“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.”
That’s because most of us in the UChicago community at the time considered ourselves safe from Romanian Gov’t thug assassins. That incident was bizarre - coming as it did in response to political speech - and brazen - coming as it did in the middle of the day with people in the nearby hallways and offices - but it was, w/o question, a very different incident from what was prompting Penn to put cords in the ladies’ room. I think, in fairness to the “cord” issue, that it speaks to an objective assessment that using the restroom posed risk of a violent crime (else why would they be there?) and that was something that just didn’t occur to any of us on UChicago’s campus. However, Penn students certainly were not being murdered as they tried to use the bathroom. My buddy at the time was underscoring his impression of lack of safety on campus. He was from the West Coast (SF Bay Area) so maybe he was inadvertently exaggerating things as well.
@PetulaClark - haven’t been following safety stats for Penn but my impression is that campus violence isn’t as much an issue as it used to be. @JHS might know more. And, of course, even back then they were isolated incidents. Certainly, this stuff could contribute to a feeling of unease for anyone not familiar with the area. But @JHS has a point that one university’s response to a violent crime problem doesn’t automatically signal that it’s “less safe” than another urban uni. It just may be more on the ball. BTW, a lot of these stats are now available on DOE’s campus safety website or via the university police logs (for more up-to-date information).
There was a murder on the block where I lived in University City at around the same time. The victim was an Eritrean dissident, and everyone said things like we didn’t feel at risk from Eritrean thug assassins. In that case, though, the police caught the killer a few months later, and it turned out to have nothing to do with Eritrean politics, and everything to do with sleeping with someone else’s wife. But that didn’t exactly make our neighborhood feel unsafe, either, if you already lived there.
@JHS that sounds like a far more typical situation. The Ioan Culiano killing was strange, to say the least, but whoever did it was able to escape unnoticed from the third floor. And this after the secretary apparently went straight to the men’s room (next door to his office), stood outside and called for him as soon as she heard the shot. Small gun too, from the casing and probably bullet wound. If I were Jane Marple, I’d be taking a close look at that secretary . . . .but all those “in the know” - including two books written about it - point to it being political assassination. We’ll probably never find out.
Are you kidding? Every major library at which I ever spent any time when I was young had some sort of folklore tradition about sex in the stacks, and the more academic the institution the more colorful and extensive the folklore was. Speaking personally, libraries played a big role in my fantasy life in the decade after I started college. Of course, that was because libraries played a big role in my life, period. Everyone I knew, male and female, dreamed of getting it on in the library.
Given the characteristics of the University of Chicago, and the sheer amount of time my kids and their friends spent in the Reg, it’s almost impossible to believe that there weren’t many, many stories of assignations in its far reaches. It’s almost impossible to believe that some of them might not be true!
@JHS - not sure how you spent your time in college but . . . you might want to ask your own about the Reg. If anything was happening on the basment level, most of my study group never noticed it.
For @Chrchill’s sake (as well as others) - swinging the conversation back to the original topic. Hearing from another parent or two with kids in HS class of 2018, it sounds like about 60% of the admits were ED, per Admissions. Actually, I’m surprised it’s that low. The numbers that fall out of that piece of information, therefore, are:
EDII 640
RD 560
And from prior posts: EDI 800, EA 400.
The thing that’s weird is that 560 / .02 = 28,000 which is about how many applied in toto (actually, 560 / 27,694 = .02022 which is close enough to 2%). So when Nondorf said the RD rate was 2%, was he referring to the RD pool or the entire applicant pool? Very confusing.
Also, we can figure out the yield on non-binding admits. 60% of 2,400 total admits is 1,440 ED so shrink by 1% (minimal attrition) to arrive at 1,425 ED enrollees. Total enrollees is 1,735, as we know. Therefore, about 310 non-binding admits enrolled. That’s a yield of about 32% (310 / (400+560)). Wonder how many were EA vs RD?
Tons of stuff was happening on the basement level, but that's not what I mean by "the stacks." The A level basement was where people went to study in a social setting. It was the University of Chicago equivalent of a singles bar. You talked and flirted (and worked) there. (The Mansueto reading room may have siphoned off some of that traffic since then.)
