Admit Rates, Standardized Test Averages, Cross Admit Results

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
201

Interesting. The College grew by 331 students for the 2017/18 year, and 3/4 of that increase was in full pay. During the prior year, they managed to increase full pay BEYOND overall college growth (by reducing aid to current students, I guess). Aid reduction similarly will explain at least part of the large increase the following year. Assuming it’s about the same number - I calculate 34 - that’s still over 200 net additional full pays. That probably translated into $10 mil. of additional revenue from switching to ED (assuming tuition of approximately $50K). I haven’t seen the College’s financial statements, so not sure how significant $10 million of additional revenue would actually be. It doesn’t sound huge, but it’s a cumulative change so maybe it starts to add up after a few years.

More fundamentally, if ED really did enable them to begin to alter the income demographic of the College, wouldn’t you expect full pay enrollments to have increased MORE than 200-215? After all, they admitted something like 1,300 ED’s (based on estimates).

202

@JBStillFlying in posts # 195 and #200:

I am puzzled by your tone and your assertions. You contend that, essentially, I’m “spinning” a “little narrative” about the connection between wealth and ED at Chicago, and you use your anecdotal experiences to “put a pin in the bubble that is [my] little narrative.”

Belittling as your words may be - to take a step back, I care little if the boost in wealth comes from the ED or RD rounds. I just care that the boost in wealth is happening.

Would it make you feel better if ED really was a more egalitarian, need-based crowd, and Nondorf used RD to get the wealthy prep kids?

Also, true to form, @HydeSnark is able to pull data quickly (much more quickly than I ever could), and it all seems to corroborate - both anecdotally and quantifiably - that Chicago is becoming a less egalitarian place, with a high percentage of full pay kids.

Note, this may not be drastic over the short term - but over a longer term, it’s a fairly profound shift for the college. It clearly has more prep/wealthy students than ever before. And, judging from the way Chicago frames the receptions/donor events I’ve attended (i.e., inviting parents of current students to donate - which I find to be rich, especially if these parents were cash-strapped!), the goal is not just immediate tuition revenue, but longer-term connection with these kids and their families.

Again, JBStill - I’m just confused. Are you arguing that Chicago is a more need-based, egalitarian student population than its peers? ALL the data we have - outside from your few anecdotal conversations - flies in the face of that. A huge chunk of the class is full pay. A huge chunk of the class comes from fancy elite prep schools which generally offer little financial aid.

(Btw, I also take issue with your assertion that I’ve talked to “ZERO” families - again, at all the receptions I’ve attended - local they may be - my impressions line up with hydesnark’s observations.)

Has hydesnark - with all the qualitative and quantitative info offered - provided the “real clarity” you’re looking for?

Finally, I have to agree with snark - you’ve picked a really weird hill to die on.

203

^ Just to be clear in #200, I’m not saying that ED shouldn’t have a financial impact, just questioning whether short-term financial considerations were the primary motivators for changing the admission plan so thoroughly.

204

@JBStillFlying - short-term financial gains were probably A motivator, but why does it matter if these financial gains were a primary motivator? There are so many institutional benefits to ED - and the short-term financial gains were probably one of many benefits considered.

I think the powers that be took a look at ED, saw all the benefits it could offer - it checks so many boxes - and then said: “This is so good, let’s do it TWICE!” (ya know, ED1 isn’t enough).

205

@Cue7 in #201 - I’m terribly sorry for hurting your feelings. This discussion, of course, shouldn’t be about “feelings” - it’s really about assessing what the College is doing and using information to back up our viewpoints. No doubt your local receptions are informative but they are like mine - anecdotal. And they are local (Philly, right?). All are valid - none should be discounted. And of course none should necessarily be used to justify sweeping or broad conclusions.

By the way, what number do you put on this “huge chunk” of full pay? Did it become a huge chunk with the class of '21 or was it a huge chunk prior to that? Numbers from your end would be very helpful. I’m guessing that a HIGHER percentage of full pay might be an outcome of ED. Whether it’s “HIGH” totally depends on where it was prior.

On that note, @HydeSnark might have made an error up in #199. 1 - (fin.aid. %) doesn’t necessarily equal full pay, Merit aid has to be considered as well (because - yes - some of those wealthy prep kids, among others, could have gotten merit). Thought I heard that over 50% of the Class of '23 has been given some tuition assistance. I’d like to know what that percentage was in prior years, particularly in 2016 and 2017-18. Does either of you know?

Finally, I’m going to PM you about something because we want to make sure this conversation can continue.

