So, let me get this straight, @DeepBlue86 , these Admissions Officers are supposed to be sitting around the table during the ED round(s) with the motivation of “lock[ing] in more full-payers and goos[ing] yield without a sacrifice in quality”. I can be as cynical as the next man about the motivations of large organizations, but I have to consider the probabilities: if anything like that was going on, a whistleblower would emerge to tell the tale. That happened in the much less inflammatory matter of the Metcalf letter. What you’re casually alleging as if it were a given would be much more serious. Someone would revolt.
“(Unfortunately, the game-theory dynamics of ED, and especially ED II, pretty much guarantee that some portion of the ED acceptees – nowhere near a majority, I hope – harbor resentments and second thoughts over “settling” for Chicago.) Yes, if you report an acceptance rate that looks like Harvard’s and Yale’s, people aware of little else are more likely to see you as a true peer of them and other, similar colleges.”
- Well, I for one hope that the myth won't die because it's been part of the folklore fabric of the university for decades now. Some traditions should remain.
My D said everyone has heard of someone who is bitter over “settling” for UChicago but no one can actually name a name.
“By the way, “outside Hyde Park” was meant to refer to New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris (and New Haven, Palo Alto, Princeton, Cambridge, the other Cambridge, Oxford, etc.) more than just to Woodlawn or Kenwood.”
- Ah. Different. Hm. When it comes to faculty hiring, departments don't hold biases. They try to poach each other's stars regardless of where they are located. As to the undergrad. families and students, I agree a bit with Bronx on the improving cross-admit stuff; we met a lot of kids who had offers of admission by other top schools and most seemed to be leaning toward UChicago, although you never know what could happen. There was a case or two where the kid's enthusiasm was directly counteracted by the parent in tow. It hadn't occurred to me that parents might be directing their kids on where to attend college, but now I'm of a sightly different opinion.
- As to NY, LA, Tokyo, London, etc. - Not sure which communities - academic? applicants and their families? employers? - you are referring to. One thing that the College seems to have stepped up is Career Advancement's outreach to international employers via stuff like career treks. That's just one aspect of where it's working (NB: kids on FA get their airfare paid for). Career Advancement is an area where the College has made excellent strides but probably still has far to go before UChicago has the name recognition of an HYPS internationally.
“My D said everyone has heard of someone who is bitter over “settling” for UChicago but no one can actually name a name.”
Well…
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21691703/#Comment_21691703
With the disclaimer that I haven’t been in the committee room, @marlowe1, I think the UChicago adcoms - like their equivalents at other elites - do exactly that, not entirely consciously and without an explicit effort to discriminate. They form general views on the right numbers and qualifications for all the buckets they’re seeking to fill as they shape the class, then go through the files and fill in the names. There’s some horsetrading at the end, and eventually they end up with roughly the numbers they want, year after year.
Just like the discovery process for the Harvard admissions trial didn’t produce any smoking-gun memos talking about limiting the numbers of Asian admits, I very much doubt anyone who broke into the UChicago admissions office would find a written edict from Nondorf mandating an increase in full-payers to some level, or any other evidence of that kind of quota. Yet UChicago knows that there are more full-payers in the ED round, and that they’ll get nearly 100% yield on those they admit.
The larger the ED pool is, of course, the greater the number of admit-level candidates there are in it, all things equal, and if UChicago wanted, they could fill the entire class from it multiple times over. Of course, if they did that, they’d be turning their back on thousands of candidates worth competing for who didn’t apply ED, for many possible reasons. Eventually, also, if EA/RD admits went to zero, only those willing to commit in advance to UChicago would bother applying there. Still, it’s easy to see how driving people into the ED pool serves UChicago’s interests (and the interests of any other school that uses ED, to be fair) - to a point.
@Lea111 - stepping up to compete with @JBStillFlying in the anecdote category…I’m going to get the popcorn…
Can’t speak to “settling”, but we can certainly say with a good deal of confidence that most of the first-years at UChicago are not, in fact, bitter over being rejected by someplace else, because the majority of the class applied and was admitted to UChicago ED, preempting any such rejections before they could happen.
DeepBlue - I tend to agree with Marlowe. True, neither of you was in the room with the adcoms. But sometimes the things people say are true.
UChicago says that it admits without regard to ability to pay. UChicago says it wants to admit types of students who are comfortable with its environment of “rigorous inquiry” and intellectual discourse.
I think it might be good to take a deep breath, DeepBlue, and believe what people say.
