Chicago Maroon on Yield

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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<p>Good Chicago Maroon article on all of the problems the high yield is causing:</p>

<p>Yield</a> for incoming students – The Chicago Maroon</p>

<p>This article also rightfully notes the fact that, for several years, the admissions committee has underestimated the yield, and the class has grown, essentially, "by mistake." </p>

<p>Again, this is fine if it happens once, but it's happened several times at the U of C. You'd think the admissions committee would have the good sense to be conservative by now.</p>

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<p>I think the class of 2017 will be a lot smaller, and the acceptance rate will (have to) dip.</p>

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<p>People start to worry about the core class size and financial pacakage after they see an extra big incoming class of 2016.
[Large</a> admitted class forces adjustments on College – The Chicago Maroon](<a href=“Saul Bellow, dead at 89 – Chicago Maroon”>Saul Bellow, dead at 89 – Chicago Maroon)</p>

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<p>^^ There isn’t anything written at all about worries concerning financial packages. If anything, it means that financial packages are better, since there’s more tuition.</p>

<p>I’m confident that the University will find a way to keep class sizes low, so that’s not what bothers me. The problem is the perpetual, negligent, and downright absurd miscommunications between Housing and Admissions. Housing stated a few years ago that it wanted 70-75% of undergraduates to stay in housing. The University then built a new dorm, and it appeared that this plan hads a good possibility of materializing. But then, Admissions perpetually and seemingly intentionally started overadmitting, making this scenario an impossibility. You see, there’s something called the waitlist that prevents overadmission and actually decreases the admit rate and increases yield the more you use it. I have a hard time believing that the University wouldn’t be using the waitlist for these purposes unless it had a secret reason not to. </p>

<p>(This year’s case PARTICULARLY highlights this absurdity; Admissions basically admitted so many students that any yield over 41% would lead to overadmission even without using the waitlist, despite the fact that everyone and their brother knew that yield was going to rise this year. Something’s up.)</p>

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<p>Someone shows worries in the comment, I think it is a reasonable worry.
[Yield</a> for incoming students – The Chicago Maroon](<a href=“Saul Bellow, dead at 89 – Chicago Maroon”>Saul Bellow, dead at 89 – Chicago Maroon)</p>

<p>UChicago administrators may like the big class size, one report from dean Boyer mentions only 10~20% senior class lives on campus, they try to attract more to live on campus, but who knows how, if space is limited.</p>

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<p>These stopgap measures have negative effects on student life. Given that the past two classes have been over-enrolled, and a new dorm that’s sorely needed won’t be built until ~2017-2018, student life on campus will actually not stabilize for another ~5 years. </p>

<p>It’s disappointing. I think it’s good for a college like UChicago to have juniors and seniors on campus (at least a decent number of them), but it won’t be realistic to have ~70% of all students in housing until probably 2018 or so.</p>

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<p>Chicago’s incoming class size is way out of proportion with its housing. Last Fall at Columbia, there were 1473 freshmen (1140 Columbia College + 323 SEAS).</p>

<p><a href=“Columbia OPIR”>Columbia OPIR;

<p>Depending on how many people show up this Fall, Chicago’s first-year class may be larger than Columbia’s!</p>

<p>The major difference between the two is that Columbia has over 5,000 beds available for Columbia College and SEAS. Chicago has undergraduate 2786 beds.</p>

<p>[Housing</a> : Overview](<a href=“Columbia Housing”>Columbia Housing)</p>

<p>Columbia may be slightly larger than Chicago because of 3-2 engineering transfers. However, Columbia now “guarantees” housing for all four years. When I was a student at Columbia more than 30 years ago, there were approximately 1800 beds in a total of 5 dorms for 4000 undergraduate students. </p>

<p>Chicago has a long way to go in terms of building dorms. There are a lot a places on the South side of the Midway to build, especially if a 60th street building like the acquired Mott Building were sacrificed and demolished. The U. of C. needs 850 more beds to have 70% capacity with just 5200 undergraduate students.</p>

<p>Why the U. of C. was targeting a class of even 1400 is perplexing. An incoming class the size of Columbia College alone of 1140 students would make a lot more sense.</p>

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<p>Yep - that’s what I’ve thought all along. The U of C doesn’t really have the physical plant necessary to maintain such a large class AND keep the goals of the College in mind. The College really should have built another dormitory before expanding. The administration has noted that they will hire “junior faculty” to teach more sections of courses because of the larger classes, but what’s going to happen to this junior faculty a few years down the line if the college returns to a more “normal” size? What will the talent level of this junior faculty be? </p>

