Admit Rates, Standardized Test Averages, Cross Admit Results

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
121

@Cue7 at #116 -

If a college skews wealthy due to the introduction of ED, then full pay families are subsidizing those on Fin. Aid. So yes, the College is definitely “spreading the wealth around.” However, UChicago is aggressive not only in enrolling ED but also in meeting “full demonstrated need.” Those “regular folks” with their generous fin. aid. packages that I met the other night were, in fact, ED-admits. Families have become increasingly aware that it’s possible to apply ED as a non-full-pay applicant and be able to attend. This year they have even supplemented with automatic scholarships available to first gen. and children of police and fire workers, regardless of their admission plan. There are ED families who have been given full tuition as a result. UChicago might be the only elite school that is using funds to attract families ED!

As colleges become more selective and attract the tippy top students you will definitely see more wealthy families vying to get in. It’s even possible to be “wealthy” - by any reasonable definition - and receive some financial aid (after all, the cost of attendance is enormous). This is one reason why UChicago has supposedly embraced Test Optional. They are worried about things like test prep raising scores too much and scaring away those talented kids of more limited means. Higher education is a superior good; families are willing to pay a LOT more for it (ie opt for elite privates and what it takes to get in) as their income increases. No doubt there are financial types and high level CEO’s at UChicago admitted events now but they didn’t just come out of the woodwork for the class of '21. UChicago’s reputation as an “elite” school preceded their decision to go ED.

122

@JBStillFlying - just how long do you think chicago qualified as an elite school (e.g., similarly selective to its ivy plus peers, rather than a more niche top school)? I don’t think chicago was in the same ballpark as its elite peers until nondorf came in.

123

@Cue7 - yes - actually a couple years afterwards. I think Boyer said by 2012-13. Here’s the context and what happened, per his history of the university:

"To reach a target of 5,000 or more [enrollees], it would be critical to enlarge the applicant pool while reassuring the faculty that student quality was increasing, not decreasing. Many of the earlier apprehensions about a larger undergraduate population focused on the worry that the University was stuck in a scenario in which only a small number of “self-selected” students wanted to come to Chicago. This assumption was misleading, given the high attrition rates among these “self-selected” students after they arrived in Hyde Park.

To address these concerns, the College launched several interventions. First, Michael Behnke, the dean of admissions at MIT, was appointed vice president for College enrollment at Chicago in 1997. Behnke was able to break the cycle of high-acceptance and low-yield rates that had plagued the College since the 1950s and to undermine the assumption that “self-selection” necessarily translated into fatefully small, encumbered numbers of applicants. Behnke bluntly insisted that the University had become a backup school for many students: “In admitting between sixty and seventy percent of the applicants in recent years, the College has brought in a number of students for whom it was their third or fourth choice. These students are not likely to have looked as carefully at Chicago as those to whom the faculty point as ‘self-selecting’ Chicago. They, in turn, contribute to the College’s relatively high attrition rate.” Behnke increased applications from 5,522 to 12,397 and reduced the admissions rate from 61 percent to 28 percent. Yield rates increased from 30 percent to 38 percent. Upon Behnke’s retirement in 2009, James Nondorf of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Yale dramatically revitalized admissions by deploying a series of imaginative communications strategies, and by the fall of 2012 Chicago experienced a huge increase in interest from academically qualified students across the nation. The results were not only a stunning uptick in inquiries and applications, with more than 30,000 applications in 2013, but a pronounced increase in the yield rate for admitted students (60 percent in 2014) and a substantial increase in the academic quality of the matriculation pool as measured by SAT scores."

Boyer, John W… The University of Chicago: A History . University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

Personally, I suspect that Nondorf believed it WAS possible to identify those applicants who wanted to “self-select”. Whether he was executing a desire on the part of the faculty or on his own initiative, ED1 and ED2 seem to be designed in order to identify those applicants who are the best fit. What else explains the fact that they are so generous with fin. aid or even some automatic scholarships for ED kids?

124

@JBStillFlying - so if chicago is spreading the wealth around, as you say, why is it overenrolling classes so often? Wouldn’t overenrolling really put a strain on the finite pool of financial aid funds?

125

@Cue7 - are you thinking that they actually are NOT trying to “spreading the wealth around?”. If 100% of the “overenrolled” happen to be full pay, well . . .

