<p>As I was expecting, this number resulted from the fact that Chicago accepted fewer students than normal as the school looks to keep making gains on the yield front. Generally, the U of C tends to accept around 3,600 students (last year, for example, the U of C accepted 3,647 students). This year, that number dropped to 3,446 accepts from the total applicant pool of 21,773. </p>
<p>Moreover, also as expected with an admissions committee that seems more interested in playing the "big numbers" admissions game, Chicago seems to be more yield-conscious. To achieve a class size of around 1350, the yield would need to be around 40%. </p>
<p>More broadly speaking, the statistics across the nation at selective schools are pretty stunning. Stanford, Harvard etc. all saw ridiculously low accept rates. </p>
<p>I'm also curious to note how Chicago's recruitment efforts are proceeding for next year. The 12% bump in apps between the Class of 2014 and 2015 was nice, but fell below the jumps found at some peer schools, such as Columbia and Duke. I wonder if the Nondorf regime is priming for another significant jump (say 15-20%?) in apps for the Class of 2016?</p>
<p>Overall, though, from the big numbers standpoint, this was a good year for Chicago! Who knows how much lower the accept rate will drop in the future?!</p>
<p>I don’t know about Duke, but Columbia’s big bump was a Common Application bump, like Chicago’s enormous bump last year. In an era when everyone’s application numbers have been rising, no one’s application numbers have increased at a greater rate than Chicago’s over the past 5-10 years.</p>
<p>JHS - agreed - Chicago’s acceptance rate has plummeted over the past 5-10 years, and apps have gone up steadily. As Chicago has tried to broaden the group of applicants it solicits, though, I wonder how much lower the accept rate will go.</p>
<p>As opposed to the more aloof demeanor that characterized Chicago’s admissions policies in the 90s and early 00s, Chicago now seems to have embraced the “big numbers” game of admissions. Accordingly, if Brown, Columbia, Duke etc. are all getting around 30K apps, I also wonder if Chicago aims to get a comparably large applicant pool, and also see its accept rate drop to the 10% range. If that’s the case, there is certainly more room for gains to be made.</p>
<p>I’m sort of disappointed with the motivation to decrease the acceptance rate. I applied to Chicago because it was a fantastic school off the beaten track. Now it’s become a big name school and I’m not sure I like that too much. But it does make me happy to know that I was good enough to get in with such competition.</p>
<p>If Chicago wanted to get the admissions rate down to 10%, I’m sure it could pretty easily. There are ways of manipulating numbers that make you look more selective than you really are. For instance, implementing an ED program while keeping EA would allow Chicago to boost its yield substantially. This is how Northwestern’s admit rate went down 5 percentage points despite the fact that it only had a 10% increase in admissions - it merely played the ED game by accepting about 100 more early applicants and thereby guaranteeing a higher yield.</p>
<p>Also, if you look at WashU, there is still quite a bit of room to grow with regard to number of applications. It’s amazing that WashU’s admit rate (15.40%) was lower than Chicago’s (15.83%) this year, despite the fact that last year, Chicago’s was substantially lower. Honestly, though, that admit rate for WashU will probably increase through the summer as it does every year, since they employ the waitlist so heavily, and this year in particular, it seems they have assumed a 37.5% yield, which is much higher than what they should be expecting (which is around 30%).</p>
<p>Honestly, though, as long as Chicago stays ahead of Northwestern, WashU, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell, then I think it’s in a pretty good position in terms of admit rate. I’m sure Nondorf will still aim higher as he always does, but I’m satisfied. Getting our admit rate down to about 10% is fool’s gold. Once we actually are able to accomplish that, the rest of the super-elites’ admit rates will have already gone down to sub-5% level.</p>
<p>Of course the acceptance rate is a sharp estimator of the quality and intellectual tone of the students who attend the University. Any Nordorf and his brother, Procrustes, would know this.</p>
<p>That’s because they accurately predicted yield last year, or even under-estimated it a bit. So it’s understandable that they’d predict a small jump in yield this year. But predicting a 7% jump in yield is just stupid. (Chicago experienced a 3% jump in yield last year. But by the number of accepted applicants, it’s clear that we’re only predicting a 1-2% additional jump this year, which is pretty reasonable.) So WashU is sure to take tons of people off the waitlist. So is Northwestern, which also assumed like a 5% jump in yield.</p>