I would say it is better presented than previous ones. A few takeaways are
Business and consulting account for half of employment opportunities
Midwest employers account for half of employment opportunities
88% medical school acceptance rate
85% T-14 law school acceptance rate
The last two are impressive considering UChicago does not have grade inflation. Will be better if the GPAs are published among accepted students and so are the number of applicants.
I have heard the College really wants its graduates to be successful in landing jobs and the Career Advance Office is doing a fine job. My own D has got some internships through the office’s connections.
You can see the 2015’s report has more detailed information like acceptance rates for Teach For America, Law school and Med school. It also lists full-time recruiting partners (200+) and Metcalf internship employers (600+).
I agree with JHS and should add: it’s strange this data is first reported through the admissions website, rather than on the Career Advancement page itself. In this vein, the data looks a bit more like propaganda rather than anything else.
On this front, UPenn’s data is vastly superior - and it passes for data rather than a glossy advertisement. Indeed, Penn tracks the outcomes of each graduate in any major.
Chicago still is not being that transparent about this. My gut tells me the situation has improved in recent years in Hyde Park, but the school is still holding actual data very close to the vest. I’m not sure why - they’re certainly doing lots of surveys and data gathering - at a rate that’s probably similar to UPenn or Brown or any number of schools that are more transparent.
Also - re Eddi’s first post - Chicago certainly has grade inflation. It’s creeping up to be comparable with most of its peers, I would imagine. An enlarged Career Advancement Office has probably been pushing for that.
@Cue7 I’ve seen curent grade distributions from the Math and CS departments. If grade deflation means they are giving away mostly As, those departments have no grade deflation.
HydeSnark - math and cs (or some of the other stem majors) are too narrow to show an overall trend. If you search for Uchicago grade deflation on this board, you’ll come up with threads that do a good job of showing the overall picture. In particular, people have noted the considerable uptick in students graduating with honors.
Further, if you look at gradeinflation.com, or I imagine if you look up closed data from career advancement, you’d find that Chicago’s once legendary grade deflation is not up to snuff any more. Look at the Chicago students getting into harvard law or top medical schools - their gpas are probably comparable to their peers for these schools, and the numbers of students we have going to these schools are increasing. The quality of incoming student is somewhat better, but not a ton. This also indicates grade inflation - we just have more chicago students walking around with the high gpas necessary to get into these fancy grad schools and jobs.
Sure. Penn’s reports are impressive. I have heard Penn’s is sort of a gold standard regarding post graduation outcomes. Maybe some others.
Chicago’s 2015 outcomes may have some advertisement purpose given usually it publishes post graduation report in May. Compared to Penn’s it still has a way to go to publish more detailed break-downs. Now I am happy to see a list of employers and institutions to be there. Also some T-14 law schools look good. Of course knowing how many people have applied and how many have landed on T-14 will give a better picture.
Regarding the grade inflation or deflation in Chicago I have a though.
Let’s say a typical Chicago student spends a hypothetical 50 hours on her classes/labs/homework per week. She gets a GPA of B+ or a little bit more. While a typical student at most other schools spends 40 hours on her classes/labs/homework per week and she gets a GPA of B+ or a little bit more. On the transcript those two students’ GPAs are very comparable. So on a big picture there is no grade deflation for a Chicago students but she has to work harder to achieve the desired GPA. We know Chicago students usually put academics at the top and they achieve a comparable GPA.
If the Chicago student works way harder, say 70 hours per week, her GPA may reach A- or so. That may look like a grade inflation but it is not in reality.
From Chicago’s law and med school acceptance rates reported and conventional wisdom of the importance of GPA to law and med school admission I do not think there is a grade deflation at the College neither a grade inflation. Chicago students just work harder to get a comparable GPA.
I also think the Career Advancement Office is doing a fine job to help students be successful even it may lag other schools in some areas. At least the attitude change is very noticeable and the efforts have paid off recently sort of.
Having quite a few friends at Penn, I can assure you that Penn’s graduation outcomes are not at all impressive unless you are in Wharton or are interested in business or consulting jobs. Their career advising in the engineering school (SEAS) does an extremely poor job of providing opportunities related to engineering.
(That’s not to say @Poplicola is wrong, or completely wrong. I am pretty impressed by the outcomes in the survey, even disregarding the massive weighting towards financial and consulting jobs. The engineering jobs are much fewer, but seem pretty good to me. And the report makes clear that only about half of SEAS students get their jobs through the career center.)
While what I wrote is simply anecdotal, I am not impressed at all by graduate outcomes at Penn. I’ll be actively discouraging my children from pursuing an engineering degree at Penn’s SEAS. This, of course, is all relative. Based on experience, co-op based programs at public institutions such as Waterloo have much better career outcomes (far lower tuition, and you even get paid to go to school!). In some years, Waterloo has 99.9% employment rate.
Eddi: sure maybe Chicago students work harder to achieve a comparable GPA to that of other schools. There’s really no way of knowing or measuring that, though.