But I believe they have actually “overenrolled” exactly one year - last year, correct? They want a class size of up to 1750. They achieved that with the Class of '21. Last year they over-admitted and ended up with over 1,800 matriculants; this year (in response?) they have - so far - admitted fewer than 2100 students so about 250 fewer than last year. They aren’t planning to hit 1,800 enrollees again.

126

Thats a fascinating quotation from Behnke from 1997 and explains much of what came afterwards. Incidentally, it confirms my own on-the-ground observation from the sixties: there was indeed a large cadre of kids at that time who werent well-suited for Chicago, for whom it was a back-up, sometimes a distant back-up, to very different schools and who had landed there without much foreknowledge of what they were getting in to. Their unhappiness was not good for them or for the tone of the place, which was generally set by the larger self-selecting group, who knew exactly what the place was about and why they were there. Nevertheless, the squawks of this unhappy minority got a lot of attention.

If you think of the objective of all the subsequent changes as being to reduce the numbers of these ill-suited and unhappy kids and increase the numbers of the knowledgeable and signed-on ones you won`t go far wrong. It is the rationale, given succinctly at this early date, for what was to become ED. I agree completely with JB in seeing it as a strategy for identifying the old core of the traditional self-selecting Chicago-loving kids within a now much larger group of applicants. All the observations made on this board about shenanigans and gaming the system and even about demographic and budgetary effects miss this simple point.

The bathtub now has a lot more water in it, much of which, unlike in the not very distant past, will have to be thrown out. The trick is to dispose of the suds and keep the essential baby.

127

@marlowe1 and @JBStillFlying - finding students who are the right fit is all well and good, but is it really that off-base to assert, as I believe @HydeSnark did (and I agree) that the university is more broke than it cares to admit, and wealthy, qualified admitted students make for a great revenue stream?

Why can’t both those things be true? That Chicago is admitting more qualified students that are a good fit (for an institution that is admittedly changing), but that the college - like so many other colleges - ardently needs the revenue that the wealthy can bring in?

Btw, the college has been over enrolling for many years now, going back to at least 2012 (conveniently, around the time Nondorf started).

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/22/large-admitted-class-forces-adjustments-on-college/

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2013/05/14/class-of-17-yield-above-50-percent/

They’ve always taken an “aw shucks we are so popular” approach, but the consistent overenrollment flies in the face of what JB has said above. If you have finite financial aid resources, why stretch them so thin? Unless, of course, qualified wealthy admitted students (so many of whom are now banging on the door) make for a great revenue stream.

The increased revenue seems to be the most plausible explanation for the overenrollment - for years of not exercising more caution with acceptances (especially because an exercise of more caution would have driven down the acceptance rate - something colleges seek!).

128

@Cue7 I think that the University of Chicago has been an elite University for over 100 years, but I don’t know if that is your question. If you mean how long has the College at the University of Chicago been looked at in the popular culture at or near the same level as the very top of Undergraduate institutions, I think that you are correct in your assessment.

129

The point made in both those stories was that the unprecedented yield numbers had created a larger class than anticipated for the year in question. Is it possible that admissions delivered exactly the size of classes they intended to deliver in each of these years and just lied about their intentions? Seems a tad conspiratorial to me when there’s a more obvious explanation.

We know in any event that the explicit long-term plan was to take the student-body of the College to higher levels, so I don’t quite take your point about “over-enrolment” as some sort of hidden strategy. The timing of all this has produced hiccups. Why is that surprising? You and everyone else on this board rightly praise the greatly enhanced facilities and amenities on campus these days. They have been bought with debt, and the debt is being serviced in some measure by higher net revenues drawn from these larger classes. That was always the plan. A function of these generally higher numbers is more full tuition-payers. No doubt algorithms were developed to make this aspect predictable.

I agree with you and Snark that these improvements would not be possible without the surpluses created by the full-payers. That’s OK in my book. If we are getting here a little Utopia of wealth redistribution I can handle that. If the allegation is that the rich are being privileged over the poor in the admission process I need to see some evidence. If it were so, a manila envelope would have landed on the desk of a Maroon editor. That is precisely what happened in the much-overblown Metcalf scandal. If AO’s are putting the apps of rich kids in a separate pile ticketed for an easy ride into this school someone will blow a whistle. Until that happens I am ready to enjoy the spectacle of a vibrant student culture that preserves the best features of the old school but adds some very necessary reforms and tweakings.

130

“that the university is more broke than it cares to admit, and wealthy, qualified admitted students make for a great revenue stream?”

