<p>Because the Class of 2017 again exceeds the target size (1479 rather than 1400), for Fall 2013 the size of the College will grow to 5,700+ (its largest ever).</p>
<p>UChicago made substantial progress in all areas of admission against the Ivy League schools this year, continuing to rise more rapidly than any other school in the country:</p>
<p>1) UChicago passed up Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, and MIT in applications
2) UChicago passed up Penn, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Brown in admissions selectivity.
3) UChicago passed up Dartmouth and Cornell in yield rate, the first time UChicago passed up an Ivy League school in yield (but not the last)</p>
<p>In fact, UChicago has eclipsed Dartmouth in all aspects of admissions:</p>
<p>applications
30,369 (UChicago) vs. 22,400 (Dartmouth)</p>
<p>admit rate
8.8% (UChicago) vs. 10% (Dartmouth)</p>
<p>yield
55.2% (UChicago) vs. 48.5% (Dartmouth)</p>
<p>This is just getting ridiculous. UChicago’s yield jumped from 39% to 55% over 2 years. Nondorf better be getting paid big bucks for this.</p>
<p>Putting in context of the other big names, we have (as of last year’s data):</p>
<p>81% Harvard (SCEA)
74% Stanford (SCEA)
70% MIT (EA)
69% Yale (SCEA)
67% Princeton (SCEA)
63% Penn (ED)
57% Columbia (ED)
56% Brown (ED)
55% UChicago (EA)
53% Cornell (ED)
50% Dartmouth (ED)
43% Northwestern (ED)
42% Duke (ED)
41% Caltech (EA)
38% Johns Hopkins (ED)</p>
<p>Considering the fact that Chicago is EA and most of the other top schools can attribute their high yields to ED, this is an extremely impressive showing by Chicago. Chicago tops Cornell (ED), Dartmouth (ED), Northwestern (ED), Duke (ED), Caltech (EA), and Johns Hopkins (ED), and it is right behind Columbia (ED) and Brown (ED).</p>
<p>Actually, this yield implies that next year’s class is again overfilled! Some 200-300 dorm rooms are going to be destroyed at Pierce, and we actually have more students (~1480) coming in than graduating in the class of 2013. This means that they’ll probably have to plan for no more than 1300 entering students for the Class of 2018. The university will be forced to plan for an even higher yield next year as well, meaning that next year’s admit rate will probably be 6-7%.</p>
<p>I can’t wait to see UChicago’s cross-admit data with HYPSM on Parchment.com. I bet Chicago will be substantially winning its cross-admits with Princeton and Yale.</p>
<p>I believe Chicago has a bright future and is experiencing an incredible present. Here in the US history is valued greatly so I guess that its going to be a while until Chicago finds its place in the HYPSM acronym, but this dosent mean that it isnt at top tier level in some areas. </p>
<p>@truth123 Yale’s rate is 65.2 for the class of 2015, Princeton made a mistake in their article:</p>
<p>Correction: Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this article and its headline incorrectly stated that this year’s yield rate was higher than Yale’s. Yale has not yet released its yield rate for its Class of 2017. The ‘Prince’ regrets the error.</p>
<p>Only shallow people worry about the so-called “HYP” reference. Smart people worry about Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Einstein, etc. (although you can’t expect much from uneducated Americans). Those last names are infinitely superior to the former.</p>
<p>And none of the current university rankings list HYPS as the top 4 schools in the world.</p>
<p>UChicago has been superior to the Ivy League from day one and leads them all in Nobel Prizes. So, yes, history is on UChicago’s side.</p>
<p>As a proud alum, I believe truth123 does a great disservice to our institution through partisan arrogance. Of course cheerleading is appreciated, but intellectual rigor and compassion for context (re: unnecessary “uneducated” Americans bit) are the cornerstones of a UChicago education–it’s a shame “truth” never truly learned these lessons.</p>
<p>Actually just a little reminder that two can play the same game. Perhaps you should have studied Western Civilization at UChicago.</p>
<p>The Ivy League is nothing from a historical point of view. It has existed for 80 years. 50 years ago Stanford was a second-rate community college. At the turn of the century the French and German universities led the world.</p>
<p>Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer didn’t even go to college, let alone HYP. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln–America’s two greatest Presidents–didn’t go to Ivy League schools. Nor did John D. Rockeller, the richest man in American history.</p>
<p>Cambridge University and Oxford University in England have a much more illustrious history than the Ivy League, having led the world for centuries. But even the establishment in Britain could never deal with the fact their greatest name, Shakespeare, didn’t go to Oxbridge (thus the conspiracy theories to find an alternative ‘author.’)</p>
<p>Universities come and universities go (you might want to Google the universities of Berlin, Bologna, and Edinburgh.) In the beginning God didn’t create HYP. </p>
<p>For most of its 400-year history, Harvard was a one room school house, completely in the shadow of the European universities. In fact, to this day America’s literature and culture greatly pale in comparison with that of England, France, Germany, Italy, etc. (Sorry, I don’t count American TV or reality shows as culture.)</p>