<p>When I attended UChicago in the 90s, one of the great joys of the college was that there were maybe ~900 students per class, and many of the top faculty members (e.g. Sinaiko, Bevington, etc.) taught core classes. It was just awesome to have ~20 students and a leading faculty member for a first year course.</p>

<p>Now, the size of the college has grown, but it’s not like UChicago has added loads of top-level faculty members. </p>

<p>Something is being lost, and I’m not sure why.</p>

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<p>Well, Sinaiko died recently, and Bevington has retired, but as of a few years ago they were both teaching core classes. Both my kids ('09 and '11) had a lot of contact with Bevington, for good or ill.</p>

<p>I think when they say they are going to hire more junior faculty, what they mean is they are going to hire a lot of recent PhDs to what are effectively non-tenure-track post-doc positions teaching the Core. Because that’s who teaches a large majority of Hum and Sosc sections already. It’s not such a bad strategy – the academic job market sucks so bad, especially in the humanities, that you can get great people for a position like this, which after all involves being on faculty at the University of Chicago, and getting pay and benefits. Some of them are great – my son worshiped his Hum professor, who had published on Dante and Pynchon – and some not so great. Like junior faculty anywhere. Big-boy faculty (like Sinaiko and Bevington) will come in and teach a quarter of a sequence, although I think in some courses (Greek Thought is one) you will get ladder faculty teaching an entire sequence.</p>

<p>I don’t know what’s so shocking about Chicago having a class bigger than Columbia’s. I think of them as being the same size, at least for the past decade or so. (And I think the size they are both supposed to be is smaller than their classes of 2016.)</p>

<p>As for Chicago’s expansion, the decision was that they needed a stronger undergraduate alumni base, and more diversity among undergraduates, both of background and of interests. They wanted to preserve the college’s intellectual character, while bringing in more people who might be interested in being entrepreneurial and wealthy some day, as well as more athletes, artists, etc. For all of that, expanding to the same size as Columbia or Yale made sense.</p>

<p>The number of beds at elite colleges didn’t expand at all between 1980 and the mid-2000s. (Unless you count the emergence of some additional colleges as “elite” during that period, which definitely happened.) However, it has been expanding recently, and is going to keep expanding. Chicago, Princeton, and MIT have all increased the size of their classes by hundreds. Yale is about to do that, too. There is a lot of demand for it. The class increases at those four colleges in the past 10 years is equivalent to building a new Ivy.</p>

<p>I am very ambivalent about the notion that everyone should live on campus at Chicago. Their dorms are just pretty crummy, even the new ones, and there is fabulous, cheaper housing throughout Hyde Park. Chicago may have invented the “house” system, but it doesn’t know how to make it work, or knows and won’t pay the price tag, and that’s been true at least 40-50 years. I know having more on-campus housing is a big marketing issue, but honestly with the perspective of age and experience I think the model of Chicago, Penn, and Cornell – with about 50% of students living off campus, but close in to the university – has a lot of advantages compared to the 100% housing model at Yale, Harvard, Columbia. The university and the neighborhood are far more integrated, and people in the surrounding community have a much less contentious relationship with the university. If you pull the students out and stick them in dorms – stop them renting, buying food, etc. – you tell the landlords and businesses to stop investing in Hyde Park, and pretty soon it goes to Hades.</p>

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<p>JHS:</p>

<p>Your post points to a central issue: the identity of UChicago’s college is still pretty murky. Is it supposed to be a more “residential” college a la Yale or Harvard? Should it feature more off-campus housing like Penn or Cornell? </p>

<p>Who knows? It seems as if various branches of the administration are disconnected from one another (e.g. Admissions and the Housing Office), and there’s no clear goal in mind about what the structure and complexion of the College should be. </p>

<p>There’s certainly a directive to expand the college, but the expansion hardly seems to be going in a methodical, planned manner.</p>

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<p>An interesting thought here is that the South Campus dorm was originally designed to be much bigger than it ended up. I seem to recall that the original design called for 13 floors in the center, instead of the 8 floors in center, west, and east that it ended up. (Aesthetically, I think the higher center would have given it more of the “postmodern gothic” look it was intended to have.) But I think the plan was pared back in 07 or 08 because of the economic downturn. In retrospect, it could have saved them a lot of grief if they had stuck to the original plan. Surely they still would have had to replace Pierce, but a significantly larger South would have helped quite a bit.</p>