  • That's a good theory, and wealthy, qualified students ALWAYS make for a good revenue stream! However, even if the university was NOT "broke", the College was clearly an under-utilized asset and they were leaving money on the table unless they expanded. All universities could use more money and the "tuition model" - due to all those families who were increasing in wealth - was fast becoming a successful funding tool beginning in the early 2000's. For EVERY university, not just UChicago.

“Why can’t both those things be true? That Chicago is admitting more qualified students that are a good fit (for an institution that is admittedly changing), but that the college - like so many other colleges - ardently needs the revenue that the wealthy can bring in?”

  • Agreed. The College has a budget and top line increases tend to be viewed favorably, subject to things like academic quality and desired diversity of the class, etc. It's probably not too difficult to get an idea of how much of the class was "full pay" once they instituted ED. All you need to do is figure out how much 2016 revenues should have grown, given the increase in enrolled, and compare to what they actually pulled in. If there is a significant growth, then ED had an impact, whether that be due to wealthy families suddenly being able to buy a spot, or other. (Btw, "other" includes stuff like better matching of grant and merit money to candidate enthusiasm. In the earlier years they'd do stuff like give generous merit to kids who would have committed anyway).

“Btw, the college has been over enrolling for many years now, going back to at least 2012 (conveniently, around the time Nondorf started).”

“They’ve always taken an “aw shucks we are so popular” approach, but the consistent overenrollment flies in the face of what JB has said above. If you have finite financial aid resources, why stretch them so thin? Unless, of course, qualified wealthy admitted students (so many of whom are now banging on the door) make for a great revenue stream.”

  • Yes. All schools pull the "wow we are more popular than we thought" tactic. Wake up! LOL. The year they truly over-enroll is the year where they actually start talking about pulling back on enrollments in the next application cycle.

There is no such thing as consistent and mistaken “over-enrollment”. Colleges run a business and are in the habit of trying to maximize net revenues subject to the various constraints. ALL resources are finite for every school - not just UChicago. If someone keeps bungling this up, they are let go and someone else brought in.

“The increased revenue seems to be the most plausible explanation for the overenrollment - for years of not exercising more caution with acceptances (especially because an exercise of more caution would have driven down the acceptance rate - something colleges seek!).”

  • So your theory is that they began ED out of desperation because Nondorf was running the university into the ground financially? That's novel. If you are correct, then boy are THEY dumb to keep admitting my kids ED and giving them financial aid. Not to mention all those regular folks I met the other night. They probably need either to cut out "No Barriers" or simply start admitting "Need Aware." However, I wouldn't be looking for them to be doing either anytime soon.
131

“If we are getting here a little Utopia of wealth redistribution I can handle that.”

  • Pricing is always a system of distribution (or re-distribution). Colleges are perfect price "discriminators". They are better than the airlines at this.

UChicago promises “no barriers” to what it offers and professes to search for all qualified candidates and give them “equal access”. That’s not the same thing as charging each of them the same price. They will charge you what they believe you are willing and able to pay. Or come as close as they can to figuring this out.

PS - they are not alone in this strategy - to put it mildly.

132

@JBStillFlying

I am confused. You state, in response to my assertion that Chicago has over-enrolled to increase tuition revenue: “So your theory is that they began ED out of desperation because Nondorf was running the university into the ground financially? That’s novel.”

How did I ever assert that Nondorf was running the U. into the ground financially? Completely to the contrary, I assert that Nondorf has literally brought in millions of dollars of tuition revenue by increasing the College’s appeal among the wealthy, and getting lots of full-freight kids through the door.

Why would ED change any of that? The ED applicant pool tends to be wealthier overall, AND allows for increases in selectivity/yield. ED, in short, checks so many boxes the U. wants - while simultaneously ensuring that lots of qualified rich kids will bang on the door, and pay full freight if admitted.

Here’s a good summary of what ED does, overall: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/12/4/early-decision-unfairly-favors-wealthy-applicants/

Also, re need aware/need blind - you recognize that Chicago is need blind because of the type of applicants it attracts, right? If ONLY low SES kids applied to Chicago, and the school needed to offer significant grants to 1700 new students a year, it probably couldn’t be need blind any more. Like any other top college, Chicago’s app pool is probably quite wealthy, which increases the opportunity to be need blind.

