@JBStillFlying - for some of the acerbic comments above, this thread is dangerously close to being shut down.
For as long as it stays open, I’ll play:
I’m of the mindset that it’s better to give 18 yos options rather than binding contracts. Seems like a better way to go, no?
@Cue7 - good question. Both are important. For instance, an 18 yo doesn’t have the “option” not to show up to work when he/she has a shift, right? How about a dedicated athlete or someone who won the part in the school musical? A binding commitment can be a very good thing. It allows you to practice responsibility and how to adult.
When it comes to college admissions, I’m of the opinion “let 1000 flowers bloom.” No one is obligated to apply to UChicago and if they do, they don’t have to apply ED. There’s an admission plan for everyone and plenty of kids still apply to all of them. Why hold back the kids who are adult enough to understand the terms of an ED contract?
Would we say the same thing for an athlete on National Signing Day? Those are binding letters of intent, correct?
Wait, I’m confused now. What exactly are people arguing about again? A 10 second recap would be lovely.
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It really is Alice In Wonderland time at the JBStillFlying house. Do you really think all those kids applying ED are “adult enough” to understand the contract? Or is it more that the adults in their lives are either (a) wealthy enough, (b) careful enough in their research, © fundamentally clueless, or (d) completely checked out to let them sign the contract?
And National Signing Day: D1 college sportsssss – what a great example of an institution completely respectful of kids adult enough to sign, and designed solely to help them out! Yes, sure, every kid should be treated like a college athlete. No exploitation there!
@JHS your just not giving some 18 year old’s the credit they deserve. They choose the school ED for whatever reason (mostly because they know the school) and hopefully their parent(s) have enough money to pay for it.
The talk of options leaves me cold. Next we will hear of straddles, securitizations and triages. Plain English will do nicely. I know what it means to make a commitment, and I recognize exploitation when I see it.
So we are being told that 18-year-olds who decide for reasons somebody else might not think good enough to make a commitment to come to the University of Chicago are being exploited when they are accepted by that institution and awarded whatever amount of financial support is necessary to attend it? Sorry, but anyone who believes that has joined the folks on the other side of the looking glass. It must be getting cracked by now.
@JHS , I can imagine a talented and ambitious kid born in the Midwest wanting to go east to a big-name school. Why is it so hard for you to imagine that another such kid would prefer not to?
A contract, properly structured, has zero value to either side at the start of the contract. An ED contract has no value; it’s just an exchange of obligations. An option, on the other hand, has value (to the applicant), because the holder has only upside but no downside (s/he has no obligation).
“An ED contract has no value”. Tell that to one of the jubilant kids who holds one of those worthless contracts.
@marlowe1 I don’t have any trouble at all imagining a talented and ambitious kid in the Midwest not wanting to go east (or west) to a big-name school. (Although, I have to say it: The experience of the past 80 years is that talented and ambitious Midwesterners are all too happy to go to the East Coast or California.) But don’t try to tell me that he has rejected applying to HYPS because Chicago is so academically superior. Be honest: His first choice is to go to the most prestigious, world-class university in his region. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not very strong proof of Chicago’s academic superiority over any other college not in the Midwest.
(Then explain why his second choice is Carnegie-Mellon, which is only sorta in the Midwest, and from the standpoint of curricular philosophy is 180 degrees from Chicago. I’m sure he’s a great kid who will develop into a great adult. I don’t think it’s a character flaw in a 17-year-old boy if he is unsophisticated about higher education or not rigorous in his thinking about it. But don’t ask me to respect his judgment. It doesn’t look to me like he knows anything.)
@1NJParent Pretty much nothing in your statement is true without qualifications that matter a lot, and even with those qualifications it’s untrue.
Contracts: A contract properly negotiated between parties of equal bargaining position operating with perfect knowledge and no or minimal transaction costs does not favor either party at the time of agreement, so it can be said to have “no value.” Except that even in Efficient Market Land those parties of equal bargaining position will have put some time and effort into concluding the contract, so clearly it has positive value to each of them, or they went bankrupt long ago.
Options: First off, options are contracts, like bets. They are discussed in the prior paragraph. And when one enters into an option contract with an option dealer, just as when one enters into a gambling contract with a bookmaker, the contract has clear value . . . to the dealer/bookmaker. Neither side is more likely than the other to win or lose the bet, but the dealer/bookmaker is certain to be compensated for making the market and administering it. And because simple options are only half a bet, the party holding the option invariably pays for the privilege of loss limitation. Which makes the values equal on day 1, except for the vig going to the dealer.