<p>JHS, I’m not sure why you find South a “crummy” dorm. I’ve been in it, and that’s hardly an adjective that comes to mind. If that’s crummy, I’d really love to see what you consider a merely “nice” (or even a first-rate) dorm! I do agree that UChicago need not follow the model of nearly full on-campus residency.</p>

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<p>With only 50~65 students over-enrollment at Princeton, Princeton may convert rooms, hire more faculty to accommodate large Class of 2016. What is UChicago’s strategy to deal with double sized over-enrollment?</p>

<p>[U&lt;/a&gt;. may convert rooms, hire more faculty to accommodate large Class of 2016 - The Daily Princetonian](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2012/05/21/30989/]U”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2012/05/21/30989/)</p>

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<p>Rimmail, it’s no secret what I consider a first-rate dorm. I would say there are 12 of them at Yale (OK, maybe 10), at least 6-7 at Harvard, and a few at Princeton. I’m sure there are others, elsewhere, but that’s what I have seen.</p>

<p>Princeton spent $400 million on Whitman College, to house 200 fewer students than South Campus. It’s quite a bit nicer.</p>

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<p>JHS - sure, the dorms at Yale and Princeton are first-rate (or world class, really), but does that make the UChicago dorms “crummy”? I remember seeing the Yale and Princeton dorms and I thought they were remarkably nice, but there are plenty of other dorms that are very good.</p>

<p>When I saw South, it seemed like a good dorm - certainly not first rate, but certainly not crummy either.</p>

<p>New Grad and I-House on the other hand for college students are pretty crummy options, mainly because they are not college dorms generally.</p>

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<p>My kid’s friends did not like being in South so much as upperclassmen – very noisy, no privacy, the kitchens didn’t work well. I think they had the right idea with South Campus, in terms of providing a variety of housing, but when they cut back the plans they cut back on some of the variety and amenities. It seems really functional, not so special. Less boring than Max, though. “Crummy” is probably not the right word for South, but I think it’s the right word for a system where that’s seen as the nicest.</p>

<p>I have nothing against crummy dorms, by the way. I think building luxury residential palaces is a poor use of university funds. I just think Chicago’s strategy is half-assed. They seem to think that building a four-year residential community is a key to their assault on HYPS status, but they are not willing to commit the resources it would take to build the kind of dorms that make the four-year residential community such a strength at HYP. They don’t even put resources into trying to maintain house affiliations for off-campus students, which shows that they aren’t really thinking strategically about this. And – unlike HPS – they don’t face the problem that if they don’t build space for their students, the students won’t be able to afford living there.</p>

<p>I think they could make a legitimate case that Hyde Park, like Ithaca, is a special environment and it’s GOOD that upperclassmen get to live in non-dorms. And maybe, like Penn, get private developers to build some nifty, close-in private dorms. If they aren’t going to do that, and they really want to go head-to-head with the big boys, it’s going to take massive resources.</p>

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<p>JHS said:</p>

<p>“I just think Chicago’s strategy is half-assed. They seem to think that building a four-year residential community is a key to their assault on HYPS status, but they are not willing to commit the resources it would take to build the kind of dorms that make the four-year residential community such a strength at HYP. They don’t even put resources into trying to maintain house affiliations for off-campus students, which shows that they aren’t really thinking strategically about this.”</p>

<p>Yup, you sum up the problem very cogently there. UChicago just doesn’t seem to have strategic direction with this at all. If you asked administrators at Yale or Princeton or even Penn and Cornell “what do you want the college to look like in 5 years?” you’d get sound responses from all these schools. Ask the same question to UChicago administrators, and I highly doubt you’d get a unified, clear response. It seems like some (like Boyer) want better residential facilities and a more “yale-like” feel, and are pushing for more/new dorms, whereas other admins (i.e. the admissions committee) are much more concerned with growing class sizes quickly to bulk up the alumni base. </p>

<p>In 5-7 years, I’d be very surprised if Yale, Cornell, Penn, etc. had very different identities/feels than they do now (i.e. Yale more residential college, Penn/Cornell more off-campus housing, less affiliation to dorms). With UChicago, who knows? A very big issue is UChicago doesn’t have the financial clout to create what some may want (great dorms), and the school should deal with this better and more reasonably - e.g. don’t expand class sizes with sparse resources!</p>

