As many posters here on CC have observed and expressed that the campus is very safe and Hype Park is very livable. But those posters are more informed people.
Here we are discussing the drop of the applications this cycle and many of those missing applicants are not well informed regarding the campus, the location of Hype Park and the geography of Chicago. An uninformed person has heard of high crimes in Chicago and knows the University is in Chicago (obviously) and could have formed a connection of crime of the city with the safety of the campus. Four years ago I had sort of that kind connection before I came to the campus in person, then I had realized the crimes did not affect student’s daily life at all. But not every person has the opportunity to visit the campus at first hand.
Maybe the College should have done more in their marketing brochures to emphasize the safety on campus and at Hype Park, citing some stats about the Chicago’ crime rates, indicating crimes do not happen often at Hype Park, comparing the University’s crime reports with national average, etc.
Bottom line the University needs to inform those uninformed applicants regarding its safety.
@85bears46 this perception, no matter how false, is a difficult issue for UChicago. After all, how many of the 30,000 targeted applicants actually visit ?
All the hype regarding Hyde Park is just that, a hype.
@fbsdreams I do understand the perception is hard to shake. But how many students can visit UPenn, Columbia, John Hopkins and other elite urban schools? There are always bad neighborhoods in a city. IMHO to single out UChicago is simply misinformed perception on the part of prospective applicants. I would like to think an UChicago college applicant will have the mental acumen to do his/her own research and find out the truth.
Sorry this sounds like ranting. I would hope the right kind of applicants will embrace Hyde Park like many generations of students of U of Chicago have done.
Interesting that USC has had to deal with these type of issues and has made significant progress in its reputation as being a safe location in a large city.
Any kid deterred from applying because of the safety issue is a kid who will be no loss to the University. Perhaps that factor should best be considered as a screen to eliminate the uninformed, the incurious and the unadventurous.
^^ Agreed. It could well be that “safety”, like the new admissions plans and lack of safe spaces, is attracting a more serious, if smaller, crowd. Could be this is part of that “higher quality” Admissions was referencing. A larger applicant pool with a lot of “fluff” beneath the surface is not much to brag about.
@marlowe1 I’d believe it’s more the parents than the applicants.
@85bears46 It is interesting that Chicago is impacted the most by bad press, while the majority of the schools you listed, and other top tiers, have crime rates at or higher than UChicago and certainly home cities which have much higher per capita rates.
But again, perception is a tough nut to crack.
As I’ve mentioned many times, spent the month of August walking all over Hyde Park during the day and late night and I never felt unsafe.
There are two things being discussed here at the same time.
One is what kinds of students some posters prefer the College to have. The other is why the applications have dropped during the last admission cycle.
If the College wants to increase the applications the next cycles it needs to do some analysis. Some posters here have expressed the continuous crime coverage of Chicago is a major reason.
OK, going to weigh in here. BTW, it IS important, as @eddi137 is saying, to distinguish between causes for a decline in applications, and whether those causes are “valid”. Whether those in the know like it or not, general public perceptions may be a bit different that what you are seeing on the ground. To what extent that contributed to a sudden decline of several thousand applicants is something that will probably be debated till the next round of application numbers is announced.
First of all, no one put their kid at UChicago thinking they would be in serious - or even moderate - danger. We can all agree on that. We - and many others - have known lots of kids who attended all four years (and then some!) and the most that happened was a bit too much to drink or maybe they tripped over something walking down the sidewalk. Or, worse, slipped on ice (warning: that is the #1 cause for most injuries in winter!).
Nevertheless, there has been an increasing lack of ease - anecdotal in source - w/r/t the city in general and with some of the tensions and violence on the south side and in other sections of the city. No neighborhood exists in a vacuum so it makes no sense to speak of how safe HP might be if communities not so far away are struggling. Violence can spill out into the “safer” areas, and opportunistic thugs can try their luck there as well. We have family in Lincoln Square and my sister lived near 900 N. Hoyne (so Ukrainian Village, I think). Both areas have been considered “safe” for a number of years. And yet, the number of shootings, murders, muggings, and so forth have - in the views of these neighborhoods - increased. The babysitter of my nieces and nephews was recently held up near Lincoln Square - she’s a Chicago girl and even she was shocked. Early evening too. In her words, there has been a rash of opportunistic armed robberies by people outside the area and which is a new and disturbing trend. Last year, there was a murder a couple blocks from my brother’s house. This stuff just didn’t used to happen - at least not in recent memory (say, early 2000’s on). And my sister got so sick of the murders nearby that she moved out of the state, after nearly 10 years in Chicago, a grad degree in a specialized nursing field, and a great job.
Both sets of experiences contribute to a general view that even the “safe” areas are less safe than they used to be. Is that a reasonable conclusion? Maybe not. But if the folks who have lived in the city for a number of years - or who have grown up there - are thinking that way, why should we be surprised that people around the country have the same impression? Unfortunately, there is also distrust of Rahmbo’s administration to report the numbers correctly and THAT will naturally contribute to the sense of unease. No one likes to think crime is actually increasing and the administration isn’t even being forthright and honest about acknowledging that (let alone taking steps to reverse it).
The rise or fall in perception of the city of Chicago will certainly influence the number of applicants to the University of Chicago. In recent years this seems to have been positive as even kids from the dreaded suburbs and rural hinterlands seem to have sought an urban experience on leaving home. As JHS among others has frequently pointed out, this trend has been very much to the benefit of schools like Columbia and Chicago and has depressed the numbers at Dartmouth, Cornell and many high-quality lac’s. That trend probably won’t last forever, and the city of Chicago may be a special case. I agree that this Chicago-equals-danger factor is partially explanatory of the numbers. It is highly probable that more kids and their parents will be deterred by this factor than not. Others will accept it as a necessary evil. However my heart lies with that minority - underestimated on this board, I believe - for whom that element of grit and danger, however illusory, is part of the essential appeal. The heritage of the University of Chicago is that it is a place apart, both academically and experientially, difficult and challenging in almost every way - not a place of middlebrow comfort.
