Huts on the Midway sound a LOT more rustic than Vue53 LOL. Things certainly have changed in the past 70 years.
@ThankYouforHelp It’s the total numbers and not the per capita which is being pushed hard for Chicago. I don’t even think per capital made the top 20 with 2015 stats. 2016 was highlited due to the sharp rise and candidate finger pointing.
I’ve posted many times. I’ve spent the better part of the last two months in Hyde Park and come to find all the press and concerns completely unfounded. It’s an absolute gem. I’ve done my best to tell prospective parents this as well. It’s always the first question asked.
RD was under 2%, imagine if they the class was only slightly larger than last year, I think it would have a detrimental impact on RD moving forward.
Just putting this out there, but if UChicago can get a highly qualified class with a drop in overall applications, does the overall drop in applications really matter to anyone but the forums and maybe/probably not rankings ?
As an applicant, still dismal odds of an offer.
@JHS at #38 - just reporting the news. Not all of it was a plot by conservatives with an agenda as another poster was implying. Look, Chicago went through a rough patch a couple years ago due in large part to Rahm Emmanuel’s sleazy coverup of the videotape in order to win re-election. The fallout was happening right around the time that families were looking into schools so it should be no surprise if some of that contributed to the decline - at least a bit - in the RD rate. The news that the City of Chicago fudges the murder stats doesn’t help either. Should any of this be projected onto perceptions of safety in Hyde Park specifically? Probably not. But will it be? Probably so.
This might help:
Despite Chicago’s alarming, if select, murder statistics and routine singling out by President Donald Trump for gun violence, this lakeside metropolis was just ranked one of the safest cities in the world.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, a London-based research firm affiliated with the Economist magazine, named Chicago to its 2017 Safe Cities Index, issued Thursday — one of only three US cities to crack the top 20 — largely based on advances in digital security.
“Just putting this out there, but if UChicago can get a highly qualified class with a drop in overall applications, does the overall drop in applications really matter to anyone but the forums and maybe/probably not rankings?”
The impression we got from others in the university community, at least for this year, is: No. While seeing favorable trends in admit rates or applicant numbers is always nice, what they really care about is the kind of student that emerges from the process. The big news from the switch to ED seemed to be that they were really delighted with the class they got and so the strategy was a success.
Will that be the prevailing viewpoint if they continue a decline in applications? Nope - academics will start to wonder what’s keeping the school from attracting a large pool of talented kids. Admit rate drops are still a nice simple indicator that things are going well and reversing that trend is not done w/o risking some very pointed questions. But that’s something for another year.
I think the continuous crime reports of Chicago last year was one of the biggest reasons the total applications dropped.
Since four years ago when my D attended the College I have had much better apprehension about the safety at Hyde Park and in Chicago as well. Indeed Chicago is not as dangerous as on the paper and Hype Park is a rich and safe place to live. The campus is very safe and the students are not bothered by the safety at all.
But from another point of view, pretending you were a high school senior and you lived in a suburban, small town, rural area, and middle sized city, you would have had a great concern about the safety of Chicago thanks to its continuous crime coverage. Many those students and their parents might have dropped UChicago off their list entirely, even it is a great fit and it has good reputations these days.
Anyway there are a lot of people who do not live in a big city and are not used to the coverage of Chicago’s crime.
“Hype Park” - I like it, even if it looks like it was a type or a Freudian slip.
Also the College purposely increased the class size this cycle from the last cycle since they took people off the wait list even in April. But they might have overestimated the summer melt so they ended up with 1700+, which was unplanned.
I think the action of careless over-enrollment does have negative impacts on the quality of college experience for all current students at College now.
We’re just speculating that it was unplanned, it could have been decided that 1700+ was a reasonable number and they had contingency plan in place if it went that high. The college has definite plans to increase its overall numbers long range.
