• Major scholarship funds were used to achieve even greater gains in diversity, and as such:
o First to college students reached an all-time high.
o Children of police, fire fighters, emergency workers, and teachers reached an all-time high.
OP do you have numbers for either of these? Meaning how many first to college students accepted and how many first-responded children (national as well as Chicago) students were accepted? Any intel on CPS accepted children?
marlowe1, super point.
I believe you are correct that the typical student from Texas is likely from a major urban population center. I will endeavor to look into this more in years to come.
Thus far my casual observation shows top sources as St John’s in Houston (incredibility well-endowed private school founded after WW2 to provide Texans the equivalent of New England boarding school education) and very wealthy public schools with the state’s top sports programs like Westlake High in Austin. My sense is that the sources in New York and California probably show similar patterns—i.e. that major urban centers produce most of Chicago students from those states.
I believe your question is particularly interesting as I would like a measure of rural/farm sources for students from each of Texas, New York and California as these locations are likely more similar than we may think.
The context of Texas at 100 students vs. say New York at 250 students is particularly interesting due to the relative size and direction of the states. New York is the 4th largest in the USA at 19 mm and shrinking. Texas is the 2nd largest in the USA at 30 mm and growing. While Texas is 58% larger than New York, it produces 60% fewer students Chicago matriculants.
My sense is there is massive upside to Texas in next decade for Chicago. There is also a development angle as the level of wealth in Texas is massive and expanding rapidly. The opposite trend is happening in New York (although most of wealth is going to Florida vs. Texas). The largest donation in Chicago history created the Booth School of Business, ranked #1 by USNWR last year ($350mm). David Booth moved his company from California to Texas some years ago. Recently, similar moves to Texas were made quietly a very large spinoffs of Blackstone, and by a family office of a Blackstone founders. These are development prospects in Texas that can change the direction of Chicago students with financial needs for the next century.
There are two major challenges that face Chicago in recruiting Texas, The subtleties are different than the typical cross admit battle vs Harvard and Stanford for a top northern city prospect.
The first challenge relates to the near unlimited resources of the state university system. With an endowment second only to Harvard, and likely to surpass Harvard due to the trends discussed above in decades to come, Texas students see a UT degree as “almost as good” as Harvard, Chicago, Stanford if they want to stay in Texas. One certainty about Texas is they are a.) the most hospitable folks I have ever encountered when you visit them and b.) they love their state more than anyplace I ever visited or lived.
The second challenge is from Rice—major endowment, elite academic reputation, warm weather in a super nice neighborhood—kind of like the Northwestern of Texas.
Chicago has it work cut out in Texas if it wants to continue to make deliberate and consistent progress in the Longhorn state. Stanford, Harvard and Chicago will all be quite an adjustment for a Texas high school graduate, but my sense is that Chicago will make Texas kids feel the most welcome vs. Harvard and Stanford, and in the long term, this will make a difference.
@JBStillFlying
Interesting and entertaining thought! A quick internet search shows Boyer to be born in Illinois, but Zimmer to be born in NY…
This makes it sound like Texas kids are barely known at Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford. I’m not so sure about Chicago, but there are plenty of Texans running around Harvard and Stanford, and I knew a bunch of them at Yale, too. They didn’t seem to feel unwelcome; in fact they seemed to enjoy themselves plenty. Some Texans at those schools got a little famous. You remember the 43rd President? The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court? Perry Richardson Bass and his sons?
It’s true that UT and TAMU are strong competition, especially for kids who want to stay in Texas. That’s great.
As for urban vs. rural kids – 85% of Texas’ population is urban or suburban, not rural. Texas’ self-image is tied to its wide-open spaces, but its reality is Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio . . .
“U Chicago will once again have an incoming class with the highest average standardized test scores in the USA.”
Pfffft. Uh, NO
@BronxBorn,
Caltech in Pasadena and MIT in Boston have the classes with the highest scores.
check your facts first before you post obviously erroneous info.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
I’ll just “suggest” that there be no debate on this subtopic, because both quotes above assume facts not in evidence. This is an apples and oranges comparison (also, IMO, one that needs to be filed under "Big Whoop’). While UChicago and Caltech report a 25-75% SAT (and the midway point is not necessarily the median or mean), MIT does not. MIT, and many of its peers, reports a 25-75% SAT M and a 25-75% SAT EBRW, which cannot simply be added together to get an accurate composite, despite what Prepscholar seems to think.