“We agree that the number of ED I/II apps has very likely grown, possibly by a lot (given that the options weren’t initially widely publicized), but you seem to think UChicago must have kept the number of admits from the ED and EA pools at the same level. I don’t see any reason to assume that - rather the opposite, since the number of strong candidates would likely have increased in absolute terms, enabling UChicago to lock in more full-payers and goose yield without a sacrifice in quality.”
If we are playing decision trees/game theory here… I would say that as long as the yield of EA and RD continue to increase, the “risk” of bringing in more from these cohorts continue to decline - giving the adcomm more reason to keep bringing in admits from these cohorts. There is a path to rationalizing why the share of RD and EA admits could go up.
That’s a more convincing account of the process, @DeepBlue86 , than talk of skimming and juicing the numbers for that particular purpose. It still leaves me skeptical that one of the admissions buckets is labelled “rich kids”. That would require someone to be making a count of acceptances under that category and then issuing instructions in some fashion to “go back and look for more of them” or “we can go easy now - we’ve got our catch”. Naturally the putative language used would be veiled, but that would have to be the purport of it if it is to be effective. If the count shows a deficiency in that supposed bucket, someone who would otherwise have made it in - or may have already been provisionally designated as in - will now have to be thrown back in favor of someone who fills that particular bucket. My own revulsion for anything like that would almost certainly be felt by at least some of those involved in it. I can live with other categories applied within reason - geography, ethnicity, interests, sports qualifications, diversity, even legacy - but that one is so alien to the history and culture of the University of Chicago that I and many another gag on the very thought of it. That may be how they do things in the institutions of the east, but this college is not like that and never has been.
I can also go some way in accepting your supposition that the ED system will have some effect - we don’t know how great it will be - in bringing in more otherwise worthy applications from kids of greater parental wealth so that those kids will naturally be accepted in greater numbers. Was that the reason it was designed? I don’t believe so but agree that it may be seen as a happy side effect by the designers, who were no doubt aware that there were not nearly as many rich kids at Chicago as at its peers. For me that is an unfortunate side effect but one I am prepared to accept, in the limited degree to which I believe it applies, for the sake of achieving the much greater good of identifying and recruiting a class of ever greater numbers attuned to the culture of the College. It sounds like you believe the latter goal to be what someone else called it in this thread - lipstick on a pig.
“stepping up to compete with @JBStillFlying in the anecdote category”
Nah, more like an insider joke for those of us who read every one of the posts by that poster and in that looong thread.
What does it mean when people talk about colleges’ “financial aid budgets”? For example, when they say that by the time students are taken off the wait list, the financial aid budget is exhausted?
@lea111 at #262 - so true! My kid obviously doesn’t know Coldbrew’s kid, although hopefully the latter never bought into the parent’s quite negative sentiments.
“Can’t speak to “settling”, but we can certainly say with a good deal of confidence that most of the first-years at UChicago are not, in fact, bitter over being rejected by someplace else, because the majority of the class applied and was admitted to UChicago ED, preempting any such rejections before they could happen.”
@DeepBlue86 - yep.
@marlowe1 @DeepBlue86 The beauty – so to speak – about ED, and I believe one of the secrets of its persistence, is that it completely absolves admissions staff from anything approaching the craven attitude marlowe1 rightly ridicules, or even the stereotyping DeepBlue86 suggests. It allows them to be completely and honestly need-blind. All they have to do is assess the pool of ED applications in front of them in good faith and select the best applicants, the ones who offer most to the University, period. And then, when the RD pool is assessed, they can do exactly the same thing with the RD pool to fill the remaining slots. No one “in the room where it happens” ever has to think about the college’s revenue needs.
What happens, of course, is that the dice have been loaded by the structure of the program. (Pace Lin-Manuel Miranda, I assume those of you with a Chicago education or the equivalent know that a heck of a lot of important structures are already in place before anyone goes into “the room where it happens.”) The ED pool is not a cross-section of the overall applicant pool. It is heavily weighted towards higher income applicants. (Maybe in a perfect world, with perfect information and no transaction costs, the ED pool would have the same characteristics as the RD pool. But this world isn’t that one.) So when the admission staff does its good-faith assessment of ED candidates, it is reliably going to pick a set of applicants that is wealthier than the overall applicant pool. (I am assuming here that the measures used to assess talent and qualifications are not correlated with wealth. Which may not be true. But if that is the case, it will further distort the pool selection.)