College Admissions Contracts: Whoops! No equal bargaining power, no equal information, massive transaction costs, and (as explained above) no real contract either. The ED “contract” is really an option the applicant grants to the college: If you exercise your option, I’ll attend for the price you set, without negotiating that price further. What is the college bound to do, what is it paying for that option? Umm, give you an answer (which may be “we don’t want to give you an answer yet”) by a certain date. And implicitly – but never explicitly, never verified, and usually actually denied – to be somewhat more willing to accept you than if it reviewed your application as part of the mass of RD applications. That doesn’t sound so equal to me.
EA is a much more equal deal. The college has a choice whether to grant the applicant an option to attend. If it does grant the option, it has the opportunity to market to that applicant in a really focused way.
“many a kid … put off by the thought of being tied to the name of a prestigious school. Too much baggage, too many assumptions, whatever the underlying realities.”
Or put off by the thought of being at school with too many kids who are attracted to prestigious schools mainly because they are prestigious.
When she was in 5th grade, younger daughter had a friend who had absolutely decided she was going to “an Ivy League”. The girl was obsessed with being “successful”, which she defined as “making a lot of money” or being President of the United States. Three years later, she continues to pursue all of these same goals.
It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it can be a factor.
I think it bears repeating that SCEA requires you not to apply to any private schools EA, whereas ED does not. Couldn’t it be that for some kids, being able to apply EA wherever they like is quite valuable?
"Do you really think all those kids applying ED are “adult enough” to understand the contract? Or is it more that the adults in their lives are either (a) wealthy enough, (b) careful enough in their research, © fundamentally clueless, or (d) completely checked out to let them sign the contract?
“And National Signing Day: D1 college sportsssss – what a great example of an institution completely respectful of kids adult enough to sign, and designed solely to help them out! Yes, sure, every kid should be treated like a college athlete. No exploitation there!”
“2. Anyway, the ED “contract” has a really important out, in that kids can walk away if the financial aid isn’t adequate, and their family, not the college, decides what’s adequate. And in any event it isn’t indentured servitude. I have never heard of a single case of a college getting or even seeking an injunction to compel a recalcitrant ED acceptee to attend that college, or even seeking damages against the kid and the parents for failure to honor the contract. Which makes it kind of a pseudo-contract ,from a legal standpoint. From a moral standpoint, it’s a contract, sure, with the financial aid out.”
Three parties sign the ED contract: student, parents, guidance counselor. You are correct that families acting in good faith can exit the contract but it’s not all that easy. The “out”, like for most contracts, tends to be for exceptional circumstances. As others have described on this forum before, the family will need to go through the appeals process with Fin. Aid. first (because that’s what you do with your first choice school) and that can take time. It’s really not an “options” contract. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of kids and families understand this. With the education levels of most kids and parents, this is simply a no-brainer.
For those of very low SES - the ones with perhaps the most unsophisticated parents/GC’s and who are most likely to be “exploited” by nefarious college admissions offices hoping to capture a low income kid bwahahahaha - UChicago grants full tuition at minimum. Certain of them are going to qualify for additional automatic monies. Families might be of modest means, but they’ve done their research and spoken to Admissions. They are not dumb.
Nondorf, as many are aware, has a long-term goal of reaching everyone - particularly those in the most under-served communities - and helping them navigate the college admissions process early. He initiated the Coalition App. as a first step in this process. By that is NOT meant “he initiated the Coalition App. at UChicago”. Nondorf initiated the Coalition App. That’s his baby.
“Kids do the darndest things for the darndest reasons. I am scratching my head over the kid whose top three choices were Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and Wisconsin, and who didn’t think much of any Ivy. CMU and Wisconsin are both great schools, and everything would have been fine if he had gone to either, but from the standpoint of factors important to education I would submit that there is no Ivy that is anywhere near as different from Chicago as CMU or Wisconsin are. The principle seems to be “three schools I’ve heard of in the upper Midwest, sort of.” Is that what it means to be adult enough to understand the ED contract?”
“A contract, properly structured, has zero value to either side at the start of the contract. An ED contract has no value; it’s just an exchange of obligations. An option, on the other hand, has value (to the applicant), because the holder has only upside but no downside (s/he has no obligation).”
-Not to turn this into a discussion of economics, but surely you mean no “net arbitrage” value, right? In reality, of course, it’s not so for some projects, but it probably gets awfully close. A lot depends on the fluidity of the market or realizable benefits just to one party, among other things.