Also, in terms of wealth distribution, Chicago has a lower number of pell grants (e.g. low SES) students in the class (11% of students - not particularly high) than many peers. So, sure, there are ED kids on financial aid, students with pell grants, etc., but the school very much seems like other non HYPS peers - cash-strapped and dependent on tuition revenue.

https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/2/28/changing-financial-aid-landscape-pell-grants-hold/

To sum, Nondorf is doing a great job - for the job he is supposed to do. The U. leadership and Board of Trustees clearly want a “big numbers” admissions process. But let’s not put lipstick on the pig, admissions amongst selective schools is a scheme-oriented, deflating game.

Here’s a good summation of what the admissions game looks like now:

https://thepointmag.com/2016/examined-life/admissions-failure

Again - Nondorf is doing a GREAT JOB. I LIKE WHAT HE’S DOING. But, the overall industry at the top doesn’t look good - especially nowadays. Unexpectedly, with all the shenanigans, Chicago is on the vanguard of “big numbers” admissions.

133

Sorry, Cue, but the Maroon editorial board’s take on this is hardly definitive. You call it a good summary, but I call it a compendium of conventional wisdom.

None of us advocates of ED believes that it operates to reduce the wealth of the student body (if that is what you mean when you ask whether it “changes any of that”). I would be happy if it had very little effect on that part of it, and I believe the effects you describe (at least at a place like Chicago) are much exaggerated. However, I am content to be agnostic until I can see real statistics. I do note that you haven’t accepted my challenge to name a peer school which lacks ED and accordingly has a student body less wealthy than Chicago’s.

You’ve got me confused, as you often do, about where you’re really coming from. It also seemed to me that you were complaining about Chicago’s level of debt, and I thought you were linking that to the shenanigans. On the one hand you say that Nondorf is “doing a great job” and you approve of the wealthier student body you believe he is recruiting; yet it is all “lipstick on a pig”, a “scheme-oriented, deflating game” and"shenanigans", and you cite with approval Ted O’Neill’s kvetching.

What exactly IS the problem, as you see it, other than that Chicago is not Harvard and never will be Harvard, where none of this unseemly scrambling is ever necessary?

134

SCEA is ideal but it seems that only the schools with rock solid yield rates can really afford to have it.

135

“Also, re need aware/need blind - you recognize that Chicago is need blind because of the type of applicants it attracts, right?”

  • They maintain that applying for fin. aid. does not impact your admission decision, if you are US resident. International students are a different story.

“Also, in terms of wealth distribution, Chicago has a lower number of pell grants (e.g. low SES) students in the class (11% of students - not particularly high) than many peers. So, sure, there are ED kids on financial aid, students with pell grants, etc., but the school very much seems like other non HYPS peers - cash-strapped and dependent on tuition revenue.”

  • That's due to the presence of the Odyssey program, per the school. I think Nondorf had an opinion piece in the NYT about that not too long ago.

“But let’s not put lipstick on the pig, admissions amongst selective schools is a scheme-oriented, deflating game.”

  • Agreed.
136

@marlowe1 - here’s an article from a more reputable news source re ED and how it tilts the game in favor of the wealthy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/31/a-college-admissions-edge-for-the-wealthy-early-decision/?utm_term=.1209b28f2e34

A telltale quote, from an Admissions Dean: “No matter what anybody tells you, the early pool favors those who are more advantaged.”

Put another way, the early pool tends to be fairly wealthy, where you can admit a bunch of qualified kids, who also happen to be well-off. And, they’re all guaranteed to attend. It’s a win-win-win for colleges (but not so good for their supposed goal of being more “accessible”).

On the front end, colleges can say they’re accessible, need-blind, etc. But that’s because, on the back end, recruitment and the pool of qualified candidates is heavily tilted toward the wealthy.

137

The argument from authority is a poor substitute for real argument. We have had much better arguments on this forum, discussing with granularity the special conditions at the University of Chicago, than anything I see in that Washington Post piece, which amounts to an assembly of viewpoints congenial to the evident opinion of the writer of the piece.

I note also that its a piece from a few years ago, and one of the individuals quoted makes the point that one of the reasons ED favors higher-income types is that they have the support and resources to understand exactly how it works. Well, thats a problem that can be overcome with greater general familiarity, not to mention that it is to be expected that applicants to the U of C ought to be capable of figuring these things out. It sounds like a few ordinary folks did that recently in Minnesota.

