The university has several tutoring programs - particularly active for the core curriculum - and for low income/first generation students who potentially may be those with the lower scores - as test scores have been correlated to parental income and education levels. There are significant resources if a student needs them and seeks them out.
Also, I’m not sure how many classes actually grade on a class curve (where students are graded relative to peers). For those that do, I don’t know that (m)any have the curve force failing grades. Some students definitely struggle and drop classes where they’re not doing well, but I don’t think consistent failing is particularly widespread. I’m a parent, not a student, but that is my understanding based on my (4th year) D’s experience.
How about putting it this way, @FStratford and @Data10 : If you’ve got the chops to be a U of C student you will be expected to figure out that the odds are long against you - well, longer even than the long odds everyone faces - if you fall somewhere along that tail trailing from 25 percent to the single lowest score in the admitted class. You could make it happen anywhere along that path, but you better have something special going for you.
Perhaps, then, that information is not so much misleading as it is a challenge to further analysis of your situation. As Nondorf said once, about a vanishingly small number of kids who were rejected ED but managed to get themselves accedpted RD, “some of you can walk on water.” Hope is the thing with wings.
If I were to make a list of highly selective colleges that are most transparent about their admission stats, Chicago wouldn’t exactly top the list. Instead Chicago is one of a small minority of highly selective colleges that chooses to not make their CDS public. They also choose to not post score distribution, admit rate by score, admit rate by ED vs RD, etc. What Chicago does choose to publish is a small number of specifically selected stats. Chicago’s choice to make one of these few public admission stats to be the minimum SAT/ACT score among all admitted students is a unique choice. I can’t recall any other highly selective colleges choosing to publish this stat.
It may be just an effort to increase transparency, as you suggest, but I’m not sure how this additional information about lowest score of any admitted kid would help students. And as discussed, it can lead to some students making poor decisions about whether they have a realistic chance of admission. Posting a score distribution like they apparently did many years ago in 2004 (see post above), admit rate by score, or any of dozens of other stats would be far more meaningful. Maybe the idea is just an interesting stat to take note of, such as percent of students who participate in specific ECs?
I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that Chicago wants lower scoring applicants to apply, even though that group may have a very low chance of admission. For example, Chicago isn’t exactly known for being selective with their mailings and only sending them to students who have scores in a typical admission range. This was true well before going test optional.
I believe what Stratford is saying is that he doubts that the motivation here is, as you suggest, Data, simply to boost acceptance stats in order to look good. I’m not that cynical myself. More likely is that it’s to encourage a certain kind of low-scoring applicant with other things going for him or her, the same objectives as TO and the Chicago Initiative and extensive advertising. The big-name schools don’t need to work that hard at it because they have snobbery and brand recognition going for them. Chicago has historically been on the lookout for a different sort of kid, but that kid needs to know about the school and know there’s a path to get in. But he or she also needs the discernment to read the tea leaves carefully.
Dean’s List is granted annually to those in the top 20% or so of GPA and the cut-off has been at 3.9 or higher for the past couple of years. So grade deflation doesn’t exist.
Given that the freshman retention rate is something like 99%, failing out would be pretty unusual.
Agreed - there are peer tutors (my 3rd year son is one) and the instructors and TA’s seem pretty accessible. Calc might be hit or miss, depending on the specific instructor, but both my kids had plenty of opportunity to attend problem sessions and office hours.
UChicago has been posting min score information for years now. If they just want low-scoring applicants to apply in order to “look selective”, this probably hasn’t been the way to accomplish that, since UChicago has historically attracted far fewer applicants than many peer institutions. Even when they went TO a few years ago, they really didn’t increase their application numbers all that much. The numbers finally jumped this past cycle (the third cycle allowing TO) but that effect might be similar to what peer and other highly selective schools experienced this past year. In any case, I just don’t see any evidence that UChicago has been attempting to juice up its numbers by posting mins. Or, it that’s been their attempt, it really hasn’t been successful.
So I’m more inclined to agree with FStrat - they feel that mins are important information so they include it (as have been doing for years now).
Chicago has had a tremendous increase in number of applications far before this past cycle. I can’t think of any college Chicago would consider a “peer” that even comes close to Chicago’s increase in applications over the past 15 years. Some specific numbers are below. Obviously posting a score stat that might encourage low stat kids to apply, rather than a stat that might discourage low stat students from applying (for example, admit rate by SAT/ACT score) is not a primary factor in this increase. However, if you are suggesting that Chicago hasn’t been placing a lot of effort on increasing applications or that Chicago “really hasn’t been successful” in increasing applications , then I don’t think saying that total applications is less than certain peers is good evidence of this.
Application Increase from 2007-08 to 2019-20 (pre COVID)
Chicago – 263% increase in applications
Northwestern – 121% increase in applications
Stanford – 98% increase in applications
Harvard – 89% increase in applications
Georgetown – 41% increase in applications
WUSTL – 13% increase in applications
As we saw in the recent admission cycle, many highly selective colleges had very large increases in applications upon going test optional. I expect a good portion of these very large increases were from kids who felt their scores were too low to apply. A good example is MIT. In a typical pre-COVID admissions cycle, a 30 ACT kid might see MIT’s high score range and 1% admit rate for 30 ACT kids on MITs website and think there is no point to apply. However, in a test optional year, that same 30 ACT kid might feel differently and choose to apply.