If they fill 70% of the class slots with ED applicants, that 70% of the class is going to be wealthier than the applicant pool as a whole. The other 30% won’t necessarily be wealthier than the applicant pool as a whole, but who cares? The University wants a diverse class, it wants no barriers, etc. It just also wants a certain level of revenue, and ED (and the percentage of class admitted ED) helps achieve that without dirtying anyone’s hands.
I’ll make up some numbers to show how I think it works. Let’s imagine the applicant pool as a whole consists of 30% full-pay students, 50% half-pay students (on average), and 20% no-pay students. If you picked the whole class that way, you would collect 55% of standard revenue from students. But the ED pool may consist of 60% full-pay students, 20% half-pay, and 20% no-pay (because they aren’t disadvantaged by ED). The revenue from that group is going to be 70% of standard. If you pick 70% of the class from that pool, and 30% from the broader pool – of course, you will probably hand out a good deal more than 30% of all acceptance letters to fill 30% of the slots from the RD pool – then you wind up with 65.5% of standard revenue from your class, 19% better than average. Yippee!
It’s even better if you expand the class at the same time. If you bump the class up by 10%, you wind up with 72.05% of the old standard, a 31% improvement.
The Dean of Enrollment Management (and Admissions) is a hero. And not a single admissions officer has ever so much as thought, “We need to admit more rich kids.”
"Well…
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21691703/#Comment_21691703"
lol has she heard Harvard students whine about being on the Quad?
@JHF , that math, speculative as it is, could be correct. Suppose it is - is it fair for me to press you on what exactly your point is here? The irony in your voice is palpable, and of course I know you don’t approve of ED. But are you perhaps executing a rhetorical turn when you condemn it for its tendency to increase the wealth of the student body? Is that something you actually deplore?
I put that question because an important part of the narrative of what was bad and failing in the old College, with which I believe you are largely in agreement, was that its students did not in sufficient numbers come from wealth and did not go forth and create wealth. That was indicated starkly in those statistics @Cue7 found in the New York Times from barely ten years ago. The Boyer plan to cure all this involved “Princetonizing” (my term) student life and increasing the critical mass of the College so as to attract students more in the mold of the peer schools and more able and willing to plow donations back to the University. That plan and its execution have been discussed many times on this board. Some of us have grudgingly accepted it, others have outright celebrated it. I have always understood your position as being on the celebratory side: you have taken your ideal UChicago as being very similar to the Yale of your own experience, even granting important differences. Am I wrong about that?
Therefore I’m a bit confused as to why you would use this particular effect as a stick with which to beat ED. You may have other sticks, but why this one? Wouldn’t the time to do that be when student wealth at Chicago actually approaches, if not equals, that at the peer schools? I don’t believe even Cue in his giddiest moments has suggested that that is presently the case. Are you suggesting it?
“If they fill 70% of the class slots with ED applicants, that 70% of the class is going to be wealthier than the applicant pool as a whole.”
- That might be as many full pay students will take advantage of ED to apply to their first choice. Is it 2x the number in the applicant pool which is what JHS's example shows? That we don't know and obviously these percentages can be tweaked to provide different comparisons to standard revenue. For instance, 50% might be full pay, and 30% might be half. That results in 65% of standard revenues, not 70%. Still better than 55%, but not as much.
“The other 30% won’t necessarily be wealthier than the applicant pool as a whole, but who cares? The University wants a diverse class, it wants no barriers, etc. It just also wants a certain level of revenue, and ED (and the percentage of class admitted ED) helps achieve that without dirtying anyone’s hands.”
- Not only are they not necessarily wealthier, one would think they are given significant merit and so would heavily skew away from full pay. For instance, the distribution might actually be something like 20% full and 60% half, which results in revenues that are only 50% of standard, not 55%.
Because UChicago is enrolling a majority of ED, you don’t even have to change the overall wealth distribution of the admitted class to improve the revenue stream - all you need to do is better match those who would choose the school on factors other than price with an application plan that allows that signal . . . and give heavy amounts of merit aid to the 30% who are more price sensitive. The first group will likely raise revenues more than the second group will cause them to decline. It’s not so much a new way of choosing richer kids, it’s simply a better allocation of funds among the admitted class. In sum: all they needed to do was stop giving out merit aid to kids who didn’t need it.
