<p>Stanford and Chicago were both founded at about the same time by wealthy men hoping to create a great private university in “the West” that resembled the great universities of the East. They took their inspiration largely (but not entirely) from the institutions we now call “Ivies”. The initial Chicago leadership was almost entirely associated with Yale. Stanford’s first leaders were tied to Cornell, which was really the pre-eminent educational innovator of the mid-late 19th Century in the U.S. (Interestingly, though, Stanford’s initial faculty had a distinctly Midwestern cast, while Chicago largely raided faculties in the East.) </p>
<p>Within a decade of their founding, Chicago and Stanford were both among the 13 charter members of the Association of American Universities, then as now the gold standard for serious research universities in this country. Chicago was actually one of five convening institutions, along with Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins. Six of the eight Ivies (not Brown or Dartmouth) were also charter members.</p>
<p>It is true that in 1963 Stanford did not quite have the reputation it has today, but it is ridiculous to suggest that it was anything like a community college then, and the elements that created its meteoric rise in public regard were already in place: a stupendous electrical engineering program that had already spawned Hewlett-Packard and SRI, the work of Lewis Terman in its Psychology Department, its law school enhanced by a wholesale raid on the Columbia faculty, the founding of its business school, the Hoover Institute, the linear accelerator which was then being designed . . . . Four future Supreme Court Justices had already graduated from the college (Rehnquist, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Breyer). That’s pretty impressive – it gives you a sense of the kinds of students it was attracting, even though few would have compared it to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton then. (Princeton currently has three alumni serving. Yale has had lots of law school alumni there, but no college alumni. Chicago has had one college alumnus.)</p>
<p>If you look at the Google Profiles of all the major universities, UChicago is the only school whose 2013 acceptance rate is listed. All the others still have their 2012 acceptance rate.</p>
<p>^I don’t think this will ever happen. Eventually, the location in Chicago becomes an issue with applicants. The majority of the US population is on the two coasts.</p>
<p>Hi Jak, I’m new on this forum, but I was under the impression that Chicago does not have the most national merit scholars (that distinction lies with Harvard). Perhaps you are mistaking the institutionally awarded scholarship (which most top schools don’t offer) for the one awarded by college board. My daughter received a national merit scholarship from Chicago but I don’t think that is equivalent to one sponsored by college board.
Also, I am of the opinion that the yield could hit the 60% over the next few years. The only problem is that as the college gets more competitive, it will be battling for students with schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Duke and Caltech are prime examples of top schools with low yields. I believe this is because of the large overlap between them and schools like Harvard. Perhaps Chicago will begin to suffer from the effects of the same phenomenon? Either way, Zimmer and Nondorf have both done a fantastic job of improving the college’s image and convincing students to attend!</p>
<p>My only beef about Chicago is its financial aid package. It uses its own financial profile in addition to the css and fafsa to grant FA therefore limited the FA package to the middle income families who want to come to Chicago. I was told by Princeton in a campus tour that any qualified admitted student in P will have no debt at graduation. Yet, in Chicago’s FA package, loans are major part of it. The merit scholarship is so few and far short of a real merit to a qualified student in relationship to the COA so that only “rich” family can afford.</p>
<p>Loans depend on the individual package of the student but I know Uchicago doesn’t do huge loans like NYU does and the school has created programs to reduce loans through the Odyssey scholarship for fairly lower incomes (below 60,000 I think) as well as uchicago promise guarantees no loans for Chicago area students. Average debt is not too high I’m sure compared to other schools</p>