Edit/update: Agree with your post #203. It’s perfectly OK for the College to enjoy the financial benefits and even weigh them heavily. Long term positive impact from ED only helps the College financially. Perhaps we aren’t quite at odds as we both thought :smiley:

206

While you guys have been typing I’ve been sleeping, not dying on hills, but the rekindled debate has awakened me, and I’m ready to fight …

Cue and Snark, neither of you seem to acknowledge at all that there could be motivations, or even effects, of ED other than these financial ones. The reason that some of us care about this enough to defend it - okay, die for it - is that we like its effect in identifying the kids who really want to come to Chicago and eliminate those who are faking it or are insufficiently informed about the school, all as described previously. We fear that the true-hearted kids will get lost in the shuffle what with all this new popularity and these tens of thousands of apps. Even JHS appeared to grudgingly take that point, though it’s not for him sufficient to overcome the negatives.

I’m more than prepared to acknowledge the negative (well, it’s a positive for Cue) of moving the wealth quotient upwards. Chicago has a long way to go in that department, but it may be pulling into range with the big boys. I applaud Snark for finding the stats posted at #199. They do show a trend, but it’s not the overwhelming one any fair reader of Cue’s analysis would predict - a decline of FA kids of 2 percent over the period that covers the advent of ED. And I see no reason to attribute the entirety of that decline to the effect of ED.

I am too internet-challenged to be able to find the same stats for the years immediately prior to the introduction of ED. It would be interesting to have those figures. The thesis of the ED-naysayers is that ED changed everything. If so, we would expect to see a really decisive break from pre-ED to post-ED, even from one year to the next. And, if ED is the culprit here, why do we see a merely smallish drift upwards during this three year period? Wouldn’t we expect to see a precipitous one-year increase, followed by a levelling-off? Even if a couple of years are required for this to take hold, why would we expect the percentages to continue to rise in all future years - if, that is, the phenomenon we are dealing with here is solely attributable to that source?

207

@JBStillFlying - thank you for a very kind, gracious response! Please note though, while I appreciate your care, my feelings weren’t hurt. I thought (or perhaps misinterpreted) your post #195 as being a little dismissive, but it didn’t hurt my feelings.

Also @marlowe1 and JBStill - there are MANY institutional benefits to ED - not just financial. That’s exactly why I think Chicago adopted TWO rounds of ED: there are so many benefits to the school.

An important point: The only real unifying factor I saw in the ED admits I met is they were (or I could reasonably infer they were) generally wealthy. I’ve met probably a dozen over the past couple years, and they are the sons and daughters of surgeons, CEOs, leaders of very important institutions in Phila, etc. Other than backgrounds that caught my eye, they would seem to fit in nicely at the current incarnation of the University of Chicago. They seemed very bright, curious, excited - if a bit more aware of pre-professional pursuits and more polished (certainly more put together) than my cohort.

@HydeSnark can offer his (always welcome) two cents - but I don’t think there’s a migration of squash players and lacrosse jocks from the east coast prep schools to Chicago.

My observations have much less to do with student comportment, and more to do with their backgrounds.

208

@marlowe1 at #205

  • FA might have declined because merit increased. USNews specifies "need based" aid, not total aid. And the College appears to be finding more creative ways to pay out both.
  • The impact of a (for lack of better word) "permanent" increase in full pay enrollments is likely cumulative for a bit as whatever net increase was realized in Year One will build even more the next three years. However, the College can also be using full payers to redistribute to merit and/or need based recipients (the "spread the wealth around" hypothesis). So it's not clear just how much of that net increase actually would show up on the bottom line.
  • Any spreading of the wealth around probably wouldn't even be possible without the College skewing wealthier, regardless of why it's doing so.
209

“@HydeSnark can offer his (always welcome) two cents - but I don’t think there’s a migration of squash players and lacrosse jocks from the east coast prep schools to Chicago.”

  • Too bad, because the Jones Armory could be used as a polo field. It's been done before.
210

@Cue7 at #181:

"@JBStillFlying - I don’t know what to tell you, but your experience seems counter to the statistical data on the class. More than 1/3 of the Class of 2022 come from the mid-atlantic and new england. About 20% come from the West (with heavy representation from California).

So, if you’re only meeting “regular folks from flyover country,” you’re missing many large chunks of the class."

  • So just to be clear, I was referencing regions containing at least 49% (and possibly over 50%) of the Class of '22, Met maybe one person total from the other half: Mid Atlantic, North-East, and CA. Class of '23 hails from all 50 states and 80+ countries. Not sure how that compares to prior years.

“Also, the preppies (but keep in mind, they may not look like “preppies”) make up a big percentage of the class. About 20 will come from Andover alone - with another 20 from Horace Mann, around 10 from Exeter, 5-10 from Hotchkiss, a handful from Groton, many from Milton, etc. etc. Chicago’s recent classes may well include more prep school alumni than Harvard’s (which, a generation ago, was unthinkable).”