<p>It’s surprising a school so smart can lack such clear plans.</p>

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<p>JHS wrote: “The number of beds at elite colleges didn’t expand at all between 1980 and the mid-2000s.”</p>

<p>This is totally wrong. That’s exactly what Columbia did because it was tired of its NYC “commuter school” status. At Columbia, three new dormitories were built from scratch. East Campus (1981), Shapiro(1988), and Broadway(2000) were built and added 1400+ beds on top of the 1800 beds in the main quadrangle and the 350 beds in the converted insane asylum (now Wien). Further, former apartment buildings have been renovated and converted to undergrad housing on top of transferring grad housing to undergrad. Housing is now “guaranteed” and it is all within 1-2 blocks from the main campus. </p>

<p>[Category:Columbia</a> undergraduate residence halls - WikiCU, the Columbia University wiki encyclopedia](<a href=“http://www.wikicu.com/Category:Columbia_undergraduate_residence_halls]Category:Columbia”>Category:Columbia undergraduate residence halls - WikiCU, the Columbia University wiki encyclopedia)</p>

<p>However, anyone who thinks UChicago’s dorms are “crummy” or “very noisy, no privacy, the kitchens didn’t work well” probably wouldn’t last a semester a Columbia. Chicago’s strategy cannot be to imitate Yale as it is simply too expensive. If there are no current plans to build new dorms, then the U. of C. should acquire or lease older Hyde Park large apartment buildings for the interim. It is much better to house students together to make a community than to have them scattered about in rental properties over a square mile in Hyde Park.</p>

<p>In the case of Penn, there are 5628 beds in supposed College Houses and 2467 students who entered last fall, as per Penn housing and 2015 class profile. That is using up 43.8 % of capacity on freshmen. By Penn’s standards, Chicago should have an incoming class of 1220 (NOT 1525!) for its 2786 beds. However, Penn’s official numbers of on-campus housing are highly deceiving. A private company, probably run by Penn alums, build a monster apartment dormitory right across the street Penn’s super block, which includes three 25-story undergrad high rise apartments. This private dorm, The Radian, appears to have the capacity to hold over a 1000 students. So, with frat/sorority housing and with The Radian for the rich students, Penn likely has over 70% undergraduate students housed “on campus”. [The</a> Radian Apartments in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania](<a href=“http://www.theradianapartments.com/]The”>http://www.theradianapartments.com/)</p>

<p>As I understand it, there was no net increase in housing capacity from closing the Shoreland to opening the South Campus dormitory. It seems that the administration is now in self-destruct mode. At minimum, there is a need to add cheap utilitarian dorms that many would dislike. Who really wants to live in Hyde Park anyway? It is a difficult place to live unless you have a car.</p>

<p>What’s this rubbish about HYPS? Columbia has had a lower admit rate than Princeton for two years in a row. Columbia has a marginally higher rating than Stanford but a much smarter incoming class as measured by SAT’s. In the 1950’s and 60’s, Columbia was more highly regarded than either Princeton or Stanford. Maybe the U. of C. should try following Columbia’s four-year housing “guarantee” if it wants to break into the big leagues.</p>

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<p>This is somewhat tangential but the recent increase in MIT’s size is MIT getting back to its intended class size after a period of shrinking class sizes. Over 10 years ago, MIT decided all freshmen should live on campus instead of allowing them to live in frats or other places. They also did not want to push upperclassmen who wanted to stay out so they needed to icrease the housing stock or cut enrollment. As the housing stock can’t be magically increased overnight they cut undergrad enrollment from around 4,500 to a low of near 4,100. With the recent construction of Masseh Hall the housing stock is again sufficiently large to allow a total enrollment of 4,500. It is also obvious how this approach contrasts with the approach taken by Chicago.</p>

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<p>

A lot of students here like apartment life off-campus. Perhaps they would feel differently at a school with a completely different living culture like Yale, but acquiring new housing isn’t necessarily going to create demand where it doesn’t already exist. There are plenty of cheaper, nicer options available than South and Max–unlike the situation at Columbia–and building a new dorm won’t change that fact.</p>

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<p>Concerning the faculty question, all assistant professors, even tenure track are considered junior faculty. Chicago has had plans in place to higher 100 new faculty for some time. Many of these are top junior faculty hired for their academic promise. If they are teaching in the College this may be a very good thing. To teach in the College one must be invited by the Dean of the College. It is not guaranteed that someone hired by a department will teach in the college. This is why one sees titles such as Assistant Professor of Psychology and in the College.</p>