@JHS said it all…
@JBStillFlying - it’s reasonable to assume that ED applicants skew very substantially toward full-pay for a variety of reasons: (i) kids who apply ED are savvier about the process, with better college counseling, typically associated with being high-SES (this explains the phenomenon noted upthread of ~80% of prep schoolers applying early somewhere); (ii) it reduces a student’s ability to negotiate a better fin aid package if they’re notionally locked into an ED offer, which is why many non-full-payers avoid ED; and (iii) knowing that early admission favored the wealthy, Harvard and Princeton eliminated it for a few years starting in 2006, citing this as a reason at the time.
I keep reading on here that merit aid at UChicago has been cut substantially, so it isn’t clear to me that this could move the dial in the way you suggest.
In any case, looking at the percentage of students on Pell grants is one objective way to assess how well universities are doing at recruiting the poorest. By this measure, UChicago is notably behind all of the Ivies and Stanford (https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-schools). I have to believe this is a by-product of starting to admit substantial majorities of its classes ED.
@JBStillFlying - how does the merit aid work? Does admissions signal the students who deserve it, amd then financial aid determines who needs it?
Or, does merit aid simply go to the most qualified applicants as a recruiting tool? If that’s the case, could wealthy students actually qualify for merit aid?
On the matter of Pell grants and the effect of ED, I note that Penn, an ED school, has a level comparable with all the other ivies and Stanford (15 percent) as against Chicago’s 11 percent. And if ED is the deal-breaker for these low-income kids, wouldn’t one expect to see higher Pell grant figures for Chicago in years prior to its introduction? I don’t have those figures, but I highly doubt they would show anything of the sort.
I conclude that ED is not the significant variable here. The more obvious one is that old dependable - prestige. Chicago is chasing a limited number of low-income kids qualified to be successful at these elite schools. If you are such a kid you may indeed want to go to a school with less prestige and less name recognition, where you must be prepared to work very hard, spend a year and a half taking courses unrelated to your interests, and then explain your choice to your friends and family. Then again, why bother with all that if you can get into Harvard? Chicago needs to fight against this perception with its mailings and with its Empower Initiative, but it shouldn’t sell its soul merely to claim bragging rights in a metric unrelated to its mission to provide its special brand of education to the kids who have a longing for it.
@JBStillFlying : Those are pretty good questions . . .
Unlike Cue7, I have never thought that having a wealthier student body was a valid goal in and of itself. Yes, I believe the University had to form alliances with more wealthy families, and it had to generate more alumni who became wealthy and supported their alma mater. That’s a long-term project, the centerpieces of which were more promotion of the University’s educational and reputational quality, creating a better overall undergraduate student experience, adjusting admissions criteria somewhat to admit some ambitious along with the pure intellectuals, and cultivating alumni more. All of which the University has been doing for a couple of decades now.
My problem with ED, and especially the extreme form of ED the University is using, is about 90% as described by my last post. It systematically favors applicants whose families are comfortable as full payors – not as a dark conspiracy among admissions officers, but as a structural matter – and when you admit such a large portion of the class that way you really close off opportunities to middle class kids. That’s true even if you maintain or even increase the number of actual poor kids enrolled. My other issues are (1) it just looks cheesy to admit a much bigger percentage of the class ED than anyone else and to beam with pride at the resulting high yield/low admission rate for the class, (2) I believe eventually it has to suppress the number of RD applications submitted, because RD is such a poor chance of admission (but on this I’m probably wrong ), and (3) I wonder what proportion of ED (especially ED II) applicants are bona fide die hard Chicago enthusiasts and what proportion are settlers who have decided ED at Chicago is their best shot at a high-prestige university, and I’m not certain I prefer those kids to disappointed HYPS rejects with a chip on their shoulders, and even better some percentage of HYPS non-rejects who choose Chicago straight up when they have a choice. It would be worth a few points of yield to have more of those.
It also matters to me that Chicago went from having the classiest admissions profile – unrestricted EA, which resulted in Chicago regularly getting more early applications than any of its peers – to having one that had previously been used only by colleges in desperate straits, like Tulane in the years after Katrina. And then upping the ante in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game by blowing through the informal 50% cap on ED admissions that was basically universal among elite-level institutions. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if Chicago broke from the pack for noble purposes, but I don’t think lowering its admission rate artificially or increasing its tuition revenue nontransparently are noble purposes.
I think Chicago is a wonderful university, and its college a fabulous college. My kids had a great experience there – exactly what I hoped for them when they went to college. I want to see it recognized as the world-class institution it is, and I want to see it improve continuously and compete successfully for the best students in the world with all the other universities that attract those students. But not by cutting corners, not this way.