves. Also, you’d do well not to jump the gun on the issue of admission rates, you never know what can happen in the future.</p>
If you are implying that Chicago purposefuly targets applicants with lower SAT scores just so that it can reject them, I’d like to see some evidence.
Do you mean the concept of life of the mind in general? If you mean the idea of life of the mind in relation to Chicago, then I question your premise… Chicago’s academic rigor is no joke, and nor is its core curriculum, and both these things foster intellectual thinking. Add to that its fantastic faculty, good student to faculty ratio, excellent student professor interactivity, and the fact that the reputation for intellectualism tends to be self-fulling (several students who think they’re not “intellectual” don’t bother applying). A few mails aren’t going to change any of these things. </p>
<p>UChicago has long been considered on par with HYPSM by members of academia. Aggressive marketing is its way of making of for the lack of free marketing it gets in popular media as compared to the aforementioned colleges, most of which are household names.
<p>Prospective Yalie – As a Yale alum, married to a Yale classmate, and two-time Chicago parent, I can tell you that Chicago is in fact very close to Yale – their intangibles are incredibly similar. There are, of course, a number of differences between the schools, some of which run in Yale’s favor, and others in Chicago’s, but the similarities are really overwhelming. Including the “life or the mind”, which is central to both universities. Our kids’ intellectual experience at Chicago was almost exactly like ours as Directed Studies students at Yale, maybe a little better.</p>
<p>A couple years into the real world, at one point my daughter said, of herself and her best friend from Chicago, both living in NYC, “It’s so disappointing, the level of discourse among people here. When we want to have a serious discussion, the only people worth talking to are other UChicago people or the Yalies.”</p>
<p>Dunbar, in response to your comment, “I wonder if the university isn’t planning on increasing enrollment down the road…”</p>
<p>My guess is that they are increasing housing capacity because they want to encourage more students to stay in on-campus housing all four years, not so that they can increase enrollment.</p>
<p>I can’t say anything about Chicago’s intellectualism, but I do not like what Chicago admission office is doing. They have very aggressive marketing in order to advertise Chicago and lower the acceptance rate. I mean, lot of peers in my school got emails, and quiet a few of them got scarfs and other materials. Chicago is definitely a great school, but it seems like admission office is trying hard to lower the acceptance rate for the ranking.</p>
<p>I would add to my previous post re Chicago and Yale: Remember, the current Admissions Dean at Chicago is Jim Nondorf, a blue-bleeding Yale alum who made his bones as #2 in the Yale admissions office. Chicago’s recent marketing plan was Made In New Haven.</p>
<p>Hm, it’s too bad I hadn’t seen this before responding to ProspectiveYalies’s thread…I sincerely wish you the best of luck at Yale, if the case is that you are an accepted student (no, I really won’t bother checking), but I also sincerely hope that you mature between now and the beginning of your journey at Yale. It’s a wonderful school with wonderful students, they really don’t need their unfortunate reputation among some as elitists and self-proclaimed kings (or princes, when you include Harvard) of the world to be enforced because of people like you. Also, I find it rather hypocritical of some people to call out UChicago for bombarding 1800 SAT students with marketing when Harvard does the exact same thing and is the LAST school that has to do so.</p>
<p>JHS makes a good point about Nondorf and Yale, but I’ve suspected for some time that there may be even more to the story than that. One profile I read a couple years ago noted that Nondorf wanted the top admissions spot at Yale but was passed over (big mistake by Yale, IMO), and Nondorf then left for Rensellaer. After a few years there, he went to UChicago. This makes me wonder whether blue is the only color he bleeds with respect to Yale. I think that catching Yale in the U.S. News rankings would have to feel very satisfying for Nondorf, and who could blame him? </p>
<p>That said, it seems extremely difficult to graze the HYP triumvarate the way the U.S. News rankings work. In any event, Kudos to Nondorf and UChicago for their remarkable efforts. Even more importantly, kudos to them for improving the student experience so dramatically while maintaining UChicago’s remarkable academic strength.</p>
That was an uncalled for slight but I"ll be happy to oblige. Duke has better faculty in Biology/Political Science/Computer Science/Classics/Religion/French/Ecology/Evolutionary Anthropology, stronger undergraduate representation in elite law/med/biz schools, better undergrad corporate placement in finance/consulting, superior Nursing/Environment schools, a higher endowment per capita, a more reputable medical school, and finally greater research output overall than the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>goldenboy, i’m a stanford ug and mit grad, but please, even i know that duke pales in comparison to chicago. don’t make me list out what makes chicago better. or stanford for that matter.</p>
<p>also, i can’t stand dukies comparing their school to stanford. stanford lite, please. you might have your basketball, but we have basketball, baseball, football, and guess what, better academics. there are only a handful of schools i would put in the same breadth as my alma mater and chicago is one of them.</p>