@ihs76 My daughter might have said the same thing, but not with a straight face. She knew she wasn't in Dillon TX (the fictional town in Friday Night Lights where everyone looked like a supermodel), but there were plenty of attractive people there of all sexes and orientations. My son is objectively very nice looking, as are at least half of his UChicago straight male friends.
2%: That could mean up to 2.49%. And the denominator is probably all RD applications plus deferred ED and EA applications -- a number that would probably be only a couple thousand less than all applications less ED and EA acceptances. 560 is 2.4% of 23,333 . . . which is about 2,500 less than all applications less ED and EA acceptances.
All EA’s that were deferred and did not switch to EDII should count in the RD pool Same with all deferred EDI’s (they shouldn’t have gotten the option to switch to EDII but honestly not sure what happened last year). Approximately 14,700 applied Jan. 1 deadline - some were EDII and the rest RD. In addition, 11,800 from early round were NOT accepted and while some were rejected there seemed to be a whole bunch of deferreds. So yeah, 23,000 in the RD pool could be correct. We don’t know and Nondorf fudges a bit, as we have found out (8% vs 8.7% accept rate). Interesting, however, if it’s closer to 2.5% - you’d think he’d say 2.5% instead of 2% if they really were concerned about future RD applicants. From what I’m hearing (again supposedly the source is Admissions but the messenger(s) are other parents), UChicago will be shooting to fill it’s future classes with a majority of ED admits.
Cross posting: Why all the love for early decision? Yes you can increase yield and bring in wealthier classes, but yield and class wealth was already strong before the intro of ED.
Following all the change, yield went up by a whopping 6%. Sure maybe there are more wealthy students, but was this all really worth it?
In the days before the move to the Regenstein, when Harper was the main library, you had to break down the action among three different modalities:
The two reading rooms (Social Science and Humanities) was where the courting went on. An attractive girl dozing over her books (I speak from the male perspective) would very often be happy to be chatted up and/or be willing to go for a coffee.
The coffee shop in the Classics Tower was where you went for that coffee.
The catacombs of the Harper Stacks (occupying 6 levels of the basement) was not really a very good spot for hanky-panky, but the thought was always there, and once or twice something might have - but didn't - actually happen in one of those dark corners.
Each of those levels was a half-floor in height, @HydeSnark. Space was at a premium. Very little head-room. Shelves crammed. An intense musty odoriferousness that was slightly intoxicating. The place was a catacombs. I worked for a time as a fetcher of books, responding to requests from the circulation desk via slips carried to us lowly wretches by pneumatic tube. Undergrads did not have direct access to the stacks at the beginning, but later that changed. Still, some preferred the daylight world to the very end. I myself had a fondness for the subterranean one. It was down in these depths that Aristotle Schwartz was supposed to have a bed. I never found the bed but saw a few guys down there who resembled such a fellow. They might have thought I was he.
All those deletions might appear to speak volumes, @JBStillFlying , scizzored out by those Ms Grundy’s who want to have a proper discussion of the ostensible topic. Alas, it was only my fumbling fingers hitting the send button multiple times. In the end it seemed the cc world didn’t need three repetitions of the immortal words of post #94. I edited myself into a state of evocative wordlessness.
Not sure why some people upthread were saying Chicago was overenrolled. If they go to the waitlist, by definition they are not overenrolled. If the have more attendees, it’s because they wanted them (more tuition$)
Depends on your perspective. Admissions’ ego got as many people as they want. College Housing, that had to squeeze people into every spare room they could find, and academic departments that now have to increase class sizes, on the other hand, see things differently.
Speaking of “book fetching”, D17 loves Mansuetto - especially its underground automated retrieval system housing 3 million volumes (or whatever it is). What else would you expect from a generation that grew up with Amazon as part of their world. Unfortunately, there is no room for Aristotle Swartz in that world. With all the great changes, the old legends are in real danger of dying out. Unless, of course, he’s still moping around Harper looking for all the books that have moved over to the Reg. It would be kinda neat if there were sightings . . .
MODERATOR’S NOTE: This thread was getting way off topic. I deleted a bunch of posts. Probably more could go, but I’ll leave it at that for now. Please stay on topic.