@DeepBlue86 For what it’s worth, Northeastern guarantees housing for 4 years. In my experience, about 50% or so stay on campus after their second year.
Sorry, Cue, but I like my authorities to have aged by a century or two, if not a millennium or two. If I must choose between Professor Nirenberg and the Greeks, I’ll take the wisdom of them who brung us the gifts in the first place.
As you know I am reconciled to the improvements touted in the article but do not see them as the unalloyed good you do - well, they are good for someone like that old student who was the article’s centrepiece, a fellow who had been rejected by all the ivies and ended up unhappy at Chicago because it lacked the ivy atmosphere. It has been my repetitive point here that the best way to solve the problem of disaffection that article describes is to eliminate these unsuitable types before they arrive and curdle. But, if you are asking for trade-offs, that’s the one I see - I.e. between an amelioration of the campus culture to make it more endurable to these types and not taking that process so far or so uncritically as to lose the essential nature of the place as the un-ivy. The jury is out on that, so I’m not yet ready to utter a cheer, much less become a cheerleader, for Zimmer, Boyer, Nondorf and the gang. I admit, however, I do like the way the last of these gets up the nose of the UCDS crew.
Point of information: Chicago only stopped disclosing its early admission numbers with the high school class of 2015 (college class of 2019), well into the Nondorf era. Before that, they disclosed both early applications and early admissions in a timely fashion.
In 2014, the last year in which they disclosed numbers, they admitted 1,350 students EA and 950 RD, out of 27,500 applicants (over 11,000 EA). Their 8.4% overall admission rate was higher only than HYPSM and Columbia. (They went lower than MIT the next year, and hit 30,000 applicants for the first time.) In the previous decade, with the old, unrestricted, fully disclosed EA program, they had more than tripled the number of applications received each year, and reduced the admission rate from ~33% to below 8%, while expanding the class size. It didn’t serve the university badly.
@JHS #422 is very informative. These figures suggest 1. Uchicago does not need to have ED in order to look “selective” or convince the accepted applicants to commit and 2. ED was not introduced to simply keep acceptance rate super low and yield rate super high. It is possible, however, that ED may have shifted aid money from merit to need based applicants.
@DeepBlue86 at #415 I have no issue with CG or who wears that brand for whatever reason they choose. I’d also caution all of us from drawing neat and tidy conclusions about someone based on their outerwear. For all anyone knows, some kid’s modest income family might have scraped together the dough to purchase one fancy item as a grad gift.
My original observation was to follow up on CU’s point. It’s important to understand that different cultures are on campus. That is not a judgement about those cultures. I did my college in a very multicultural environment including a good number of non western international students from all over. It’s definitely true that different viewpoints about wealth are included in cultural distinctions. Nowhere did I ever indicate that one culture is “vulgar,” and to state that inference is as offbase as it is parochial.
@Cue7 you and I don’t share the same criticisms. Any one of them can be turned into a brag by the person NOT viewing it as a criticism LOL.
Ex: they don’t disclose their early decision rate (Bad) = UChicago encourages ED applicants who truly view the school as first choice, just like their webpage says (good).
Looks like the lack of disclosure on early admit rates must have started with Nondorf. When I began following the UChicago threads, that information for class of ‘20 was disclosed to the admitted only. Do we have any evidence that Nondorf started this more recently than 2010 or so? Haven’t looked. And now other unis are following the trend. Predict an even greater number to follow as admit rates continue to fall. Hold on to that stomach!
@surelyhuman what’s interesting is that UChicago has been touting “critical thinking” since I was on campus in the 80’s - and likely well before that. That explains some of its history as a maverick and at times counter to strong political winds. It’s even gotten the school into trouble on occasion. Totally agree that a false narratives type may not fit, although I disagree that they are not interchangeable - for the intellectually honest, there should be some overlap, IMO.
Just read @JHS at 422. Helpful to have that history. Didn’t realize they admitted a majority early back then. Looks like they have favored early over regular for a number of years now.
If I remember correctly, that was the year they first handed out a clear majority of acceptances early. It was something of a shock. The EA acceptances were probably yielding a majority of the enrolled class by the class of '14 or '15.
