@BronxBorn
Here’s a fun cross-admit: UChicago v U of Texas Plan II. Had my child not been admitted ED to UChicago, this would have been a difficult choice, but I’m sure UChicago would have won out in the end. For the uninitiated, Plan II is a mini UChicago in the midst of the University with an enrollment of apx 150 students per class.
Texas is interesting: v few kids attend boarding schools, the local day schools are top flight (St Marks, Greenhill, and Hockaday in Dallas and St John’s, Kinkaid, John Cooper, and Awty in Houston), phenomenal athletes, and the 6% class ranking legislatively-mandated admit to UT means 1000s and 1000s of imminently qualified kids who fall out of the 6% can’t get into UT, regardless of test scores and ECs. Target Rich Environment to say the least.
The rationale behind limiting applicants to one early application was/is that the colleges involved (plus peers like MIT, Chicago, Georgetown) would likely see their early applications quadruple if they permitted kids to submit EA applications everywhere at once. SCEA was born because Harvard initially experimented with ED, then went to EA, unrestricted except for no simultaneous ED application. It was swamped, with something like 8,000 early applications the first year (an unthinkable number at the time, which I think was the early 90s). So they went with single-choice EA, and that brought the early applications down to a more manageable number.
The SCEA schools do not do a lot of yield protection. They really don’t need to. Their reputation isn’t much affected either way by small changes in their admission rates.
+1. I don’t think I had ever seen that word before.
I agree, by the way, that cross-admits are going down. In my class at Yale, about a quarter of the class had also been accepted at Harvard, and Harvard was generally getting about 60% of the cross-admits at the time. I think the cross-admit level is much, much lower now, although it’s probably significantly higher than the number vs. Stanford, where there are some real differences in the student body.
That said, the daughter of my best friend in high school and college was a 2018 Yale graduate. She was accepted there SCEA when she applied, not that long ago. She applied to four other colleges RD, including Harvard and Princeton, and was accepted at all of them. It still happens.
“The relentless marketing from U of Chicago seems to be paying off.”
@tpike12, Couldn't agree more. Kudos to Jim Nondorf for ignoring the "it simply isn't done, my dear" conventional wisdom that so many "elite" schools followed at the time. Of course, they've all changed their strategy lately, if our household's pile of flyers and e-mails is any indication.
@JHS at #34 - things may have changed with the SCEA admits and the yield. I read earlier this year that while this data isn’t published, the commitment rate is well above 90%. Perhaps this has to do with exactly who is admitted in the early round. Once you subtract out athletes, development, Questbridge and similar, you are left with maybe half of the total group admitted early who truly have the freedom to consider another institution. ED has the technical loophole of financial viability for the family - if it doesn’t work, you are released. The practical result for both SCEA and ED is that those who apply under those plans overwhelmingly view the institution as a first choice.
Their RD commitment rate is something like 70%. Why wouldn’t you expect an even higher rate for a group where you know that college is their first choice, and they are not likely to have a significantly cheaper option at one of the close competitors? (Especially since some of that group are really committed, like Questbridge, some athletes, and true development cases.)
Athletes, Questbridge, and development don’t make up anywhere near half of the SCEA admits at any of these colleges. If your “and similar” includes legacy, maybe you get there. But guess what? In my experience, lots of legacy SCEA admits apply elsewhere. In the group I described above, two of the three kids who ultimately turned down an SCEA admission were legacies at that school.
Agree for SCEA, but less so for ED. For the latter, in many cases it is more like “my first choice among those schools I think I can get in to with the added admissions boost of ED.”
@foosondaughter - anecdotally, those who choose ED for that reason seem to have a harder time getting in. ED is rapidly turning into a way to distinguish your application from the others at your top choice - signalling that you are serious - and just to get a bump at a good school that you’d like to attend. ED doesn’t help if your application doesn’t sing that you have done your homework about whether it’s the right fit.
@JHS, I ran through Yale’s numbers from last year’s admitted class based on estimates on that thread and published information - it did appear that an SCEA applicant who didn’t have those special hooks (yes, legacy was included - sorry I didn’t mention that earlier), had his/her paper chances cut in half. So it’s a large number who are admitted early with some strings attached (or pulled for them). I’m sure plenty of legacy admits apply elsewhere too, but I’m betting a good number of them end up at the family “Alma Mater”. Maybe it’s just the people we know (including a few legacy/benefactors who know the trends). And we live in a middle class suburb in MN and don’t exactly hang around the country club set.