In the interest of keeping @Marlowe1 from freezing to death on this lovely spring day, it’s probably best not to wax on about options or binding contracts. I think we can all agree that ED is a different animal from EA/RD which is different from SCEA . . . everyone here knows the differences. To say there is “no value” contradicts a ton of evidence to the contrary. Whether one believes that families are exercising choice or are compelled to apply to certain schools under certain admissions plans . . . well, fortunately there are a variety of Hum and Sosc. Core sequences that can accommodate your desire to expore both hypotheses.
The students in your local high school may want to pay more attention to fit and less attention to pure prestige.
When my D applied for college starting a couple of years ago, she was in the cohort of local students that were competitive applicants everywhere. I went on college visits with her and we paid a great deal of attention to fit. One thing that I knew would be important for her was a rigorous atmosphere, because she is naturally a bit of a slacker. Students from our high school at Harvard report it is easier than high school. My nephew, a Yale graduate, reported it was very easy to skate through college there as well. And before others jump in to defend Yale and Harvard, it is not that they don’t have very capable and hard working students, as they clearly do. It is that these colleges don’t demand much, so it requires its students to be self-motivated which my D was not (at the time). I often repeat my nephew’s quote re Yale: “It can be hard to get an A, but it is harder to get a C”, which we took to mean it is not a great place for slackers.
Princeton and Columbia looked promising in terms of rigor. I expected Columbia to be a shoo-in for her early application, because of its rigor and because she loves big cities in general, and NYC in particular. But there were incidents that year that showed her that Columbia was too liberal for her (which is saying something because D is quite liberal). Princeton seemed like a good fit on paper as well, but was scratched off almost immediately due to its rural location.
So UChicago earned her early application because it was rigorous, in a major city, strong in many areas (her intended major was Neuroscience) and its letter on “No trigger warnings” was a welcome difference relative to Columbia. There are students from her high school cohort that are happily attending Harvard and Princeton, but I think Harvard ended up as my D’s #6 choice, and Princeton was off her list. Now after a couple of years of college, my D can’t think of a better place for her than UChicago, and due to the rigor and high expectations has learned what she is really capable of.
^ Agree with #330. Will add that HYPS offers SCEA because they can get away with doing so (perhaps they’d offer ED but for the obviously bad press coverage they would receive?). It’s not as restrictive as ED, but it’s not EA either.
"The ED “contract” is really an option the applicant grants to the college: If you exercise your option, I’ll attend for the price you set, without negotiating that price further.
"What is the college bound to do, what is it paying for that option? Umm, give you an answer (which may be “we don’t want to give you an answer yet”) by a certain date.
-Yes - so far no different from any other college application . . . .
“And implicitly – but never explicitly, never verified, and usually actually denied – to be somewhat more willing to accept you than if it reviewed your application as part of the mass of RD applications. That doesn’t sound so equal to me.”
However, with SCEA they DEFINTELY make clear that your chances are no better by applying early. At least Yale does. So . . . you forego early at any other school, including UChicago, in order to have the same consideration as you would have had in the regular round. That doesn’t sound so equal to me, either.
“EA is a much more equal deal. The college has a choice whether to grant the applicant an option to attend. If it does grant the option, it has the opportunity to market to that applicant in a really focused way.”
In reality, there are far fewer selective colleges for the teeming hordes who apply to them. They will ALWAYS be at a significant advantage and that impacts stuff like merit or other enticements. ED removes “price” from the equation. For those who don’t want to bargain on price, it’s a fine contract. For others, it’s not - they are uncomfortable with having no bargaining power there. Obviously, practically speaking families have little to no bargaining power over price at any top elite institution, and they can theoretically walk away, but for a good number that option is simply out of the picture. Instead they will appeal their aid and work with the school, just like with an ED admission. ED merely states in the open what most are doing in practice with EA/SCEA. It’s not for everyone, of course. But many appreciate its raw honesty.
“Students from our high school at Harvard report it is easier than high school. My nephew, a Yale graduate, reported it was very easy to skate through college there as well. And before others jump in to defend Yale and Harvard, it is not that they don’t have very capable and hard working students, as they clearly do. It is that these colleges don’t demand much, so it requires its students to be self-motivated which my D was not (at the time). I often repeat my nephew’s quote re Yale: “It can be hard to get an A, but it is harder to get a C”, which we took to mean it is not a great place for slackers.”