Here’s what I could find easily:
College Class 2014: EA: 5,855 applied, 1,676 accepted RD: 13,485 applied, 1,963 accepted
College Class 2015: EA: 6,960 applied, 1,400 accepted RD: 14,802 applied, 2,139 accepted
College Class 2016: EA: 8,698 applied, 1,532 accepted RD: 16,579 applied, 1,812 accepted
College Class 2017: EA: 10,317 applied, 1,380 accepted RD: 20,052 applied, 1,296 accepted
College Class 2018: EA: 11,143 applied, 1,351 accepted RD: 16,360 applied, 953 accepted
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
LOL, that horse keeled over 25 pages ago,
From what I can tell of discussions on cc about UChicago and what my son tells me of discussions on the UChicago campus, the old slogan about where fun goes to die really should be changed. There’s enough fun on campus, it’s just that all the horses are beaten to death, so the slogan should be “where horses go to die”
Narrator: It was the Night King’s horse.
@JBStillFlying in post #424:
I am still confused - how is not disclosing any stats on ED good? How can that relate to the reason behind the ED policy (that, at any U., seeks students who rank the U. #1)? How can obfuscation be turned into a brag?
If your kids went through this process recently, I don’t know how the lack of information could be good.
@marlowe1 - I am also confused: what, exactly, is a “non-ivy”? What are the qualities you’d find at Chicago that wouldn’t be found at some of its peers?
What’s described in the article (link again provided below) is a Chicago (in the 70s) that provided a first rate, intense education, but didn’t offer support to students in other ways (read: a Dean that was not supportive of students taking a leave of absence, little career guidance, little time given to the powerful applicability of a great education). Chicago’s purpose is to cultivate and educate the very best intellects/talents out there. It can’t do that suitably unless it provides ample auxiliary supports. It’s the auxiliary stuff that’s being amplified now.
Actually Nondorf or another host at the Parent Reception (don’t recall his name, think he’s German) made the joke that UChicago is no longer where fun comes to die, but rather the place where you can have just enough fun. He got a good laugh from the audience out of that one.
And while written stats are hard to find on acceptance rates, they are briefly discussed at information sessions and receptions (eg 50% of class admitted ED, 7 percent acceptance rate for ED1/EA with 15k applications, 35k total applications with 5.9 acceptance etc)
@Cue7 , at the risk of getting a little over-serious again and commencing to beat on that many-times-dead nag, I have to insist on the correct terminology: the U of C is the “un-ivy”, not the “non-ivy”. I call it that largely because of the history you know well enough - kids not wealthy or glamorous enough; sports nearly non-existent; e-c’s not a big deal; prestige lacking, especially in the east; test scores and gpa’s good but not great; kids studious and introspective. All of which, in those that loved the place, were either not negatives at all or were richly made up for by - intensity and quality of curriculum and teaching; the egalitarian ethos of the student body; the sense of being in this thing together brought about by some of those deprivations as well as by the common frame of reference and discourse created by the Core; and perhaps most important of all, the kind of kids the place drew, who had the aspiration of figuring out the meaning of things aided by “the best that has been thought and said”. Going on to the next step of making a living was something we all knew we were going to do, but that was not why we came to this place.
I’m not dead against the auxiliary things, but I can never bring myself to love them as I loved the things that were and I trust still are the main event. As @JHS will remind us, those aspirations existed among certain kids and subgroups at the ivies as well, but that is not quite the same as a college with a general gestalt that fosters these things and almost everyone in some way participates in. That gestalt made the College of the University of Chicago more than the sum of its parts.
We both might as well admit that what I loved and thrived on was something you took as bitter medicine. You therefore want to see it extirpated root and branch, whereas I entertain the hope of its continuation. But I ask you, Cue, does the world really need another ivy? Or does it need the University of Chicago to keep faith with its own historical mission and vision?
@JHS at #426: Those are huge jumps in the EA application numbers! What are your thoughts as to why? Early is only really starting to catch on now for other top elites (similar jumps were announced by at least a few this year).
@Cue7 at #430: the “brag” would be that UChicago has pity on the poor souls who would otherwise waste their time and their early chip by confusing admission rates for personal chances. Perhaps another “brag” is that UChicago wants to devote appropriate time and resources to those who declare the university to be their first choice, and doesn’t wish to waste time on those merely seeking an “easier” path into a top university. Presumably a good number of the latter are frustrated away from the application process by lack of statistics.
– Does the world really need another Ivy?
