<p>Acceptance rate is a result of three factors: how many applications the school gets, the yield rate of the school, and the size of the school.</p>
<p>None of which has to do with how good the school is. Applications and yield rate have to do with how good prospective students perceive the school to be, and the size of the school is usually outside its control in the short run.</p>
<p>You also might want to consider the colleges that have a self-selecting applicant pool.</p>
<p>Most people are dubious when they see that the UChicago had a 25-30ish % acceptance rate. However, I don’t think any college-knowledgeable person would disagree with the fact that the UChicago is an excellent school.</p>
<p>A high acceptance rate is not a good measure of a school, for example: University of Illinios- Urbana Champaign acceptane rate is around 71%, ranked near 40 by USNEWS.</p>
<p>It all depends how you define the quality of a school. Most people will probably say that, for undergrad, the quality of the undergraduate student body is a very significant factor in defining the quality of the school. However, acceptance rate alone is not good for assessing the student body. A combination of test scores, acceptance rate, and high school class rank is probably the best one can hope to get.</p>
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<p>Agreed. A lot of students tend to look at numbers superficially.</p>
<p>Or just throw out acceptance rate altogether, because it has nothing to do with how qualified the students are.</p>
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I’m not sure Chicago is a good example of that. In terms of applications per seat, Chicago is as popular as Cornell and Penn.</p>
<p>Its relatively high acceptance rate comes from its lack of ED and resultantly lower yield.</p>
<p>Yeah, ED forces higher yields which lower acceptance rates (you don’t have to accept as many people if more come) which makes the school appear better.</p>
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<p>It is true that Chicago is not as self-selecting as it was a few years ago. However, I think Chicago can work as a good example in another way. If you’ll look at the incoming class statistics throughout the years (at <a href=“https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/admissions/classprofile.shtml[/url]”>https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/admissions/classprofile.shtml</a>), then you’ll see that even as Chicago’s admissions rate has dramatically decreased, its test scores have remained about consistent from year to year. Many would say that the Chicago of today (with acceptance rate ~25%) is much more selective than the Chicago of 10 years ago (with acceptance rate ~60%). However, standardized test scores say otherwise. In fact, the class of 2011 with an acceptance rate of 35% had a higher SAT than the class of 2012 with an acceptance rate of 28%.</p>
<p>Chicago is probably more selective than it was 10 years ago, but not as much as the acceptance rate alone would suggest. While I don’t think that you can definitively “rank” or “compare” selectivity (because some colleges give slightly different weight to different things), the best measure you can hope to get is a combination of test scores, acceptance rate, and high school class rank.</p>
<p>Agree but you cant ignore it altogether. I think the old attitude of “I wouldnt be a member of any club that would have me” still affect peoples perception of a school. The real coin of the realm in CC land is peoples perceptions of schools anyway.</p>
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The following schools have no ED too:</p>
<p>Harvard - 9%
Princeton - 10%
Yale - 10%
MIT - 12%
Stanford - 10%
Cal Tech - 17%
Notre Dame - 24%
Georgetown - 21%
Boston College - 27%
UC Berkeley - 23%
UCLA - 24%
Chicago - 35%</p>
<p>Source: USNWR - 2007 data</p>
<p>Berea College has a lower acceptance rate than UChicago does.</p>
<p>Chicago has low yield. It isn’t mostly because of ED. It’s because students are scared because of Chicago’s hardcore reputation. It happens. Look at Caltech’s yield and then look at Chicago’s yield. Caltech’s acceptance rate is actually HUGE in comparison to what it would be if it were as popular as MIT; you just don’t see it since Caltech only has a freshman class of about 200, and Chicago’s is about 5x as large.</p>
<p>Also, Chicago doesn’t have the financial resources to compete with its peers in financial aid. I know quite a few people who had Chicago as their first choice, but then they got into another school such as Yale or Harvard, which gave them quite a bit more money. And no one’s going to pick Chicago over Yale or Harvard if the latter gives $20k more than the former. Hell, I wouldn’t.</p>
<p>But this year’s acceptance rate at Chicago was 26.8%, which was even lower than Northwestern’s 27.4%. That’s also lower than Emory and 2% higher than Johns Hopkins. The admissions rate is going to dip in the following few years, probably to sub-15%. It has become one of our president’s goals, and I see no reason why he shouldn’t succeed. Chicago recently recruited Jim Nondorf to run admissions, who was responsible for increasing the yield of the very best students from 10% to 35% at Yale in 3 years, and for increasing the number of applicants at Rensselaer by over 100% in 3 years.</p>