Wealthy kids from Texas and all the southern states have been going off forever to ivy league schools. What is really new here is that Texas kids are now going to Chicago to the tune of a hundred a year: that’s around 6 per cent of the entering class. And it looks like there is room to grow, despite the allure that Texas institutions hold for the native born of those parts. This is astounding to me, who was one of three Texas kids in the Chicago class of '67.
It would be interesting to know whether the Chicago-bound Texas kids differ in any significant way from the ivy-bound ones. I have a hunch that there would be significant differences. Chicago might be seen very much as the end of a trail that leads through the heart of the country - the magnet city of the heartland. The ivies belong to a different world of eastern culture, prestige and privilege. So it seemed to me long ago.
The presence in Texas of David Booth and the other guy - the one they named the Department of Economics for - might suggest that there’s some kind of Austin-Chicago axis in the making, whether along the lines I suggest above or merely serendipitous ones. Could the endgame here be to retrieve Big Bertha from UT? Or to constitute the city of Chicago as an outpost of Austin?
You’re right, @JHS , about a certain Texas mythology that romanticizes the wide open spaces, whereas Texas in reality is a pretty urban place these days. However, we live by myths, and urbanity is a relative concept. Those spaces are still to be found in the souls of Texans, even some transplanted ones. People who move to Texas acquire the native accent and taste for barbecue and chicken-fried steak rather quickly. And a lot of Houstonians and Dallasites haven’t been off the farm for very long - or in any event have come from smaller cities and towns of an entirely lesser magnitude. You don’t need a herd of cattle to order up custom-made boots, drink Shiner Bock and find repose of soul in the hill country or the rolling plains.
There is something about the Texas angle. One of my parents’ friends attended the Austin reception. Nondorf was there personally and was flown into Austin on the personal jet of the Kellers… The entire Keller family was there and my parents friends learned that practically all of them attend or have attended Chicago. Someone at the reception told her that three or four years ago, there were barely five to seven students admitted from Austin. This time there were more like 20 at the reception. At least in Austin the admit group was split in three, rich ED kids from suburban schools, diversity admits and this year there was the military Admit angle. That aligns well with the significant bump in the reported admits from Texas.
Not sure why it’s happening. Just reporting what we were told.
Kellers and Griffins are Chicago families, however - are they not? Or are we talking the Austin branch of those families?
As long as any school is offering ED 1, ED 2, EA, RD, R2D2 ?, merit scholarships and National Merit Scholarships, they are still insecure. They know if they showed nonchalant behavior like Stanford or Harvard by going EA and no merit, their artificially inflated castle will instantly deflate.
I’m surprised no one mentioned a salient fact: Chicago is now as selective (acceptance rate-wise) as Yale (Nondorf’s alma mater, who supposedly didn’t offer him the head post). It’s fairly incredible that Chicago is now firmly in such rarefied air re the acceptance rate (e.g., right with HYPS and Columbia).
Also, @HydeSnark said the cross admit data is pretty meaningless, but schools do chart this information pretty carefully. It seems pretty important to schools to figure this info out. Check out p. 20 of this Stanford Senate report on cross-admit data:
https://stanford.app.box.com/s/jkwh18y9s8ba2u8hqsx3
Even though the number of students who turn down Stanford is pretty small (maybe only 500-800 a year, max), the school carefully tracks where students go. It’s also especially important to schools to track this data over time.
I’d love to see what Chicago’s RD cross-admit data looks like. My hunch is HYPS still eats our lunch, but they don’t gut punch us the way they used to (e.g., where, years back, I remember an ad comm rep telling me, glumly, only 4% of cross-admits chose Chicago over Yale).