<p>And to this day, when one speaks of the Golden Age of Civilization, one is speaking of Ancient Greece.</p>
<p>Fortunately for humanity, many of the greatest minds in history didn’t even go to college (which must blow the minds of the CC crowd.) </p>
<p>It’s absolutely hilarious to hear a bunch of shallow braggards on CC claim that they are Plato, Aristotle, and Shakespeare because they went to HYP. In fact, there does seem to be a particular form of mental illness and delusion throughout the Ivy League (thus all of the cheating scandals at Harvard, since the students can’t really live up to their own braggadocio.)</p>
<p>Anyone with any sense of history or education wouldn’t need a reminder of these facts. The vast majority of the greatest minds in history had nothing to do with the Ivy League. Fortunately for the world, no single institution, including UChicago, will ever have a lock on human intelligence. But the important thing about UChicago is that what mattered most throughout its history was the education you got, not trying to sit around weighing which school had the more supposedly prestigious name.</p>
<p>And if you didn’t learn that lesson at UChicago I feel sorry for you.</p>
<p>@truth Sorry but funcomes2apply is actually correct. While its great that you know so much about the history of higher education, when you discredit the Ivy League to raise the level of UChicago, you’re no better than those you abhor. Fun was mostly saying that, while it is ok to claim your school is the best, you shouldn’t be overly arrogant and stipulate that your education makes you better than “uneducated” Americans because you can see through the lies of the HYP label. After all, didn’t you just spend 20 minutes writing a speech defending the uneducated?
All of us know that Chicago is just as good as school as an Ivy, and that labels mean nothing. Just please, try to have the sense of common courtesy not to throw out insults at random. Its very unbecoming.</p>
<p>This whole race thing is absurd. The huge number of kids rejected from a school is an indication of a college’s admissions failure. It means that the college is not socially responsible, is not concerned about the quality of its admissions pool and it not conducting its admissions season in a socially responsible and ethical manner. It means they are unsuccessful marketing their school to their target population and are creating a lot of noise instead. A beter way to think about it is "University of Chicago solicited >28,000 applications from students that they rejected, thereby unnecessarily costing families approximately $280,000 (Including cost of scores-and does not include travel costs for visits). That unnecessary cost for families is followed by having to muster up funds to pay for education. The PR expense is also immense to the university. All this BS hinders efforts to carefully match students to schools and causes unnecessary hardship. The numbers game is totally irrelevant to the quality of the school and higher yield numbers says nothing about the quality or even popularity of the school since the most important variable is unknown-and that is which school was preferred over which others. The choice of Chicago over Harvard, Yale and MIT means something entirely different than the choice of Chicago over NYU, U of Maine and St. Johns(NY) and it is impossible to differentiate on the basis of yield alone.</p>
<p>Although your overall commentary is certainly defensible, your last sentence is rubbish. Looking at yield rate together with the SATs of entering students gives you a good picture of how a school is faring. (Obviously, a school isn’t going to have high SAT scores if it’s not winning its cross-admits with other elite schools.) Not to mention that sites like parchment.com offer statistically significant cross-admit data, with Chicago jumping in cross-admit performance against its elite peers in the past couple of years. The 55% figure is very relevant, and is very good news for Chicago.</p>
<p>Also, $280,000 isn’t really that much money for an entire 30,000-strong pool of applicants. It’s also not accurate - a great many students were pardoned from the application fee due to their financial situation. Let’s also not forget that most applicants are from upper-class families where the admission fee is going to be trivial. Although there is a question of where to draw the line in marketing, all other elite colleges market to students who probably are not going to be admitted. It’s obviously impractical to market to only people who are likely to be admitted, especially in the case of schools like UChicago when you can’t tell who is going to be admitted from students’ SAT scores due to the holistic application process.</p>
<p>Most of the criticism leveled at UChicago just seems to be from people who don’t want Chicago to join the ranks of HYPSM anytime soon. I think Nondorf’s strategy is that once UChicago starts being mentioned in the same breath as HYPSM among the general public, this criticism will start being more and more discouraged. Leveling arguments against schools that are “obviously more prestigious” is much more difficult than leveling arguments against schools that only the elite know about.</p>
<p>Not just $280,000, you missed one zero, made it 10 times smaller. It should be $2,800,000 for 28,000 applications if you include application fee and some SATs or ACT…</p>