<p>Also of note is that schools in the midwest typically have a very low yield rate. If you’ll look at the top schools in the midwest, they have significantly lower yield than their peers in the east.</p>
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Chicago’s “hardcore” reputation is certainly no more significant than MIT’s (quite possibly less so), which has a perfectly good yield. On the flip side, Duke has a reputation as a laid-back school but has a lower yield than Chicago.</p>
<p>Duke RD 33.5%
Cornell RD 35.1%
Chicago 36.4%
Caltech 37.5%
Dartmouth RD 40.6%</p>
<p>MIT 66.1%</p>
<p>It’s hard to make conclusions here. The schools you listed above each have their own reasons for having comparative yields. Chicago’s a very different type of school than each of these.</p>
<p>I do admit that I misspoke. I wouldn’t say that Chicago’s low yield is due to its reputation as a hard school. Rather, I would say that Chicago’s relatively low number of applications is due to it. Northwestern, by all means Chicago’s closest comparison, gets about twice as many applications each year. This really should not be happening.</p>
<p>I think that its low yield has its origins in the lack of name recognition, especially in the east. Most students who get into Chicago also get into other Ivy Leagues, and public perception weighs heavily on their mind. Notice that the percentage of in-state students at Chicago and Northwestern is significantly higher than its non-midwestern peers. Students from the northeast have very little motivation to go to Chicago when they already have a plethora of great universities in their direct vicinity. I imagine that Chicago/Northwestern admits about an even number of students from the various regions of the U.S. This then becomes skewed when the yield of students from the midwest becomes very high and the yield of students from the northeast/west becomes very low.</p>
<p>Phuriku, I agree with you.</p>
<p>The question is what, if anything, Chicago should do about it.</p>
<p>My parents (UC '61 and '63) are strongly opposed to any decreased emphasis on “the life of the mind,” the Core, etc. The goal of the current administration seems to be to become the next Yale: attract the best intellects, but only those who contribute to a vibrant, world-class campus scene as well, with music and publications and theater groups and so on that are destinations in and of themselves.</p>
<p>I don’t think that can work. In each year’s high school class, only a relative handful of students really bring it all to the table in Yale fashion, and Chicago isn’t going to draw them away from Yale (or Harvard or Columbia, the other urban schools operating on that model). If Chicago dilutes its academic culture in order to attract more ballerinas and politicians, it’s going to lose what makes it special. It won’t become Yale, it will become Wash U, and IMHO that would be a terrible loss.</p>
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<p>I agree. But there are a few very necessary problems that the university must confront. The first is financial resources. Although the university has quite a nice endowment, it doesn’t compare to its peers, and with the average professor paid at $180k/year (unrivaled by all but Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford), it is unable to allocate a significant portion of its resources to vital areas such as financial aid.</p>
<p>Also, up to this point, I think the university’s buildings have been a bit mismanaged. That there were beaten-up, ripped-apart, and duct-taped couches in one of the most beautiful libraries in the nation should give you a picture of how negligent the administration had been in the past few years to the maintenance of the aesthetics of our facilities. The University of Chicago is one of the most beautiful campuses in the world, but to keep it up requires a significant amount of financial resources.</p>
<p>Cash is important. Prestige (indirectly) generates cash. Therefore, I do think that name recognition should be advanced at least to the level of, say, Columbia. I know that we occupy a niche in the academic community, but the academic community isn’t where the money is. What I think Zimmer is now attempting to do is bring in a larger class size, generate interest in high school students to whom Chicago’s name would usually not reach, and generate a reputation this way.</p>
<p>I don’t think that generating popularity like this will necessarily be a detriment to the ‘life of the mind’ attitude. On the other hand, I do think Zimmer intends to alter the student body in a small way to generate more attention. I don’t think such a miniscule change will dramatically alter the attitude Chicago possesses toward education. The Core, after all, will probably remain intact for a while. Remember that Zimmer is a mathematician and although he is also a businessman, I do think that he values the rigor that Chicago possesses and I don’t think he intends to let that go.</p>