https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/2/16/billionaire-trustee-hosts-dinner-early-admits-reno/
You think UChicago could make the connection between the school and money any more explicit?
I’d love to see the recruiting/admissions budgets of different top schools. I’d also like to see how these budgets have changed over time.
Chicago does seem to be making a much more affirmative play to connect the school to money/power/prestige of late.
This isn’t that new - it’s happened for at least the last few years. Though I don’t know if it happened before the Nondorf era. Probably not.
It has inspired what is, in my opinion, the bougiest thread ever posted on this forum, if you read to hear a first hand account. You can find it if you google the name of the restaurant and “college confidential”.
It’s also not unique to UChicago - there are similar events for Harvard, Stanford, etc. all with the same vibe of “come and you’ll be this rich too!” Still, I think it’s mostly aimed at parents, not kids. The main purpose is to try and make potential donors who are about to send their kids off to college feel so good about UChicago they want to give even more money. If they were trying to “woo” students, why would they host this with a bunch of ED kids before RD decisions came out? Frankly this has more in common with a fundraising dinner than an admissions event - because, well…it is a fundraising dinner in disguise.
That’s true @HydeSnark - I just wonder how many EA admits attended? That’s the group Chicago probably wants to recruit the hardest - and there are probably quite a few EA admits in the NYC area.
And it doesn’t end once they matriculate. One couple we know (who’s kid is a full pay freshman at Harvard) was recently invited to a very nice dinner with several hundred other “wealthy” families and asked the participants to donate, at a minimum, another $25,000 to the university (as if the 70K a year COA wasn’t enough). I guess these aggressive tactics is one reason they have a $30+ billion endowment!
Was this a special invite thing or were all admits in the NY area invited?
Glad to see UChicago getting more organized in fundraising. My observationso far: my kids private school has more of a fund raising machine…
Wanna hear something scary? My kids’ public school (magnet school but still very much public) even appears to have a more organized and effective fund raising machine. :-0
I’m torn between being a little wistful we don’t live close enough to be invited to the bougie NY events and being happy that apparently we’re considered hicks in the boonies so only receive an occasional, low key donation request letter.
Awww we missed it by a year, lol! It would have been so great to attend that event.
Re: fundraising, yes, schools certainly seem super proactive about that. My son went to both a private school and a public school, and both school systems used every single opportunity to fund raise, whether it be cold calling parents, lowkey mailings, and at almost any type of meetings at the respective schools, there’d be requests for funds. And of course it continues even after they’ve graduated because now they’re ‘alumni.’ I’m thinking that’s just part of the system now.
Looked up the definition of “bougie” on the internet: it’s a thin, flexible surgical instrument for exploring or dilating a passage of the body.
? it means pretentious, as in “bourgeoisie” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bougie#Etymology_2
In my book billionaires can bougie or boogie or whatever else they like - as long as they write checks as they do it. “God gave me my money,” said Mr. Rockefeller, “how could I withhold it from the University of Chicago?”
I don’t know, they seem to be on their A Game since our son was admitted - the call to have coffee with a rep this summer while he was in town, the reception at The Godfrey the night before the kids moved into the dorms (where they talked a lot about ways in which we can “give back”), the mailings, phone calls…personally, I’d like my son to get through his first year (even his first quarter) at the school before they started in on us for donations!
It is a very generous thing to do to open up one’s home to guests (no matter what the social economic status.) It’s so great that he and his family are doing this.
@HydeSnark #10 - your generation needs a sense of humor ;
Any information yet from these events as to the stats from this year’s applications?
This is par for the course for Harvard. There is a book, I forget the name and too lazy to google, partly about the founding of Cal (Berkeley was the only U of California back then, so this was a loooong looong time ago) and the Harvard admits from SF Bay Area got a reception at an Alum’s house that has a view on top of a hill… The book was good, it posits Cal as the future of US Public Education because it took smart kids from schools that are not feeders (the author went to Groton) and gives them the same quality of education. It talks about social mobility through education as a public good
Here’s what I think is HydeSnark’s “bougiest” thread. http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1961545-admission-rates-yield-outcomes-talk-at-admitted-student-luncheon.html
If that’s bougie, sign me up! It’s a reminder that – Blue Hill at Stone Farm and hedge fund billionaires notwithstanding – the University of Chicago is very much a product of bourgeois culture, in the most positive sense imaginable. (Not that Blue Hill and hedge fund billionaires aren’t also products of bourgeois culture. They are.)
This might be obvious to several on the thread but bears pointing out for newer readers:
The host of this event, Trustee and AQR founder John Liew, is himself an alum of the school three times over (BA, MBA, PhD). The Maroon probably should have clarified that Liew graduated from the College. It wasn’t merely the case that he grabbed alums from his or other “Wall St.” firms to help out with recruiting or fundraising. AQR itself is the product of brainpower coupled with a UChicago education. Two of the three founding partners have degrees from the University of Chicago - Liew, and Cliff Asness (MBA, PhD from Booth).
I would feel happier about the story if I knew that some of the alumni who were featured at the event were not Wall St. or hedge fund types. Were there any artists, academics, public servants, scientists, entrepreneurs, journalists? There are lots of Chicago alumni in the New York area who did not get any degrees from Booth and who do interesting, admirable things.