  • No reason to believe this year is any different unless Test Optional had a negative impact on the feeders. The kids I ran into - including the few self-identified "preppies," seemed to be "onlies" in their schools, so I definitely didn't meet any HADES kids. Maybe there wasn't a good representation this week?

“This is not to say everyone isn’t happy and ready to mingle. I imagine the prep school types at Chicago are very happy to be there, and probably look a little different than the lacrosse recruits going to Dartmouth or Princeton. Nevertheless, they are most likely wealthy and well-connected just the same.”

  • No doubt. Also, one doesn't need to be a NE preppie to be "well connected".

“You do know, right, that you could go to Harvard for a day and have the exact same experience you just had? But that doesn’t negate the heavy influence of the prep group (and wealth) in Cambridge.”

  • Funny you should mention Harvard. I have visited campus on a few occasions and each time was made VERY aware of the prep group and wealth in Cambridge. My question about Harvard has always been how does one avoid it? Great kids from all over the place, of course. Wealth always seemed to be the unifying factor. Again, maybe just an unrepresentative sample of what can be found at Harvard. I know people from more modest means who were very uncomfortable there once upon a time.
211

Just visiting this thread as the parent of yes, a HADES 2020 financial aid student of all things. Why is this thread even a thing? As a long-ish term CCer, this thread seems like a Seinfeld episode, really about nothing. Are many colleges gaming the rankings, full pay, you name it to get ahead? Absolutely. Why does every think Chicago is so evil in this regard? I’m just puzzled.

212

I too find that this thread is becoming silly. I was at the Open House over the last 2 days. My DD is an ED admit. I too met dozens of students and parents from all over the country and world. I have no idea what the financial status is for any of the families I met, and nor do I care to know. Many of the families I met were with ED kids, but I did mingle with several who were EA and RD.

Maybe I’m being incredibly naive, but I believe the admission officers do a really good job at choosing the types of students to admit to UChicago, and I hope they are choosing these students based on their academic record, extra-curricular experiences, UChicago essays, etc, and not on how much money their parents earn. (Isn’t UChicago a Need-Blind school?) As long as UChicago can provide my DD the education that she desires, I don’t care which students are full pay, have a financial aid package, or a merit package.

213

@MAandMEmom - so I think the question is: how has the economic breakdown changed within the student body. That’s ultimately the question- and it’s an important one.

That’s why this thred is a thing.

214

I also wanted to add, since I’m not sure if anyone mentioned it yet… Dean Nondorf said this week at the Open House that this year’s admitted class has students not only from all 50 states, but from 70 countries! I can’t remember his exact words, but I think he said it was the most diverse admitted group in history. I thought that was amazing.

215

@HydeSnark comments “we see a large leap in the number of full pay students from 2018 to 2019.” Of course, the size of the college increased by 331 students in that period. The percentage of students who are full pay increased by about 1%.

I would be concerned about the effect of more wealthy students on campus if I heard that family wealth shaped social interactions on campus. In my experience as a student in the “old days” it did not enter in.

The more full-pay students admitted and the stronger the university becomes financially, the more students from working-class areas (such as where I grew up on Chicago’s South Side) can be admitted and given aid. If you believe experiencing a Chicago education is beneficial for society and for the students involved then I can see only good coming from admitting more students from families able to support their offspring’s education and thereby the university.

In my time as a student in The College students with prep school backgrounds were highly competent. They went on to fruitful career and life paths. Yes, they were slightly arrogant. One told me in our senior year she was looking forward to going back to New York and “returning to civilization” after graduation. But overall, I certainly benefited from knowing them. I was used to a lot stronger talk where I grew up.

Personally, I think it will be beneficial for the prep school students to come to Chicago as I believe a Chicago education trumps that offered in the Ivy League. Good for the students and good for the university.

216

@groweg My point was that a large increase in the size of the college with a small decrease in the number of students on financial aid can only be possible by admitted a class that is much larger but still contains about the same (or even slightly less) students on financial aid - i.e. each subsequent class is bringing larger and larger tuition revenues with them.

So in the short run, at least, this money isn’t going back into financial aid, or rather the data doesn’t appear to support that, even if the university marketing department is making a big deal about No Barriers (“watch what we do, not what we say!” as a certain presidential advisor put it). Of course I would be delighted if all this money was meaningfully expanding equity and access at UChicago, and some gains are being made in that direction (which I am quite happy about), but for the most part this revenue is almost certainly being used to pay off interest rates on large loans UChicago took out years ago and only impacts the student body insofar as those loans paid for a building spree, the majority of which (Campus North aside - though some people are even angry about that one), are not used much for undergraduates.

217

@Hyde Snark writes there is: “a large increase in the size of the college with a small decrease in the number of students on financial aid.” Using your data from 2017 - 2019 there were 2,437 students receiving financial aid in 2017 and 2,486 aid-receiving students in 2019. This is an increase.