Based on demand, the answer seems to be that it needs several more. Princeton and Yale have expanded class size by over 500 slots, and admission rates keep going down. Stanford and Duke became Ivy equivalents. Prior to James Nondorf’s arrival, the market was already busily turning Chicago into another Ivy simply by kids recognizing that it was an awful lot like the Ivies in qualities they cared about – which are largely the qualities you care about, plus its actual stellar reputation in the kind of circles where degree pedigree matters. Take a look at Johns Hopkins’ admissions data, Northwestern, WashU. People are paying bribes to get into USC! Even if it were doing nothing in response, Chicago would be getting swept up in the tsunami.
The demand for more Ivies is overwhelming!
Unfortunately for you, @marlowe1 , Chicago is uniquely well positioned to meet that demand, because, well, apart from some mainly positive cultural idiosyncrasies, it is barely distinguishable from its closest Ivy peers in areas that matter. Really, it can keep almost everything about its culture you love, because none of that is inconsistent with the core of it’s essential Ivy-equivalence.
(As a side note, I understand your nostalgia for a college almost completely lacking in employment consciousness. However, no place is home to pure intellectualism unsullied by practicality anymore. That was possible in a world where a college graduate could get a decent, interesting, entry-level professional job that paid the equivalent of a couple years of tuition, room, and board. Had I not gone to law school, my first job out of college would have paid close to my entire college COA not covered by my NMS. My children’s first jobs out of college paid about 0.7 x their average annual COA, and for one of them that included a second, part-time job. And they were lucky!)
@JBStillFlying The early applications were exploding because Chicago’s popularity was exploding and itis EA program was a great, applicant-friendly “deal”, as long as you didn’t have your heart set on applying SCEA somewhere.
“-- Does the world really need another Ivy? Based on demand, the answer seems to be that it needs several more. Princeton and Yale have expanded class size by over 500 slots, and admission rates keep going down. Stanford and Duke became Ivy equivalents. Prior to James Nondorf’s arrival, the market was already busily turning Chicago into another Ivy simply by kids recognizing that it was an awful lot like the Ivies in qualities they cared about – which are largely the qualities you care about, plus its actual stellar reputation in the kind of circles where degree pedigree matters. Take a look at Johns Hopkins’ admissions data, Northwestern, WashU. People are paying bribes to get into USC! Even if it were doing nothing in response, Chicago would be getting swept up in the tsunami.”
- Let's hope people aren't paying bribes to get into USC because that's what goes on at some Ivies LOL.
Certainly the demand suggests that the world could use more top universities. But while all universities might strive be “Ivy-selective”, I’m not sure all of them strive to be “Ivies” (unless by “Ivy” is meant merely the gold standard for selectivity). There are a bunch of schools that surpass some of the Ivies in terms of niche academic offerings at the undergraduate level (Stanford, JHU, NU, USC come to mind, as do several others. P should be noted for its excellent engineering program). Others - UChicago and some top LAC’s - are noted for rigorous academics and a culture of intelectualism and inquisitiveness (hence the reputation for “quirkiness”). In contrast, Harvard and Yale are known primarily for being Harvard and Yale. The classes aren’t considered overly-taxing, and those wishing to excel in some academic areas are best off elsewhere. Certainly they do attract bright kids, high achievers and lots of charismatic “leaders” who will go places. But they don’t necessarily stand out among other top universities when it comes to plain ole’ academics.
“(As a side note, I understand your nostalgia for a college almost completely lacking in employment consciousness. However, no place is home to pure intellectualism unsullied by practicality anymore. That was possible in a world where a college graduate could get a decent, interesting, entry-level professional job that paid the equivalent of a couple years of tuition, room, and board. Had I not gone to law school, my first job out of college would have paid close to my entire college COA not covered by my NMS. My children’s first jobs out of college paid about 0.7 x their average annual COA, and for one of them that included a second, part-time job. And they were lucky!)”
-This might have a lot more to do with the job opportunities awaiting a Yale grad than reveal a time trend for starting salaries, unless everyone was offered the same job in the same location.
I’ve noticed a two-stage message coming out of the College: 1) Career Advancement / UCI can help you arrive at some options that work for your professional interests, regardless of major; and 2) therefore, you can explore your intellectual interests to the fullest. Not sure it’s necessary to choose between “intellectualism” or “practicality”. However, one area that seems to be ignored entirely nowadays is the option to pursue an academic graduate degree, so perhaps one has to sacrifice the pursuit of “pure intellectualism” or deal with a lack of support to help with the next steps. However, somehow I doubt this is truly the case; more likely those pursuits take place with the assistance of an academic/major advisor or mentor, rather than anything overseen by Nondorf.
