If you are comparing Chicago’s early acceptance rate to that of the Ivies, it’s a mistake to adjust the Chicago rate for athletic recruits and not to adjust the Ivy college rates. They tend to have a lot more athletic recruits – 200+ per class – and I think almost all of them are in the EA/ED numbers. Chicago also accepts a lot more students early. The “real” Chicago admission rate for EA applicants may well be lower than the SCEA rate at Harvard/Yale/Princeton, but the Chicago admission rate for ED applicants is meaningfully higher.
@JHS I think you’re right. It’s my guess too that overall the Ivies have more athletic recruits and so is Duke. They probably have more legacy admits too relative to Chicago. It’s impossible to be accurate to that level however. It almost like all guess are on the ball park but none of them are good enough for a real unhooked picture, which could vary differently for a particular given year and for a particular school. For the best estimated Chicago acceptance rate given in this forum this year for last class, 17.9% for ED1 and 17.9% for ED2 were probably very simplistic best guess while we all agree ED2 has to be a lot more competitive than ED1. The question is if you estimate ED2 rate at say 8%, will ED1 be estimated at 28%? That’s hard to imagine and probably is not true but…
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2090267-yield-update-class-of-2022-p2.html
At the end of the day, it will boil down to how my kid really feels about both schools and if he want to go all in early or be little more conservative. Both schools are very difficult and regardless, he needs to go back to the board and put forth his best everything effort in order to have a shoot at either.
I remember one contributing member of this board once summrized as "To be honest, if I would have found CC prior to my son’s college search …we may not have applied to UChicago,… To read all the posts today that say “unless … chances are you won’t get accepted…threads, we may have steered clear…”
Hey that was me!
@BrianBoiler Well said Brian =))
We too discovered CC after our son was admitted, and unlike @BrianBoiler CC would have reinforced U Chicago’s attractiveness/“brand”. Compared to other college bulletin boards on CC the UChicago board has been more thoughtful and covers “meaty” subjects. Even the “complaints discussions” are useful, as you can tell much about an organization by what they complain about.
I still hold to the “we may have steered clear.” But not because of the UChicago portion of CC, but in general seeing all the “need a National Award,” and “only 8% acceptance rate.” On many of the other chance me threads.
I still contend that acceptance rates are not probability rates. And to stay on topic of this thread. Regardless of the acceptance rate, your individual case has a different probability of acceptance. ED1 raises that probability over all other paths. If UChicago is determined to be your school preference and you can afford it, you want to do everything in your power to raise your personal probability of acceptance to the highest number possible. So go ED1. If UChicago is only a little better than Duke and you believe your chances of Duke or Chicago is better going ED1 to Duke and if “wait-listed”, then applying ED2 to UChicago, then do that route. I think it all depends on how much you want UChicago over Duke.
I know there are other options with EA, but I really think you send a different message to admissions with that route. Just my two cents.
A little off topic:
Things you can do to increase your personal probability of acceptance:
1> Get a hook: (I know that is easier said then done, but DIII athletics are not DI athletics) Maybe not an options, but a hook is the next biggest thing to ED1 to improve your chances.
2a> Put together a very strong supporting application by making sure your essays are better than all the others the admissions officers are going to read. BTW, I’ve never read a chance me thread where the poster doesn’t think their essays are outstanding. Some of the things to keep in mind. 1> You want to make it enjoyable to read. You aren’t submitting for a grade. You want the AO to know who you are after they read it. 2> Make it tie back to the university you are submitting it to. Show that you did some research into what the University wants to accomplish. Show how you’ve done that in the past and how you plan to do so in the future.
2b> Make sure you pick great “recommenders.” I really believe that this is the biggest variable in the college application process. Don’t just pick teachers who your student think liked him. Pick the “recommender” that will make the effort to right a personal letter that also tells the AO who your student is. Not Joey is a great person, but how Joey shows that he is a great person. For UChicago, you would want your “recommender” to show how Joey really strove to learn and not just get a grade (that tactic would most likely work for all of the competitive schools).
3> Make sure your ECs kind of also weave into the narrative. Joey didn’t just do service work to adorn his resume.
A quick “Tail of Two Sons.” Son1 is an extremely bright STEM major who really wanted to go to GaTech to major in CS. We did the whole campus tour thing. During the standard admissions presentation, the admissions director stated right out “We are looking for students who do X & Y and we’ll be reading your essays to see how you’ll do this.” I forget exactly what X & Y were, but they were along the lines of the ceaseless pursuit of knowledge and applying that knowledge in a way that makes the world a better place. My son wrote a very good essay about how he loves camping and doesn’t want to be the stereotypical CS dude who lives in a basement, grows a gnarly beard, and wears suspenders and never sees the light of day. When it came to recommendations, he asked in passing two of his teachers to write these recommendations. When they said yes, he sent them a link to complete it. He applied to 7 schools. Was waitlisted at GaTech, UofM, and accepted at McGill, UMD, UICU, RIT, and TaylorU. He was accepted off the waitlist at UofM two weeks after being put on it. He was accepted off the waitlist at GaTech in mid May, but after he eventually decided to go to UMD. Once at UMD he somehow got to see his Calc BC teachers recommendation which was a form letter that didn’t even mention my son’s name. “I taught the student in Calc BC and he asked great questions and did work that was near the top of his class…” I suspect if he would have written his essays as the AD said in the meeting and/or he would have been better about how he went about getting recommendations, I’d be writing checks to GaTech instead of UMD. But the fact that he was waitlisted at his first and second choice, drove him away.