<p>First of, I think you meant $2,800,000 rather than $280,000. But please remember that were it not for the efforts of the admissions office to garner more applicants, there would still be thousands of rejectees, certainly more than 10,000. The “unnecessary costs” (another idea I shall try to debunk) that can be blamed on the admissions office is probably closer to one million than three.</p>
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<p>Well, it seems to me that a decrease in an institution’s acceptance rate is almost always heralded as a success of a college’s admissions office. Improving a college’s applicant pool strength and increasing it’s size often go hand in hand, not to mention the affect of (perceived) selectivity on prestige and rankings, things that Chicago ignored for far too long.</p>
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<p>Marketing is a service, albeit one we’ve learned to hate (but we would hate almost anything if it were to interrupt our TV shows…). If I hadn’t discovered Chicago through a friend’s mailings, I probably would not have realized that it was precisely what I was looking for in a school, and I probably wouldn’t be Chicago bound right now. I don’t see why it’s a universities duty to be socially responsible, but short of inundating your mailbox with packages, I don’t really see how Chicago is harming society. Their acceptance statistics are all available online, and it’s a students decision to weigh the costs (time, applicant fee and other investments, not least the emotional) to their odds of gaining admission.</p>
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<p>The university wouldn’t know whether a student lies in it’s target population until he or she applies. One way admitting a better student body is by simply increasing the number of applicants (by definition, it’s the applicants on job to be self-selective). </p>
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<p>Your rejoinder notwithstanding, the best way of thinking about this is the University reached out to thousands of people who, statistically speaking (since close to 25,000 applied last year, and fewer than 10,000 applied just a few years ago) would not have applied otherwise. These students were still given every option of not applying (and several did not), but some decided the application fee (often waved) was worth the odds. I am one of these students, and even though this process led to the disappointment of 4 of my friends, I’m still glad for it (on a macro level as well. One persons acceptance is easily worth the disappointment/100 bucks of tens of rejectees). Investments do not yield positive results for everyone (or even most), but that is not a testament to the reprehensibility of investments, just the investors (if even that).</p>
<p>
Chicago is pretty good with FA these days (and are getting better). Chicago also awards several merit scholarships (unlike the Ivies etc.). Out of the thousands admitted, I’m sure there are several hundreds (even a thousand) students who would not have applied were it not for the tireless efforts of the admissions office (and their payoff for admissions alone more than compensates for a few hundred dollars here and there). Many would have received better financial offers from Chicago than they did at other (peer) institutions. These total savings alone may have compensated for the million or so spent on applicant fees (at the very least, blunted it).</p>
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If I hade to put money on it, I’m pretty sure they don’t regret doing it. You seem awfully concerned with only the costs of a transaction and tend to ignore the benefits.</p>
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Hyperbole and rehashed arguments…</p>
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<p>The number game is irrelevant in itself, but it’s just a numerical (and hence objective and precise) way of looking at something very relevant, which is the quality of a school’s class. Nonetheless, you don’t seem to consult any data on the “important variable” before tearing Chicago apart. Here is the only data I could find on it:</p>
<p>It may not be precise (look at their methodology and sample sizes) but it does pass the sniff-test, at least for the first few colleges. Chicago does pretty well, it’s ranked 6th, right behind MIT and Princeton and just ahead of Brown and Caltech. Their past data chronicles Chicago’s ascent (and therefore the admissions office’s successes) very well.</p>
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<p>I think you underestimate (among many underestimations) the quality of Chicago’s student body. Consider</p>
<p>With parchment, the first 10 seem more or less accurate. However, I have a hard time believing (if you go through the next 20) that Pomona or Carleton would be ahead of Columbia.
If you look at the UChicago profile, the 18.8% accept rate (from 2010) is still used, so it may not be up-to-date.</p>
<p>"50 years ago Stanford was a second-rate community college. "</p>
<p>I don’t believe Stanford was ever a community college. Hewlett Packard was started in 1939 by two Stanford grads but looking up Walter Hewlett’s bio, I see his father joined Stanford medical school faculty back in 1916.</p>