Now, that’s a story that makes sense to me. (#333)
@JBStillFlying I’m familiar with Dietrich. My daughter went to college fully intending to pursue a career as a writer. She was interested in the Creative Writing program at CMU, and had a number of friends (and faculty) there she had met through doing Pennsylvania kid-writer stuff in high school. (CMU’s Creative Writing program, by the way, is objectively very high quality – light years beyond what Chicago offered when I knew what Chicago offered.)
I stand by what I said: 180 degrees. Maybe not that different if you intend to major in Economics or Applied Math of some sort, but you won’t be reading any Marx or Weber, and you won’t be having lunch with any Anthropology or Classics majors, because they don’t exist. Compare the syllabus of Dietrich’s one-semester general education required course in social science vs. the SOSC offerings at Chicago, and consider that only Dietrich students will be taking those courses anyway.
I’m not saying Dietrich is bad, by the way. It probably looks more like the future of humanities and social sciences in undergraduate education in the U.S. than Chicago does. But it is laser-focused on “tools,” and fundamentally abandons any concept of common cultural knowledge, either within a field or among fields.
As for ED standards: I believe I can find some statement by practically every school to the effect that they apply the same standards ED that they do RD, except for some deviations like Penn’s, which says it only takes legacy status into account for ED applications. Universally, as far as I know, they explain their high ED admission rates as reflecting a stronger applicant pool. No one believes them, but that’s what they say.
@JHS - not that this matters after two years, but UChicago was my D’s reach, CMU her match, and UW-Madison her safety (we get reciprocity which left serious money for grad school if that turned out to be her best option).
Her interest: History and Economics. She would have been exposed to Marx/Weber (not that she would have been any more thrilled at that prospect than she was at Chicago LOL), and we compared syllabi very closely.
My son - UChicago class of '23 - also visited CMU/Deitrich overnight and loved it. Definitely would have been thrilled to be admitted. His interest: Poly Sci and History.
Perhaps Deitrich has revamped a bit since your kids’ time.
All schools have differences in focus, structure, etc. My kids were looking for a serious education and CMU fit the bill. And - just as an FYI - the College at UChicago is getting a bit more “tool’y” and “applied” itself. As for “common cultural knowledge”, the Core’s newest offerings at least sound like they are broadening that concept a bit.
If I step away from this freight train of a thread I find it has arrived in a different county by the time I step back. I do want to protest, however, @JHS 's ascription to me at #328 of a belief in Chicago’s “academic superiority” over the peer schools. Nor do I take it as a given that a talented kid coming to Chicago is simply seeking out “the most-prestigious world-class university in the region” but would otherwise, if I was being honest, be seeking out HYPS. That whole prestige and pecking-order way of thinking is really quite anathema to me. I harbor the quaint belief that schools have different characters and cultures and that in making a choice among them a kid ought to be focussed on finding the one closest to his own personality and aspirations, where he can flourish on his own terms and where he can meet like-minded fellows. Prestige comes into all this, more for some than for others, and there are different sorts of prestige, but I very much deplore the whole ranking and tier-constructing model, wherever Chicago might fit in to it. That’s middle-brow stuff. Many kids are the captives of it, but it doesn’t require any bending of honesty on my part to imagine kids who are not.
“As for ED standards: I believe I can find some statement by practically every school to the effect that they apply the same standards ED that they do RD, except for some deviations like Penn’s, which says it only takes legacy status into account for ED applications. Universally, as far as I know, they explain their high ED admission rates as reflecting a stronger applicant pool. No one believes them, but that’s what they say.”
“If you’ve done good college research and would be thrilled to land at Northwestern next fall, then Early Decision (ED) could be a good option for you. Applicants who choose ED send a strong, positive message to Northwestern. Given early applicants’ high level of interest, and the academic and personal strength we see across our early pool, our ED acceptance rate is typically higher than that of Regular Decision (RD). As with all traditional ED plans, you agree to withdraw all applications at other colleges and enroll at Northwestern if admitted.”
In reality, the admit rate is higher because fewer apply. In UChicago’s case, ED1 is the largest group of admits so that further increases the admit rate. However, ED admit rates have been declining as well and it makes no sense to waste an application going ED (you can only have one outstanding per application period) unless you really have done the research. Anyone looking primarily at getting a bump at a top school will likely be very disappointed. So strength of the applicant pool is going to be a key factor.
As admit rates continue to decline in general, more top kids might be opting for ED at their top school (like what happened at UChicago with the Class of '21) just to avoid the headache of trying to stand out among tens of thousands of others. ED allows you to get right to the point: you will attend if accepted. That’s a very strong message for a place like UChicago, especially as it does consider itself a tad “different” from other (not all) top places in terms of academic rigor and pace of learning.