@Cue7 Ha! I think this supports my point. They are making meaning from noise here. I don’t think we’re dealing with statisticians here, they don’t even record the number of observations. The rates swung up and down with no clear pattern within the span of a few years. I find it extremely difficult to believe that the admissions office of Stanford and Princeton was doing anything different between admission in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and yet the cross admit rate swung from 63% to under 50% and back up to 64%. The swings with Yale and MIT are even more pronounced. Admittedly, I think Harvard and Princeton do show a clear pattern year-over-year: Stanford “wins” most cross admits with Princeton and “loses” most cross admits with Harvard, but you really can’t draw any definite conclusion from Yale and MIT. Clearly, it depends on the whims of the cross admits.
One thing is clear though. Reading too much into year-over-year swings is basically one step removed from haruspicy. And this is 10 year old data! Things are probably even more random now - admission rates are much lower, across the board, and the emphasis has shifted into early (binding or not) programs that must significantly reduce cross the numbers of cross admits. If Stanford was seeing cross-admit rates between 10% and 27% with other elite schools in 2010, I would be shocked if UChicago is seeing cross admit rates of more than 5% with any elite school today.
@CupCakeMuffins Harvard and Stanford offer SCEA not EA. Although applicants are not bound by SCEA, there is nothing nonchalant about SCEA. It is extremely difficult for the recipient of SCEA acceptance to gain acceptance to a “peer” school in RD round. SCEA is every bit about yield protection as ED.
The relentless marketing from U of Chicago seems to be paying off.
This simply isn’t true. In my kids’ cohorts (when I had lots of information about where a lot of kids were admitted), only some SCEA admits treated it like an ED acceptance. Many didn’t. My kids’ friends (plus one relative) included 5 Harvard SCEA admits, 3 Yales, and 4 Stanfords. Of those 12 kids, only four didn’t apply to other colleges RD, and of the 8 who did, all 8 received at least one acceptance from one of the other two. In fact, at least 6 (and maybe all 8) were accepted RD at all of the others to which they applied. Three chose to attend a college other than their SCEA college (one Harvard → Yale, one Yale → Harvard, one Stanford → Michigan with full tuition branded scholarship).
Note that there was an important difference between the kids who applied elsewhere and the ones who didn’t. Seven of the eight who played the field were public-school students, many (not all) of them looking for the best financial deal. The four who didn’t were all students at private schools where there was a fair amount of peer (and adviser) pressure to treat an SCEA acceptance as if it were ED
What is true is that, by accepting over half of its class ED, Chicago is limiting the number of cross-admits with peer schools in its pool of accepted students. I agree with skieurope: If a decade ago Stanford’s cross-admit rates with other top colleges were that small, Chicago’s cross-admit rates today with the same colleges must be much smaller. Stanford back then was accepting about the same number of applicants Chicago does today, but none of them were bound not to apply elsewhere.
@jhs If your observation of your kids’ cohorts were generalizable, wouldn’t SCEA schools simply offer EA?
@BronxBorn 's info sounded pretty authoritative to me. He must have a pipeline of some sort. His dope on cross-admits was that Chicago is thrashing the lower ivies, possibly even besting Yale, and holding its own against Harvard, Stanford and MIT - winning in some areas of the country and in some fields, losing in others, with the trend “moving strongly in Chicago’s favor”. Given the gravitational pull of the two coasts, of the magic of Silicon Valley (in the case of Stanford), of centuries of dominance, prestige, money and elite culture (in the case of the ivies), that’s saying something for a school on the south side of Chicago where fun, if it no longer comes to expire entirely, is kept on short rations.
It’s the whole point of test optional is so students with low test scores don’t submit?
@HydeSnark +1 for referencing haruspicy
@Marlowe1 I don’t doubt that the admissions office thinks there’s a pattern, I just don’t trust their ability to tell without hard numbers.
@JHS Even if everyone who applies SCEA applied to every other elite school, as more and more students (proportionally) are admitted early instead of regular, it will reduce the cross-admit rates since it becomes more difficult to gain admission to elite schools in the regular round. This is what has tended to happen since schools will admit the same number of students early vs regular even as the total number of regular applications increases faster than the total number of early applications, which decreases the relative regular decision acceptance rate. That is why I think even the increased importance on non-binding early admissions programs (even non-restrictive ones) has probably reduced cross-admit rates.