@JHS “The rationale behind limiting applicants to one early application was/is that the colleges involved (plus peers like MIT, Chicago, Georgetown) would likely see their early applications quadruple if they permitted kids to submit EA applications everywhere at once. SCEA was born because Harvard initially experimented with ED, then went to EA, unrestricted except for no simultaneous ED application. It was swamped, with something like 8,000 early applications the first year (an unthinkable number at the time, which I think was the early 90s). So they went with single-choice EA, and that brought the early applications down to a more manageable number.”
You don’t think these schools have the resources to hire a few extra admission officers if they get swamped by a high number of EA applicants? I seriously doubt that the reason you are bringing up is the primary reason why they restrict EAs
I accurately related why they adopted SCEA a generation ago. I’ll concede that the origin of the practice doesn’t necessarily explain its survival. But you are wrong to think it’s only a question of “hiring a few extra admission officers.”
There’s a huge cost to throwing people at the problem. All the selective universities have been required to do that anyway, but I’m sure they aren’t anxious to do even more of it. They pride themselves – maybe too much – on a collaborative, high-quality evaluation and selection process. That really depends on having everyone on the same page as much as possible, and also having a decisionmaking group that isn’t too large to sit around a big table and actually to talk (and to listen) to one another.
The processing time for regular decision applications is just short of three months from deadline to decision. (Lots of applications come in before the deadline, but the early admission practice pretty much ensures that no one looks at an RD application before January.) The processing time for early action from deadline to decision is only six weeks, including Thanksgiving weekend, and those are six weeks in which admissions staffs are still very much engaged with getting RD applications in the door and dealing with applicants’ questions. So, sure, you could hire more staff, but you couldn’t acculturate everyone so that you would get anywhere close to the ideal of having it not matter who read which application, or whether the decisions being made really reflect a meaningful consensus. And there would hardly be enough for them to do in the periods of the year when they were not under intense pressure. (Or, if you hired seasonal admissions workers, they would be very different from your permanent staff.)
“The incoming class will have nearly a dozen full scholarship students who earned veteran status by serving in United States military.” Those would be the UChicago’s first Posse Veterans cohort.
@marlowe1 I think most people would have a hard time believing this unless @BronxBorn shows reliable data. Where is the data to support this? To my knowledge, the best most up-to-date publicly available data on cross admits comes from Parchment (which by the way has a strong midwest representation). This data tells a different story which imo is much more consistent with how the public views all these schools.
According to Parchment, UChicago:
definitely wins only over Cornell
there is a chance it enjoys wins over Dartmouth and Brown
Looks like it loses to or at the very best goes head to head with Columbia and Penn
Loses vs HYPSM
Yale wins 76% of cross admits - 95% CI: (70% ,81%)
MIT wins 74% - CI: (66%, 81%)
Harvard wins 71% - CI: (64%, 77%)
Stanford wins 67% - CI:(59%, 74%)
Princeton wins 61% - CI:(55%, 71%)
Columbia wins 58% - 95% CI: (50%, 67%) so at best-case Chicago is head to head
Penn wins 58% - CI: (50%, 65%) so at best-case Chicago is head to head
Brown wins 53% - CI: (45%, 61%) so there is a chance UChicago could be winning
Dartmouth wins 51% - CI: (43%, 59%) so there is a chance UChicago could be winning
Cornell wins 38% - CI: (32%, 45%) - UChIcago wins this one
If it’s true that Chicago is getting 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 of cross admits with HYPSM, and somewhere between 2- or 3- in-5 with the rest of the Ivies, that’s great news for Chicago, not bad news. Five years ago, or 10 years, the cross-admit numbers wouldn’t have been anywhere near that. Five years from now, Chicago may well look even stronger.
The high school market is a pretty dumb way to gauge a university’s strength. But in the end it IS a market, albeit one that falls awfully far short of having costless information and low transaction costs. If the Chicago undergraduate experience is as high-quality as I think it is, the high school market ought to recognize that, too.