Son#2 is a competitive Track and Field athlete who has 12 varsity letters, 3 state medals, qualified for 6 state meets and was XC and Track Captain his Jr. and Sr. year. So he has a pretty decent hook. But, even given that, he made sure his essays for UChicago told of who he was and how he thought the union between UChicago and he would make the world a better place. He personally sat down and asked his three recommmenders what he thought the university was looking for and asked if they could include examples of that in his application. He was also going through the USNA process which requires many more recommendations be sent not to just the school, but also to our representatives to congress. So not a small undertaking to get teachers to write individual and personal LORs. Once they agreed, he hand wrote thank you notes and followed-up with updates on his status. When he received a LOA (Letter of Assurance) from the USNA, he sent them another note thanking them for the work they put in. When he received the likely letter of Chicago, he did the same. Finally, when he accepted UChicago’s offer, he bought UChciago coffee mugs (yeah probably the obligatory teacher gift) as a way of thanking them for his help.
Athletes do inflate the ED acceptance rate a bit, but there aren’t nearly enough athletes at most schools to remove all, or even most, of the admissions advantage suggested by (relative to RD) ED acceptance rates.
UChicago’s ED1 rate is around 17-18%. Their RD rate is about, oh, 3%. Even if you remove all the athletes and legacies from ED, the effective rate is still probably north of 10% for unhooked kids, which would still be more than three times the RD rate.
So if your son loves UChicago to the point that it’s his clear #1, and you can afford it, I suggest ED1.
Most top schools have ED/SCEA/REA acceptance rates considerably higher than their overall admit rates, which means that the ED rates are much – multiples of 3, 4, 5, even more – higher than the RD rates.
Check my numbers – these are estimates:
Overall rate/ED (or SCEA/REA) rate:
Harvard: 5/14
Yale: 6/16
Princeton: 6/16
Stanford: 4.5/9
MIT: 7/8
Columbia: 6/17 (? - hard to find ED numbers)
UChicago: 7/17
Penn: 9/19
Brown: 9/21
Northwestern: 9/24
Duke: 9/22
MIT is an odd case – very little, if any, advantage to applying early. Georgetown is the other school (to my knowledge) that does not really confer any statistical advantage to applying early.
It’s complicated to talk about the real admissions advantage of ED (much less EA, where there is certainly less advantage). Many/most of these colleges don’t allow international students to apply early, or don’t allow international students who need aid to apply early, and that alone would make the early and regular applicant pools very different. There are almost certainly lots more no-chance applications in the RD pools. It is impossible to tell what the difference is for comparable students who, objectively, are strong candidates. I believer there is a meaningful advantage, especially at ED colleges, but the real advantage is nothing like the 4-5x rate that you get by looking at the early admission rate (with or without adjusting it for recruited athletes and others) and figuring out the implied RD rate (which is tiny, and gets tinier still if you calculate in the effect of deferred early candidates).
On top of everything @JHS said, next year there is really no understanding how the whole test optional thing will drive applications. The “chance me” threads have been pretty heavy on people saying they are going to try test optional. If so, I don’t know if those will be more likely to apply ED or EA or RD. I do know that you’d have little control over that so I’d go with going with what has happened in the past and making sure your application is the absolute best it can be.
My personal belief is that test optional admits will be well below 100, and they will have an exceptional application otherwise. Seems that there is this narrative that the tests aren’t an important part of the application which isn’t really the case, they just aren’t required.
I think your projected number of admits is high. I’m guessing 10 max. However, will total number of applications go up and in which rounds? If I got a poor score and am marginal elsewhere, which is a likely scenario, do I play the ED card. Which will drive WD apps up and acceptance rates down.
^It would lower the admit rate by encouraging the addition of a whole bunch of apps with 0% chance of admission. Everyone else’s chances will pretty much be the same unless the number of high-quality apps increases as well. Realistically, Admissions is probably hoping more for the latter since that helps the school look better than ever.
Anecdotally it does seem that the few “chance me” posts are misinterpreting the purpose of Test Optional. A major policy change such as this probably requires a thorough reading of the admissions page but not sure that is happening.
OK I’ll go with 10 too. @BrianBoiler ^:)^
My daughter worried about the same thing last year but wound up apply ED II and got in. I’m not sure if the same would have happened in ED I but our sense was that it did not hurt her changes to apply ED II. I think that in any case ED and EA are very advantageous and using ED II to get two chances at early admission is not a bad idea.