^^That’s true. I’m sure Boyer gives the same talk every year at opening convocation but as a lifetime resident of Chicago he speaks very fondly of the city, but not in any fawning way. Same with his thoughts on the university.
I would guess there are very few parents/students who are seriously considering UC, then dismiss it because of Chicago’s overall crime rate. Families who consider UC or WUSTL or Williams or Pomona will be informed.
I live in a small NC town. The great majority of folks I know see Chicago (and DC and New York) as dangerous. Their kids aren’t going to college in those cities anyway. Few can afford UC or NYU or G’town, and fewer can actually get in. Most are fine with in-state publics and warm weather. And in blissful ignorance that their beloved small-town mediocre HS is actually a much more dangerous environment for their kids than Hyde Park or Greenwich Village.
My friend went to an information session and the SAT 25-75% range for 2021 was reported as 1420-1530. Last year, it was 1460-1550. But this may be more a consequence of the new SAT than a weaker student body as other elite schools (Stanford, Princeton among them) are also reporting lower scores than the prior year.
Trust me, people at Penn wring their hands about the safety-perception issue, too. I think they have been more successful than Chicago about improving the image of Penn’s neighborhood, but some of that is no doubt due to luck, and some is due to small differences in geography. Penn is much closer to other very affluent, white-majority neighborhoods than Chicago is. (The elephant in the room is that when many people see low-income people of color around, especially Black and Hispanic, their sense of danger is pretty impervious to rational argument.) Columbia is closer, too. And both Penn and Columbia have great public transportation access right in the middle of campus. Penn has a close partnership with private landlords in the area; it generally hasn’t competed with them, which has encouraged private investment in the neighborhood.
People do send their kids to college in neighborhoods that are actually dangerous, by the way. Here in Philadelphia, Temple is huge. It has been making great strides in safety over the past couple of decades, but it can look and feel like a police state on Saturday nights. The surrounding neighborhood is improving, but it’s improving from terrible, and the non-terrible part is still only a block or two deep on all sides. (In a year or two, that will no longer be true of the south side of the campus, closest to the city center. Lots of development happening in that space.) Drexel and LaSalle have safety issues, too. It’s a problem for all of them, but they still attract lots of students.
When I was visiting Penn in '89/‘90, I noticed a chord around the perimeter of the wall in the ladies’ room that you are supposed to pull when being attacked. When I asked a buddy of mine (Wharton student) over lunch what that was about he replied that a female student had recently been murdered. Can’t remember the details. Anyway, there was NEVER anything like that on the UChicago campus back around the same time. In those days, it was understood that Penn was in a worse neighborhood than Hyde Park.
@nostalgicwisdom that’s interesting and corresponds to Nondorf’s comment that the average SAT was 1499. Did your friend catch the 25-75 for ACT? The new SAT results might be lower than what College Board’s Concordance tables would suggest. There’s a thread for that! (naturally):
Given that the Class of '21 admits did submit both versions of the test, it’s crucial to understand just what that range you posted means. Did they convert old tests using the CB Concordance Tables? Are they just citing “new” SAT test results? That sort of thing.
In 1989 and 1990, I was living, with two small children, in a house my wife and I owned about one block from the very edge of the Penn neighborhood. It was NOT understood that Penn was in a worse neighborhood than Hyde Park. Our neighborhood felt basically safe – random street crime was rare, other than minor stuff like stealing plants off someone’s porch – but we heard all the time that Hyde Park was worse. (It wasn’t worse, but that’s what we heard.) There were issues. One of the things that prompted us to move to a much fancier neighborhood was when our kids started collecting empty crack vials off the street, because their caps had all different colors.
My husband grew up in Philly and lived in HP and we have friends who lived in both locales (academics) and they all attest to that section of Philly being more dangerous. 1) This was 25+ years ago and 2) they might be suffering from the same bias as @JHS mentioned - the “other” neighborhood is always worse. However, they did live in both so have some perspective. And, of course, Uchicago didn’t have those cords that you are supposed to pull when you are assaulted - and, in fact, I had never heard of such a thing before visiting Penn. Very chilling - but still wouldn’t have kept us from moving to the area, had the opportunity arisen. Today, we know many kids and faculty who have lived near Penn (or on campus) and the only assault we know about was that econ. prof. who offed his wife about 10 years ago. But I think that happened on or near the Main Line, not near Penn.
In fact, from time to time Penn people – mainly graduate students and employees – are victims of serious crime. My impression is that it happens more frequently than it does at Chicago, but that’s affected by Penn being meaningfully larger than Chicago, and by the fact that I read about everything that happens at Penn, and I don’t read about everything at Chicago. But what’s important here is that few of those serious crimes are Penn campus street crimes. Far more frequently, they are the kind of crimes that could occur among 20-30-somethings anywhere – crazy, jealous lovers, ex-lovers worried about blackmail, business disputes – or they are street-type crime occurring on streets far from the Penn campus. It’s not like there is no crime in and around the Penn campus. The workday population of that area is something like 50,000 people, and that many people is going to generate some crime statistics.
It was Chicago, wasn’t it?, not Penn, where a young professor was murdered in an on-campus bathroom around the time @JBStillFlying is talking about. I’m surprised they didn’t think to put cords in.