<p>Invasion, I think you misunderstood what I wrote. What I was trying to say that with 30k odd apps that Chicago might not have to market as heavily, that word of mouth would do it for them. I do think it will plateau eventually, just not soon. Also, more apps means more disappointed young adults, so lets all stop glorifying what is essentailly a supply/demand statistic. As a school, Chicago was as brilliant with a 30% rate as it is with its ~9% rate.</p>
<p>goldenboy, please please please be more mature and stop touting Duke’s qualities because of ignorant poster’s such as phuriku. I’ve been reading CC for years now and you’re notorious for damaging Duke’s rep here. </p>
<p>As for some of you who are blind to the fact that UChicago does market aggressively to students who they know they’d never admit, consider the fact that a HS classmate of mine who barely managed to crack a 1700 on his SAT was recruited by UChicago. Needless to say, he didn’t apply knowing he wouldn’t get in. Despite his SAT scores, he was bright enough to realize that Chicago only wanted to increase their applications numbers to drive down their acceptance rate.</p>
<p>It’s great that so many people today are applying to Chicago (who knows how many genuinely want to be there) but I have more respect for schools that increased their applications number organically.</p>
<p>“also, i can’t stand dukies comparing their school to stanford. stanford lite, please. you might have your basketball, but we have basketball, baseball, football, and guess what, better academics. there are only a handful of schools i would put in the same breadth as my alma mater and chicago is one of them.”</p>
<p>Who compared Duke to Stanford here? Who cares whether you’d put Chicago in the same breadth as S and M. It’s a shame that those kids have the reputation for being socially awkward and incapable of holding a conversation outside of star wars, kafka, plato, lord of the rings, angst poetry, and video games cheat codes.</p>
Cool, I’m a 1L at Harvard Law School, what’s your point? Lets have a debate based on comparing objective facts and statistics here instead of making meaningless appeals to authority. You can list out what makes Chicago better but the list will be about as long as the list of what makes Duke better. That’s why they are called peer schools.</p>
<p>Stanford is better at both than everything academically though. Its the best school in the world in my opinion.</p>
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Stanford basketball is kind of a joke lets be honest. If you don’t think so, you have lower standards for what constitutes an elite basketball program than you do for what makes an elite football program. As far as college baseball goes, no one really cares about it as the College World Series happens in the summer when all the students are away from campus anyway. Its really a non-factor and most baseball games are more poorly attended than tennis and lacrosse matches.</p>
<p>If you’re going to bring up non-revenue sports, there’s Lacrosse-a sport that Duke is elite at while Stanford. I don’t believe either school has a good Hockey team.</p>
<p>I’m glad you think so highly of UChicago by putting it in Stanford’s company; maybe one day it will become the school you imagine it to be already in your head.</p>
<p>
CC does not equal real life young Blue Devil. I’m not denigrating UChicago like he often does to peer schools; I’m merely pointing out facts to keep him grounded.</p>
<p>goldenboy’s arguing point for Duke on other areas of the forum is the following:
UChicago is an extremely good school that is almost on par with HYPSM, though not quite.
Duke is a better and more selective school than Chicago (obviously, since Duke’s acceptance rate is 2 points lower than Chicago’s), so Duke must be on par with HYPSM.</p>
<p>It’s a cute form of logic, where he tries to get UChicago people to support his arguments by “praising” UChicago. Unfortunately, it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t actually view UChicago that highly - he’s just using it as a launching point for his arguments that Duke is so great. Now he’s depressed that he won’t be able to use an arbitrary data point to demonstrate the “obvious” fact that Duke is more selective than UChicago. It’s a great day for people who hate phonies.</p>
<p>“It’s a shame that those kids have the reputation for being socially awkward and incapable of holding a conversation outside of star wars, kafka, plato, lord of the rings, angst poetry, and video games cheat codes.”</p>
<p>Hey…nothing wrong with talking about those at frat parties. We also talk about Sherlock and Batman too now ;).</p>
<p>BTW, Duke is great phuriku, and it does outperform UChicago in some areas, let’s please not turn this into another Duke vs UChicago thread.</p>
<p>Never said Duke wasn’t a good school. Obviously, it must be doing something right if it can get somebody like goldenboy into Harvard Law.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s interesting that someone mentioned Chicago possibly overtaking Yale on the US News list. On a mathematical basis, it’s possible, but very improbable for this to happen over the next 5 years.</p>
<p>Chicago and Columbia score 95/100, and Yale is at 99/100 on the US News point scale. 1 point is quite a lot of room to cover, but 4 points is just huge. With last year’s SAT increases and perhaps an increase in the % of students in the top 10% of their HS classes to 97-98%, Chicago will probably gain 1 point if it maintains everything else. It could gain another point if the HS counselor PA score goes from 4.6 to 4.8, which is pretty feasible. It would have to increase graduation rate to about the 95% level to get another point, and this could take a few years.</p>
<p>After that, there’s really nothing else that can help, since the college president PA score is unlikely to change for quite a while. This puts Chicago at the 98 point mark, so it would have to rely on Yale losing a point to catch up with it. I would love to see Chicago catch up or overtake Yale, but I think it’s pretty improbable.</p>