Acceptance rate 41 percent. Too high for an elite school?

<p>JHU had a very low acceptace rate this year, and I got an appointment to USMA.</p>

<p>sorry dude, as a 20% or less, your schools don't make the cut. they are great schools, without a doubt, but there aren't many that are 20% or less. also apps are up across the board this year, at every school. because of how arbitrary (and is it really arbitrary? only the students that get rejected say it's arbitrary, but we all have a basic idea of what it takes to get into each school) admissions decisions are, all schools will have lower admit rates this year because everyone is putting in more apps than students in previous years. so uchi may even break into the 30's this year, kind of like tufts</p>

<p>even that 41% acceptance rate didn't help me out</p>

<p>mikey, i'm very happy for you, but don't you think usma is a safety academy to annapolis?</p>

<p>i'm so sorry elizabeth, but take heart, it's really really cold in chicago so maybe it wasn't the worse thing in the world.</p>

<p>USMA is about 10% and this is stupid. Acceptance rate really can't be used to determine how good of a school it is. JHU and Chicago are surely better schools than say WUSTL, but that school has a very small accpetance rate because they waitlist 30% of their class to boost their rankings.</p>

<p>Haha, bnb, you are just trying to make me angry because you forgot the point of your arguement.</p>

<p>no mikey: i didn't forget the point of my argument, i'm just trying to make you angry because i can.</p>

<p>and also because pyramid kinda likes it. pyramid is so kinky</p>

<p>What is Tufts Syndrome? Some medically diagnosed disease or something?</p>

<p>yeah, kinda. only more insideous</p>

<p>ah bwah, clarification. CC replaced my p-i-s-s-ing people off with ****ing. Sorry to disappoint with my lack of kinkyness...</p>

<p>And actually my sympathies lie with mikey on this one.
My empathy lies with you. I enjoy ****ing people off too...but I can't take the consequences.</p>

<p>chicago is ranked kinda low now.....its 15 now...i think it used to be higher.....</p>

<p>According to US News, perhaps. UofC did fall one spot to #15 from the 2005 listings...but I'm confident that the ranking will bounce back up this year...not that it matters anyway. Within other lists with 'prominent' ranking systems, such as those published by THES and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, it is positioned even higher......just shedding a little light on a thread with a demeanor overcome by pessimism.</p>

<p>The thing about UChicago is that it has one of the best faculty members and its Ph.D. programs are extremely well regarded. Its undergraduate enrolment is small. Therefore, it should be easy to raise the quality of its undergraduate education. However, the focus is not on the undergraduate education and the admission statistics show this. In general, if it wants to raise the undergraduate ranking, it has the resources to do so. The question is: do the faculty members want to do this?</p>

<p>BlacknBlue, I'm just curious... where have you decided to attend next year?</p>

<p>Firstly, about yield, Chicago's Early Action policy plays enormously into their yield. It seems that at the same time we applaud a school for its ability to attract a high percentage of the student who apply, we criticize it for accepting too many students Early Decision, students who are bound to go to the school.</p>

<p>Even Harvard/Yale/Stanford's SCEA policies help tame their yields more than Chicago's-- I imagine more than a few kids have applied ED elsewhere and EA Chicago and have been accepted elsewhere, making Chicago not even a decision for them. H/Y/S kids can't do that.</p>

<p>Secondly, about acceptance rates: I go to a superelite public school in the metro NY area, and I believe two of the colleges with the highest acceptance rates at my school are Dartmouth, Cornell and Columbia. I would be willing to imagine that those schools accepted a higher percentage of kids than did the best state school, Binghamton, based on the high quality of the application pool. Chicago's application pool is also high-quality, and based on who I've seen accepted (and rejected) from my school over the last few years, the students they accept are on par with those going to Ivies.</p>

<p>amy: of course the students accepted by uchi are on a par with the ivy's, the issue is that once accepted, so few choose to actually attend. the yield indicates that the bulk of the accepted students find something better elsewhere, that is why uchi must accept so many apps, otherwise uchi would not be able to fill their class. i surmise that the bulk of the uchi students that do attend have no better alternatives than uchi unless they receive a buyout to persuade them to choose uchi over another institution that only have need based aid.</p>

<p>if uchi were to go ed instead of ea, i surmise that a bulk of the truly outstanding ea apps would disappear which would increase the yield and reduce the the overall acceptance rate which i believe that most uchi attendees would like to see.</p>

<p>this is the thing about the uchi forum that is wild. noone has stated that uchi is anything but a great school, but just the mention of 41% acceptance rate and a low yield drives everyone here nuts. it only goes to show how insecure, uptight and tense the student body and their parents are. just the mere mention of low yield and how a large portion of accepted students choose to go elsewhere reigns down a torrent of how great a school uchi is and how the "rankings" don't tell the whole story of how great uchi is. the original op never said anything about the rankings or that uchi is anything but an "elite" school, but rather was asking why he/she should choose a school with a 41% acceptance rate over one with 20% or less. i'll say it again, uchi is a great university, one of the best, it just so happens that most of the accepted students have better choices. frankly, that's a good thing. if most of those non attending students actually chose to attend, i surmise that most of the current student body at uchi would be at tufts.</p>