<p>Unalove: By the way, I have read Prof. Abbot’s address. It is one of the best essays I have ever read on any subject. Extraordinary.</p>
<p>Two honest questions:</p>
<p>1.) If acceptance rate is only 1.5% of the USNews score, what suddenly happened in the last few years to make UChicago jump forward in the rankings?</p>
<p>2.) What would it take for UChicago, or any quality university for that matter, to be regarded as well as HYPSM? So far, this thread gives me the impression that UChicago is sub-HYPSM because 1) it has less $$$ and 2) since it’s not Ivy League or on the coast it will always have the stigma of being a lesser school no matter how many Nobel Prizes, government officials, and advanced degrees it produces.</p>
<p>Also dang 3 posts came up in the time I was writing this ._.</p>
<p>^kaukana you have a good point, but I don’t think less of myself for being less of an appealing admissions candidate, and I’ll explain why in a moment.</p>
<p>High school me took the SATs with a small amount of practice and testing in the high 1300s, a score that nearly automatically punted me out from the very top schools but I could shop to some great liberal arts colleges and Chicago-back-when. With the time I saved not worrying too much about my test scores, I read a lot of Bertrand Russell and was involved in exactly one student organization that wasn’t too demanding of my time, in which I held a significant position. I wanted to major in Classics and/or Religious Studies. I have a feeling I probably sailed through getting into Chicago-back-when, because I understood it and they understood me. Just the way I was a 50th percentile student on paper getting into Chicago, I felt like the literal average student once I got there. That’s another heads up for incoming students: remember that being average or below average isn’t a bad thing. You got in because you were above average in your original context.</p>
<p>Anyway the reason that this doesn’t bother me in the slightest is that every job in the universe is its own miini-college admissions process, and every job in the universe values different things, and different candidates shake out as more or less appealing in different ways. I was an average student at Chicago, and in the working world, I’d be a well-above-average hire for some employers, and I’d be a well-below-average hire for other employers, just being who I am with the resume I have. </p>
<p>So just because high school graduates leave for college assumed that the “social pecking order” is set, they’re in for a rude awakening when they realize that real jobs don’t always care about long resumes or good grades, they can care about skill sets that today’s high school students have no idea whether or not they possess yet.</p>
<p>^ramboacid</p>
<p>Without really looking at the numbers too carefully, I’m going to guess that the primary movable target in rank is percent alumni giving. Chicago hounds ME about getting my classmates to give with “participation challenges” for this reason (e.g. it’s not about total number of dollars given as much as everybody and their mother giving at least one dollar.)</p>
<p>It took me a sec to remember what you meant about HYPSM- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT. Ok. Those schools, I would argue, compete more against each other than would be fair to monolith them, and why those schools? Why that acronym? Why not CCCWAO (Cambridge, Caltech, Columbia, Williams, Amherst, Oxford)? And if we’re talking money, then we really need to include schools like Grinnell and Smith into the picture, and other large endowment, small student population schools.</p>
<p>Acceptance rate matters less for US News and more for general bragging rights and creating (counter-intuitively) more demand. It doesn’t hurt that UChicago’s accept rate is a hair’s breadth away from Princeton’s, or that it’s well below Duke’s and Georgetown’s. Students - especially high school students - feel good knowing they go to an uber-selective school. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.</p>
<p>So UChicago is trying to game the system like WashU has been doing?</p>
<p>IWillKillforMIT,</p>
<p>What schools don’t try to game the system? They just have varying degrees of success based on the factors that go into computations such as the rankings. Get off the high horse and realize that now, admissions is a full contact sport. </p>
<p>(Note, at least as of yet, UChicago administrators have not outright cheated, as a group of Princeton officials did years back when they sought info on a bunch of Yale applicants. Link: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/nyregion/princeton-pries-into-web-site-for-yale-applicants.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/nyregion/princeton-pries-into-web-site-for-yale-applicants.html</a>)</p>
<p>ramboacid: USNWR doesn’t give out its raw numbers, at least not for free, so I am just guessing. But my guess is that the rankings are very compressed at the top, and that small differences can mean several place changes in rank order. Chicago has always been at or near the top in academic reputation, which is a huge component in the rankings, so what it really had to do was get its little factors (like acceptance rate/yield) into the ballpark of its competitors, so that they wouldn’t counteract the advantage of its academic reputation. For years, Chicago was top-5 in academic reputation, but much lower in most other categories.</p>
<p>So, places where I think Chicago has made marginal improvements, other than acceptance rate: median SATs, number of classes < 20 students, percentage of alumni giving, financial aid, retention rate, and endowment. Some of it is maybe gaming the system (e.g., capping registration on courses at 19), and some of it reflects real quality improvement.</p>
<p>Retention rate is real. Good lord, the graduation rate was sub 90% within the last decade.</p>
<p>@Phuriku: Hey, watch it with your assumption that “Chicago [had] … a relatively unsuccessful College (as we’ve seen in the past).” If your metrics are solely admissions selectivity based on the numbers of admits and rejects, perhaps. But you should know that that is a very narrow way to assess success and failure in an institution that had (and has) the goal of helping its students get a broad and deep liberal arts education. The College did a damned good job of teaching me and my fellow classmates (now alums) back when the admissions rate was sky high. And, kiddo, I would hazard to say that we were just as smart, inquisitive, creative, and dedicated as today’s U of C students.</p>
<p>I think they meant farther in the past when the college almost died off.</p>