What we do know is that there are more Chicago students today walking around with high GPAs than there used to be. Further, even 10 years ago, there were some articles pointing to Chicago faculty feeling pressure to inflate GPAs, as seen here: http://chicagomaroon.com/2005/01/18/gpas-get-a-76-boost-from-grade-inflation/
In the past 10 years, with all of the change at Chicago, don’t you think the impetus to give Chicago students higher grades has only increased?
Additionally, I highly doubt that Chicago students now are working harder than the cohorts from 15-20 years ago (i.e. roughly my time at Chicago). If anything, they are working less because the school offers so much more in the form of extra-curricular and recreational resources. This being said, the joke in my day was you could work extremely hard - for 70 or 80 hours a week - and still get a C. The average grade given was probably around a B, and this is supported by data on gradeinflation.com.
I highly doubt that students at Chicago now are breaking their backs to get Cs or even Bs. In fact, doing a comparable level of work, in your view, seems to yield B+s and A-s. This, then, demonstrates grade inflation. Maybe not as much as you see at some peers, but it’s in the ballpark.
20 years ago, Chicago wasn’t even playing the same game as Harvard, Duke, etc.
This is way off track for a UChicago thread, but Waterloo:Penn is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. I don’t know what exactly you mean by “public institutions such as Waterloo,” because I question whether there are a lot of other public institutions equivalent to Waterloo, which is more or less the MIT of Canada and a world-class computer engineering school, which offers a somewhat different student experience than most US universities, and which is much, much cheaper than any US university, especially if you are Canadian.
I note, by the way, that the Penn report shows a 95% employment rate for 2015 SEAS graduates who sought employment. And it has what seems to be about a 95% response rate, which is way above the norm for this sort of thing. (I’d love to know what kind of data Waterloo has for its 99.9% employment figure. A tenth of one percent for a Waterloo engineering class could not possibly mean more than two people, and probably not that many.)
Yah it’s a bit off track. I guess I’m just angry and bitter because a few of my high school friends who attended Penn SEAS have been unemployed (one even double majored in comp sci and bioengineering and had a reputable GPA and research experience) for two years. They would’ve probably been better off attending a public, co-op program back in Canada. A few of my friends at schools like Waterloo, UBC, etc (not as bright as those at Penn) ended up at Microsoft, Apple, and Google simply because they had co-op experiences under their belt. Life just isn’t fair. Sometimes I question the value of having an elite education/pedigree in disciplines such as engineering or computer science.
Sorry one thing I did not say it clearly in my previous post:
“I have heard Penn’s is sort of a gold standard regarding post graduation outcomes.”
What I meant was the Penn’s post graduation report was sort of a gold standard - the data and presentation. I did not mean the actual student outcomes.
Cue7, I have re-read your comments and realized that maybe the perception of grade deflation/inflation was different.
What I was talking about was that there was no obvious grade inflation these days compared to its peers or other colleges in the nation. Let’s say there are 10 peer schools to measure the GPA. If a typical student works normal hours and gets an above average GPA among students of those 10 schools I would think her grade is inflated. From what I have heard this symptom does not exist in Chicago now.
What you were saying was that there was grade deflation until maybe 10 years ago. A Chicago student had to work much harder to get a B or so. I agree with your observation that there was a deflation before and the grade has been inflated over years to the current time. I do not know the workload comparison between current students’ and old ones’. But I can feel there are less complains about academics. One of the most complains is food, which IMO is exaggerated. One can hardly be satisfied with the thing you have to eat everyday and 7 days a week. Of course I would like to see there are more dinning halls on campus and more eateries in Hyde Park.
So in summery I do not think we are conflicting each other regarding grade deflation/inflation. The grade has been inflated at College over years but the grade is not inflated compared to its peers.
The work load and degree of difficulty of course load at UChicago clearly depends on what courses one takes and number of courses taken per quarter. My son is a freshman and he has been taking physics, calculus, honors computer science and English each of the first two quarters. The work load has been a bit insane. Many of his friends are taking only three courses per quarter with one or maybe two science classes. They are nowhere near as busy.
The Humanity, Calculus, and Physics are parts of the Core which everyone has to take. However some people take natural science sequence instead of physics or chemistry which is harder.
I have heard the grading on Calculus is generous while the grading on Humanity is stingy. I am not sure about the honors Computer Science. It may be the most challenge one for your S. I hope he is doing fine curricular-wise and extracurricular-wise.
Yes, most courses are graded on a decent curve, but most of the test scores are lower than kids expect due to stringent scoring. My son is doing relatively well, but he and many of his classmates feel insecure about their grades because of the tough exam scoring. I think most believe the TAs are overly picky and often take off points when the situation does not warrant it. My son is involved in a little bit of extracurricular activity, but does not have a great deal of time outside of classes and studying to be involved in multiple clubs or organizations. That should change next quarter when he no longer has to take calculus and physics. However, computer science will always require many hours of work per week.
My son is happy he is attending UChicago because he is learning a great deal. Any kid who challenges himself or herself at The University and can handle it will be very prepared for a rigorous professional career after college.