Hyde park may be fine but the south and east neighborhoods to campus are very dangerous…like it or not
No comparison to NU that you can easily walk to Evanston
I am more concerned with the significant drop in the number of applicants. Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science is the future. The lacking of a good computer science and engineering program is and will be an enormous disadvantage to the University of Chicago. As demand in this area continue to increase, the university will lost more applicants in the long run.
I think GO is on to something.
Also architecture.
As for location it could be as much a strength as a weakness. It certainly is for my son who works in the loop while living in HP several months after graduation.
IIRC, Nondorf mentioned something about offering a major in architecture next year. Also business economics. Not sure if the latter will be offered through Booth or not but if so it’ll take some pressure off economics.
GO writes: “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science is the future. The lacking of a good computer science and engineering program is and will be an enormous disadvantage to the University of Chicago.”
I think he has a point. The university does have a smallish but very good computer science program. It has excellent math and statistics departments. Those resources provide a good starting point for a push into the artificial intelligence and machine learning fields. It would be great to see that happen.
@Kentriko Are you a native Chicagoan? Have you lived in Hyde park or Evanston? Have you seen the presence of UCPD on campus and at Hyde Park? Have you walked at night along Midway Plaisance or 57th Street?
I do not deny that there is a danger if you decide to walk at midnight at 63rd and Halstad but almost none of the students would normally venture out to Engelwood or west Washington Park anyway at 2:00 am. And if you go to West Evanston or Howard at the same hour, you won’t be a whole lot safer either.
It is a tragedy that there are a lot of gun violence in Chicago. But it is also true that almost all the gun violence happens in poor black neighborhood in places like East Garfield Park, Pullman, North Lawndale etc and they are far away from Hyde Park. Hyde Park has always been a fortress among a sea of suburban decay. Students are safe by urban standard in Hyde Park.
Personally, I am sick of uninformed people saying that because of Chicago street violence, so University of Chicago is unsafe. Last time I check, neither Columbia nor UPenn is located in miles of perfectly pristine and quiet city neighborhood. I am quite sure Columbia and UPenn campus is perfectly safe for students but they do have to exercise reasonable caution when they venture outside. It is just the same for U of C and Hyde Park.
Right on 85bears46! As an alum who grew up on the South Side of Chicago who makes frequent trips back to Chicago and to campus I completely concur. Yes, there still is a crime and gun violence problem in Chicago. But, the neighborhoods around Hyde Park have transformed themselves in a very positive direction over the past several decades. The high crime parts of Chicago are far from Hyde Park. I have posted on this before and it is tiresome to have to do so yet again. But outdated and mistaken thinking needs to be challenged.
Right on 85bears46! As an alum who grew up on the South Side of Chicago who makes frequent trips back to Chicago and to campus I completely concur. Yes, there still is a crime and gun violence problem in Chicago. But, the neighborhoods around Hyde Park have transformed themselves in a very positive direction over the past several decades. The high crime parts of Chicago are far from Hyde Park. I have posted on this before and it is tiresome to have to do so yet again. But outdated and mistaken thinking needs to be challenged.
I do believe they had contingency plan in place of over-enrollment. Anyway the University owns a lot of properties at Hype Park, and it is easy to find rentals there. So in the summer the University rented a very good apartment complex at 53rd street to lure upperclassmen into it and to make space on campus for first-years.
But it is hardly a good plan at all. It only indicates they did not plan extra 100 first-years and rushed at the end. I have observed that many universities maintain a fixed range of enrollment each year to fit their infrastructure. In Chicago’s case the Class of 2017 and 2018 had 1400+ each year; the Class of 2018 had 1500+ and 2019 had almost 1600. Then the Class of 2020 has 1700+. They have constructed North but taken out 5 satellite dorms during that period. The net gain of beds is in a few hundreds, which is less the demand. Besides the bed they also need to consider dinning, and more important the classroom experience. The class schedules need to adjust and more teachers need to be had.
Overall I think it is more like an unplanned event than a planned one.