“@JBStillFlying The early applications were exploding because Chicago’s popularity was exploding and itis EA program was a great, applicant-friendly “deal”, as long as you didn’t have your heart set on applying SCEA somewhere.”
- This makes sense. Also, despite the rapidly declining early admit rate, it was still sizably higher than RD (even not counting in deferrals). And that's always going to drive a whole lot of subsequent applications! Perhaps this explosion in early apps. is what prompted Admissions to turn to ED. Interestingly, the increase has only continued, as five years later they are up to something like 15,000.
“Unfortunately for you, @marlowe1 , Chicago is uniquely well positioned to meet that demand, because, well, apart from some mainly positive cultural idiosyncrasies, it is barely distinguishable from its closest Ivy peers in areas that matter. Really, it can keep almost everything about its culture you love, because none of that is inconsistent with the core of it’s essential Ivy-equivalence.”
- This "Ivy Theory of Selectivity" seems off to me. Like the more selective or "higher quality" you get, the closer you approach to "Ivy Equivalence". I believe there are probably at least 2400 ED1's by now who would beg to differ.
I can really only speak to the culture of the College in a past era, when not only I but every kid at Chicago and every kid at every ivy believed Chicago to to be a very different sort of place, with a different sort of student body and a different educational philosophy. Sounds like Cue believed that as recently as the nineties. The SES stats show that even a decade ago there were very significant differences. Now in your telling and virtually overnight it has become “barely distinguishable from its closest ivy peers”.
Could be. How would I know from my distant perch in time and space? These are subjective judgments fraught with raging confirmation bias, if not outright advocacy. I devoutly desire that no such uniformity and homogeneity will have overtaken and stifled all that was original at the College I loved. Perhaps you are predisposed to wish for the contrary: you enjoyed your Yale experience, and it is natural for you to think that the world needs more of what Yale gave you.
Differences can be significant without being absolute. I can hardly say that your assessment is wrong, much as I would wish it to be wrong. However, Steven Pinker’s description of ec-obsessed and class-cutting Harvard College students doesn’t sound much like anything I can imagine at Chicago. Is it really true that Chicago students are no more serious about their studies than these Harvard kids? Could be, but I have read many descriptions on this board - both of Chicago and the peer schools - that don’t suggest this at all.
And all these bright high school kids filling up the application bins at all the top schools - are they all really seeking only a single model, HYS or P if they can get them, otherwise the next best? That hardly seems right to me as a matter of simple human observation. There are too many disparate kinds of personality and intelligence in the world, each seeking the great good place sympatico with his or her own talents and energies. Brown is a perfectly fine school, but are its students therefore interchangeable with Chicago’s?
What we really need here is a good piece of investigative reporting by an acute and non-axe-grinding observer (in short, neither you nor me!) who would actually embed himself in a dozen or so colleges and report in virtually anthropological terms the character of each of these tribes. Short of that, some on this board have made observations based on their experience at multiple institutions. I hardly ever recollect anyone saying that Chicago is “virtually indistinguishable” from Princeton or Yale or Harvard. But maybe I hear only what I want to hear.
@marlowe1 - i’m saying this only slightly tongue in cheek: if Penn is the social ivy, duke is the basketball ivy, and Princeton is (as Michelle obama proclaims) the iviest of ivies, how about if Chicago is the “Academic Ivy”? Would that mollify you in any way?
@JBStillFlying - i’m curious again about how not presenting statistics on something as restrictive as ED could be a positive, but i can’t seem to gain any clarity from you about that. And no, I don’t think it’s good that Columbia followed suit.
“I hardly ever recollect anyone saying that Chicago is “virtually indistinguishable” from Princeton or Yale or Harvard. But maybe I hear only what I want to hear.”
- Well, I seem to recall a tee shirt in the Bookstore many years ago that read "Harvard - The University of Chicago of the East." Or something like that. Was UChicago known to be The Harvard of the Midwest? If so I missed that. I've been with people who tried to name drop something about the top Ivy's on the Chicago campus before and they were typically met with indifference. People - at least in the grad schools - seemed to care more about what you've done in the field than where you came from. That fact was always a central aspect of the place - to me anyway.