Just finished a two day admitted student visit. I intentionally looked for current and admitted students wearing Canada Goose jackets (it was cold and rainy). I saw very few. However, I saw plenty of moms carrying their LV Neverfulls. You could tell there was financial privilege there if you purposely looked at shoes, purses, and jewelry, but it wasn’t over the top or in your face. You had to know what you were looking for or at. Mostly just a bunch of happy, excited kids.
@DeepBlue86 I can never understand why posters assume all the Ivy League schools are identical, that they are some how homogenized, when in fact they are mostly quite different from each other. Maybe you mean a specific school inside the Ivy League, it seems a lot like Columbia but still with significant differences.
It’s too warm for Canada Goose right now, even by the standards of non-midwesterners. If you wore a Canada Goose jacket at any point in the last 3 weeks, you would burn up - those things are built for <10 degrees and windy, not a slightly chilly and rainy spring day.
Still, there is plenty of conspicuous consumption, if you look closely.
This is a chicago thread, after all, so I have to ask @JBStillFlying and PepperJo, as a litmus test for what I remember from Chicago:
Where are the students wearing capes, the students who clearly don’t shower, the students who still carry around blankeys (blankets) wtih them, the students who can’t really talk to other humans and prefer talking to machines, the students who try to look Amish because they think it’s cool, the students who dress in oshkosh for adults?
All these students were noticeable (and memorable) to me when I visited, more than a generation ago.
Where did all the weirdness go? You all talk of happy shiny excited students, but I haven’t heard about any weirdness. Am i missing something?
(Also, JBStill, pay attn to the maroon article about canada goose. It’s not important if kids are flaunting it - it’s important that it’s there, and is noticed.)
@PepperJo I had to look up what a LV Neverfill was. Had never heard of it. Didn’t notice any last week, but wasn’t looking either. However, Louis Vuitton is an easy logo to spot so I’m surprised I missed it.
This wouldn’t necessarily correlate with a “wealth disparity” between the two visit dates, but I also wonder if Easter Triduum had an impact. This week’s Overnight was over Holy Thurs/Good Friday so many practicing Catholics and other Christians may have opted for last week. On the other hand, Catholic high schools would be out during Good Friday, so you’d miss only one day of class if you attended this week.
My experience in the last few years is that CG cladded U of C students start to show up just before Christmas break but they pretty much disappear by early March. Time to change to spring look for the fashionably dressed ones 
@Cue7 They’re hiding in their rooms or in class, probably. All those tropes of students are still around at UChicago, and I don’t think they’re going to go away anytime soon.
I know this statement gets met with a lot of gasps of incredulity, but the fourth years I met as a first year and the fourth years I met as a first year really aren’t particularly different in terms of the sort of weird factor you refer to, taken as a group. Archetypical subcultures are very hard to kill, and as @DeepBlue86 has pointed out, in an extremely roundabout way, the “ivy-leaguing” of UChicago is unlikely to get rid of these students, because they exist at every elite school!
@Hydesnark - do the first or 2nd years seem different to you than when you were a first or 2nd year?
@Cue7 - we did see a student wearing a cape! But further north of Hyde Park - like somewhere on the north end of Bronzeville. Cosplay/anime/whatever convention, maybe. I don’t know. That’s what it looked like.
@HydeSnark - yeah I don’t think they are dead and gone - and theyll be around for long time - as they are found at any top school (places like vanderbilt and USC included).
But, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “happy and excited” used to describe the Chicago community, up until recently…
@JBStillFlying in some ways (i.e. wealth) - definitely. In other ways (i.e. shocking number of students that don’t know how to shower), no.
“Maybe you mean a specific school inside the Ivy League, it seems a lot like Columbia but still with significant differences.”
I wonder if posters over on the Columbia thread complain about their lack of information for ED. They don’t release number admitted.
@Cue7 I think this is a salient change over the years, students are happier than, say, 20 years ago. But I don’t think that’s much of a bad thing, and it’s orthogonal to a lot of the stuff you’re talking about (like fashion). You can be happy and unfashionable!
Perhaps you misunderstand, @JBStillFlying - my point is that one doesn’t have to look very far, not beyond the front page of the student newspaper, to find evidence of the kind of petty corruption and socioeconomic divisions that some here seem to think are only found elsewhere. And I’m confident that the perception of it has nothing to do with how many Catholics were in evidence on which visiting dates, as you seem to suggest.
This is the deal UChicago made with Nondorf - near-top US News ranking, near-universal acknowledgment of the university as an Ivy peer, very high selectivity and yield and a much more sustainable financial profile in those admitted - but the price is having to make the same kind of trade-offs that the Ivies make.
Nearly 400 replies into this thread, and the capacity for rationalization continues unabated. Just own it. Construct a believable, realistic portrayal of the school that focuses on the strengths but acknowledges the upsides and downsides of the trade-offs. Don’t act like UChicago is a better version of Princeton or Yale, without their issues - no one believes that.
@HydeSnark at #390 - I wonder if that shower issue is due to being (even mildly) on the spectrum.
@DeepBlue - It’s Easter. Peace be with you.
You all make me laugh. It was in the 30s and 40s, and the wind was cold and howling on Friday. Enough to warrant a jacket anyway. There certainly was some quirkiness in behavior and appearance (by my standards anyway), and the enthusiasm by the tour guides and Dean Nondorf was lovely. My daughter knows that Snell-Hitchcock is not the right place for her though. She was rather perplexed and amused by the activities going on in there Thursday night. That should make UChicago diehards pleased.
So the Maroon and we on cc start chattering about evidences of greater wealth on campus - and @DeepBlue86 , Inspector Clouzeau as ever, grandly concludes that Chicago exceptionalism is a fraud and a delusion. I myself am not quite ready to see the end of an era in this soul-searching about the correct quotient of overpriced winter jackets on campus. As others have pointed out - even Blue himself - such an earnest, interminable but also oft-whimsical debate is really unimaginable at the schools where wealth needs no apology.
I’ll take the description of the ethos of this place from young Dylan Hernandez. A boy from those infamous impoverished hinterlands, he is certainly aware of wealth in the background of some of his fellow students. However, his testimony is that on this campus that doesn’t matter to anyone. What matters, as he tells it, is struggle to learn and the curiosity to discover. That’s the same agonistic and egalitarian spirit I myself recall from the bad old days. This kid is the true ur-Chicago article.
Don’t put too much stock in the cliche that the old Chicago made everyone miserable. Almost everyone felt the lash of the hardness of studies, but only those unsuited for such seriousness were made miserable by it, retreated to their rooms and dreamed of what life would have been like for them at Harvard. That will not happen to a kid like Dylan, who has exactly the right stuff for the place.
Aww, @marlowe1 - Inspector Clouseau? My feelings are hurt…
I will, however, concede that UChicago threads tend to bring out my inner Inspector Javert, and life’s too short for that. Blue out.
@DeepBlue - don’t stay away too long. We rah-rahs need a bit of pummeling now and then.