@BronxBorn 's stats are definitely counter-intuitive, @Penn95 . However, Bronx seems like a straight shooter. I don’t want to press him on his sources, but it sounds very much like they are internal out of the Chicago Admissions Office. Perhaps, as @HydeSnark suggests, there’s a dollop of wishful thinking in them added to an insufficient sample size. Then again, perhaps these stats are more in the nature of “leading indicators” than whatever is reflected in these Parchment numbers. I know little of the Parchment methodology or reliability but have heard it criticized.
The intuitive part is that any kid applying to HYPSM (or some combination thereof) plus Chicago is not likely to have Chicago as the top choice. It may not be a safety any longer, but it does not yet have the name recognition or general prestige of those places. The kind of kid who would actually prefer Chicago culture or education to that of those schools will not often make those multiple applications and therefore will not often find himself in the position of receiving acceptances from one or more of HYPSM plus Chicago. That kid will have a different sort of educational aspiration, one that fits more with the Chicago ethos and culture and will incline him to apply Chicago ED. That is one of the reasons that cohort is growing and one of the reasons why I would intuitively expect the cross-admit numbers with these schools to be both small in number and not generally favorable to Chicago. However, things may be on the move, if Bronx’s numbers have any validity.
With Penn, Columbia and many other fine elite schools it is a closer-run thing. They all have prestige comparable though different in each case with Chicago’s, but it is not lights-out prestige that dims that of Chicago and all other schools.
Prestige can be well-founded and yet still insidious, especially if it’s at odds with the true talents and aspirations of a youngster. Yes, all schools are more than their brands indicate and have more types within them than the stereotypical ones. Many years ago, when I had a choice between Rice and Chicago, my personal aspirations and longings all told me to choose Chicago, and ultimately I went with that. Yet, as a kid from Texas, where Rice has a sort of local-ivy prestige, no one could understand why I would throw that acceptance away in favour of a place at that time so lacking in all prestige, indeed hardly known at all and surmised to be some form of minor state school in the city of Chicago in the faraway state of Illinois. No one would say that today, certainly no one outside the state of Texas would say it. However, there is not a state in the union or likely a country in the world where anyone would fail to recognize the prestige of Harvard et. al. A kid anywhere who accepts Chicago over Harvard will have a lot of explaining to do, a lot of incredulity to overcome.
It will always take some level of gumption to follow your own star - if indeed Chicago is your star. But if that was so, why would you have applied to Harvard?
@HydeSnark - I agree, much cross-admit data can just be noise, and the sampling size of cross-admits is just getting smaller, every year.
Nevertheless, if looked at over a broader period of time (say, in Chicago’s case, about 15-20 years), I think the results would be fascinating. 20 years ago, Chicago’s 50/50 cross-admits would (I think) be places like Tufts, Emory, Wash U. As I recall, Chicago took maybe 5% from Yale or Harvard, and probably no more than 15% from Brown, Dartmouth, etc.
If now, Chicago is indeed in more 50/50 battles with places like Brown or Columbia, that’s considerable progress over a generation. There really isn’t another school - I don’t think - that’s made comparable gains over the same time.
To put a place like Penn in perspective, 20 years ago, it was probably 7th in the Ivy League for selectivity and desirability. Now, after a lot of investment and forward progress, it is currently 6th in the Ivy League for selectivity, and 5th-6th for desirability.
In the same period of time, overall, Chicago has probably gone from #25 in the country for selectivity and desirability to maybe #6 for selectivity, and somewhere between #8-12 in the country for desirability. That’s a big shift.
Chicago also should have allowed their name be used in movies like other schools, probably an effective way of disseminating a name. I think they’re less opposed to it currently though.
@Cue7 I agree that long trends over time are much more indicative, but it’s hard to take even that seriously if each year the data gets noiser due to smaller and smaller number of observations (i.e. there is very high heteroskedasticity which can nullify the validity of any sort of regression). Then again, I doubt there were even that many people choosing between UChicago and Brown 30 years ago - admissions is far more regional than people think and only became nationalized fairly recently.
The main thing I take issue with is claims that UChicago is getting more competitive because the cross admit rate with Yale is much higher than the year before. Like…okay? That’s suspect statistical magical thinking that makes me deeply suspicious of any non-quantified claims coming out of the admissions office.