Again, if the relative proportion of full-pay, prep school matriculants helps the university financially allowing increased absolute numbers of students to receive financial aid where is the harm? The prep school folks never bothered me during my UChicago days. They broadened my horizons.

218

@groweg Who says they bother me? I’m not the one making normative statements here about the presence (or lack thereof) of prep school students at UChicago. Personally, I don’t even think this is a much of a change from the norm - prep schools have always existed solely to get people into elite colleges (hence the “preparatory” name) and the strengthening of a historic symbiotic relationship b/c UChicago wants to use them as a piggy bank is barely a change, slightly changing demographics aside. I’m not delusional enough to hope that elite colleges - which have always existed to further the interests of the upper classes - will suddenly turn into machines for equity. But I am optimistic enough to hope that they might improve in this regard.

I’m just pointing out some realities about the socioeconomic makeup of the College and how UChicago is using its money, and making an attempt to use data (at the very least, anecdotal evidence from my time here) to give more…eh…grounded stories than the pile of ideologically motivated wishful thinking that passes for arguments around here.

Speaking of trying to stay grounded in data - that’s a bit of cherry picking, there was a decrease from 2017 to 2018 and then an increase from 2018 to 2019. If you expand the data back a year to the 2016 rankings there’s another decrease: 47.6% were on financial aid with a college size of 5395. So from 2016 to 2019, we see a decrease of about 82 students on financial aid.

But these small fluctuations hardly matter - UChicago cannot know how many people need financial aid beforehand, that’s what need-blind means. That is why they have to rely on indirect measures (like recruiting from expensive private schools or wealthy suburban public schools or using ED). It’s far more meaningful that the number of people not on financial aid consistently rose as the college size increased than that the number of people on financial aid fluctuated up and down from year to year. One is a trend, the other is noise.

This is much easier to see with a graph, but it’s basically impossible to link to pictures on here without breaking the rules (if someone knows how, please let me know!)

219

@Hyde Snark writes: “Speaking of trying to stay grounded in data - that’s a bit of cherry picking…” I was using the data you presented. When I showed analyzing it went counter to your narrative you add new data! Now, that is cherry picking!

“…elite colleges - which have always existed solely to further the interests of the upper classes…” Sounds like the old economic determinism, class warfare perspective to me.

220

@lilchaz and @MAandMEmom upthread make a good point: why does the wealth distribution, whether it’s skewed toward the wealthy or not, really matter?

UChicago obviously provides plenty of need based aid for lower and even middle SES families, they’ve got several programs in place to increase outreach to underserved groups, and now they have dropped test scores from the admissions requirement. What are the biggest issues scaring applicants away from applying to top schools? Affordability and test scores! What’s the biggest concern once they arrive on campus? Finding a welcoming community and making sure the resources are in place to help them succeed.

During this discussion, I don’t believe anyone has actually asserted that UChicago has deliberately chosen rich kids over equally-or-better qualified kids of more modest means. If I’m not mistaken, the debate concerns whether ED keeps lower SES kids from applying at all or applying EA/RD where they stand a higher chance of getting struck by lightning than getting admitted. But if those barriers mentioned above are genuinely removed, is the ED-bogeyman even a genuine concern? For instance, is there another top school where these kids would actually get a better deal if they applied ED?

ED isn’t for everyone, but the overwhelming response to UChicago’s ED system shows that it’s an enormously popular option for a whole lot of kids. Why even suspect that they set it up so that - inadvertently or otherwise - it shuts out a whole group? That makes no sense - and the fact that they are even offering automatic awards (first gen, police and fire, etc.) to ED kids just underscores that everyone who believes a UChicago education is for them need not worry about affordability.

Some may prefer keeping price in the picture as a driving factor - and that’s obviously OK. That’s also a different issue than feeling discouraged because you know UChicago is your #1 but, honestly, it’s simply out of reach. The latter situation isn’t supposed to be an issue anymore. Obviously, student and parents have to be of one mind on this investment: It’ll probably still be hella expensive. The difference now is that it’s supposed to be DOABLE.

Long ago, an exceptionally bright HS classmate of mine applied and got in. He was PERFECT for UChicago - but he just couldn’t afford it. He went to State U for undergrad (BA, humanities kid) and then achieved highest honors at State U Law. His bar admissions run all the way up to the Supreme Court. Cream rises to the top; however, he was pretty much confined to a local practice from the get-go, simply because that’s where his law degree packed the biggest punch. And his undergrad’s (crappy) reputation and his own continuing financial issues meant State U Law was really the best option, despite his brains. Those were not his original goals, but he had to settle for them. I’ve been asking myself for a couple of years now what could he have achieved had he been able to attend UChicago? This was a kid who would gladly have embraced something like Committee on Social Thought with a minor in Philosophy!