I have never seen any convincing stats - and do not believe any exist - showing that, holding all other factors equal, kids accepted ED at Chicago end up with financial packages significantly less good than those accepted EA or RD. If, however, you are someone open to going to many different schools and are looking to select the best financial package among all the offers you can garner, thats fine with me, go ahead and put the U of C in the hat with all the others - but dont ask me to believe you`re being exploited because some other kid who really wants to go to Chicago chooses ED as a way of demonstrating that desire and enhancing his chances.

I always want to push back against the lazy assumption that ED`s principal raison dètre is a financial one. Whether it has some of those effects at this university, whatever the effects may be at others, will in due course be revealed by actual statistics. In the meantime, I am still waiting for you to respond to my challenge.

138

@marlowe1 - a real argument would require data we don’t have, so our next best outlet is argument from authorities - from those who presumably have the data.

All we have are lots of authorities saying how ED favors the wealthy. We don’t have the data, but I’m not sure why we’d need to rebut the authorities’ assertion, or take an agnostic position.

139

I`m not a big one for accepting authorities, Cue. I like to try to think about things myself, in my bumbling fashion. It was a nasty habit I picked up at the University of Chicago.

But I ask again - if ED is having this effect of skewing things to the high-income side at this university, you should be able to name a peer university without ED and a lower SES student body.

140

@marlowe1 It’s not particularly a valid form of argument to demand statistics that will never be available as proof of something that can be proved by inference many other ways.

One of the features of ED at the elite level is that, for colleges that can afford to give a lot of aid (but not unlimited aid), its structural features obviate the need to practice actual discrimination in aid packages. ED skews wealthy without any intervention by the college, for several reasons:

ED is especially attractive to kids who are sophisticated about college admissions, who have evaluated their college choices early in their senior years, who go to schools where lots of other kids apply ED and counselors recommend it, and who do not feel a need to compare financial aid offers from various schools in order to make certain they are getting the best financial deal.

Every one of those features select for wealthier applicants. Sure, a really sophisticated non-wealthy kid can decide he or she will get a good enough deal from ED to make it worth applying, and some do, But those kids (and their parents) will hear a chorus of naysaying peers telling them that ED is only for the rich or for those so poor that no college will expect them to pay for anything. (Check out financial aid discussions on CC, and you will see that opinion expressed time and again.) Many colleges – not including the University of Chicago – do in fact award less favorable aid/merit packages to ED applicants, whom they do not have to compete with other colleges to enroll. That contributes to the general anti-ED folklore in the middle classes. So at the end of the day, the ED pool is a lot wealthier than the RD pool. If you treat the applicants all equally, you are going to admit a reliably wealthier class if you do it ED.

I would have pointed you to The Shape of the River, by William Bowen (former president of Princeton) and Derek Bok (twice former president of Harvard). It’s a long discussion of college admissions and social justice, and argues very strongly against early admissions programs of any type based on their race- and class-discriminatory effect. The authors believed in their thesis so strongly that when Bok became president of Harvard for the second time, after the book had been written, he made a real attempt to end early admissions. Harvard and Princeton terminated their respective SCEA and ED programs, only to resume early admissions three years later after they failed to convince any peer universities other than UVa to join them. (And it was clear they were taking a hit in the admissions arena, especially Princeton.)

No one ever suggested that either Harvard or Princeton was discriminating against early acceptees in their financial aid packages. That wasn’t anywhere near enough, in the eyes of their former presidents, to make their early admissions programs nondiscriminatory.

So, yes, another argument from authority. But they are damn good authority on the issue of the effect of admissions practices on the composition of college student bodies.

Note that this does NOT assume that colleges are choosing ED for financial reasons. Harvard and Princeton resumed early admissions purely because they were demonstrably losing out on students they wanted to enroll. Neither was in any financial difficulty, to say the least. Harvard’s yield went down about 10 percentage points during that period, and Princeton (which had previously admitted half of its class ED) saw its yield decline much more than that, threatening its ultra-elite image.

(It’s completely disingenuous, by the way, to suggest that financial considerations don’t loom large in making ED popular for colleges. Maybe not so much for Chicago, which looks financially weak only in comparison to a handful of other elite universities, but definitely for the many colleges that want to say they are need-blind (or 90% need blind), but can’t afford to go over their financial aid budget and need to make certain they don’t. That is what Vice Presidents for Enrollment Management and Financial Aid do; that’s their job.)