A larger portion of students feeling their (relatively) low score is a barrier is correlated with a larger increase in applications upon going test optional. A smaller portion of students feeling their (relatively) low score is a barrier is correlated with a smaller increase in a applications upon going test optional. So if mailings, website info, and other factors decreased that psychological score barrier among (relatively) lower scoring kids prior to going test optional, then a smaller increase in applications is expected upon going test optional, all other factors being equal. If going TO didn’t increase application numbers that much, it certainly does not show the opposite – that Chicago’s website, mailings, and similar activities prior to going TO have not been successful in increasing applications among (relatively) lower scoring students. However, the bigger factor likely relates to the time Chicago went test optional being different from the present. Post-COVID, I think students are both more likely to both be aware of colleges being newly test optional and more likely to truly believe that they will not be penalized for applying TO.
I don’t mean to suggest Chicago is the only college that may encourage kids to apply with (relatively) lower stats. Many colleges do this. For example, we saw in the Harvard lawsuit that Harvard intentionally sent mailers to Black students (not other races to same extent) with scores suggestive of near auto reject, and immediately after doing so, there was a huge jump in number of applying Black students with relatively low scores. Prior to COVID test optional, many highly selective private colleges used vague language on their website to imply that there is no minimum score that is too low to apply.
Than k you @JBStillFlying . That is indeed what I was thinking.
Another thought is that UChicago’s brand is not a “mass market” brand like Harvard’s or MIT’s, that everyone including the taxi driver knows. It is more like Princeton or Caltech, equally great (and one can argue, better) institutions, but less well known by the masses.
So, showing that a low scorer got accepted to UChicago, is not as effective in convincing a huge number of applicants to kneejerkly apply despite their low scores - as if it is a lottery.
UChicago’s brand does not lend itself well to lottery applications.
To quote @marlowe1, it will probably at most allow a low scorer to look at the other sections of their application to discern if they are the type of person that can get in despite a low score, and subsequently flourish at UChicago, a school known for its rigor despite having that low score.
It seems to me that there are three theories going here as to why Chicago chooses to post this minimum score stat:
Transparency pure and simple.
To juice the school’s selectivity numbers.
To create a larger field of potential admits.
I would add a fourth point - that for many years of its history Chicago was not, in comparison with its ivy peers (who may not have regarded it as a peer), a very high-scoring school in the SAT department. @merc81 's table shows just how recently and rapidly it ascended from a quite mediocre median to one of the highest. There are many reasons for this rise, and they have been often discussed here. Most of us who love the school think it has been a good thing. However, history is not mocked - an institutional memory must linger of a certain kind of kid Chicago was once specially known for: one who was curious, ambitious, and brainy - but not very focussed on getting good grades as such or boning up to ace artificial tests like SATs. Such kids might pour themselves into reading or tinkering with subjects unrelated to school courses, but they had more important fish to fry than achieving top test results. Their intelligences were, in a word, quirky. This was once the iconic Chicago type caricatured (lovingly) once as Aristotle Schwarz, the kid who in response to what he regarded as the Princetonizing tendencies of the Administration of the day retreated to the Harper Stacks and never again emerged therefrom.
Poor old Ari may have been devoted to his hero, but unlike that illustrious namesake wasn’t very systematic or organized. He likely had a mediocre test score and even mediocre grades. He lacked the killer instinct for these things and considered them meretricious vanities anyhow. And if he ever found his way out of the stacks it would not have been to a job on Wall Street or a professorship at Harvard. We old alums tend to romanticize him as the true Hutchins-inspired exemplar of learning for its own sake.
Some of that ethos, I suggest, still exists even in the cold hard hearts of today’s admissions officers. This minimum SAT metric is a way of flushing out the new-model Ari Schwarzes of the high school world and saying to them: “There is still a place for you at the University of Chicago. Show us why you belong here.”
Regarding Chicago’s history, it’s my understanding that in the past Chicago was very self selecting. For example, I previously compared the 2007-08 cycle to 2019-20. Continuing with that example, Chicago’s admit rate was a (relatively) high 38% in 2007-08. Chicago didn’t need to have a low admit rate because the small minority of kids who applied were high quality ones who were a good fit for the school. Chicago could create a great class of outstanding students with a (relatively) high 38% admit rate. Chicago was a great school for a special self-selecting group, and both students and admin seemed okay with that.
Anecdotally I attended HS during this earlier period when Chicago wasn’t as widely popular among typical high achieving kids. Among high achieving kids in my upstate NY HS, I only knew one who applied to Chicago, and he was definitely a good fit. He was the type of kid who’d frequently be carrying around a large pile of books and would read and learn for fun. I believe he is a classics professor today.
“I believe we are a better university than they {Columbia} are, so I think we should have more applications than they do”
… “I don’t think Chicago should stand behind New York on this one. We deserve the same number of applications, if not more.”
The article makes it sound like Boyer and the admin were no longer satisfied with being thought of as a niche school with a reputation of “where fun goes to die.” President Zimmer (started in 2006) said he wanted more applications from NY and commissioned research about how to increase applications and was successful. There was a 40% increase in applications that year from Stuy alone – the HS for which Columbia matriculates the most students. They hired Nondorf who according to the article had a reputation as a “super marketer” He made a recruitment booklet and updated the website to made Chicago look more fun. Recruitment officers visited twice as many high schools. in 2010, Chicago hired the marketing firm Royal & Company who is credited for inventing college marking spam mailings (see https://www.fastcompany.com/90557723/the-man-who-invented-college-spam-and-created-a-monster ). This was also during the period in which Chicago stopped posting ACT/SAT score distributions and instead started posting lowest SAT/ACT score of all admitted students. More recently Chicago became the first top 20 USNWR national type college to go test optional.
The efforts were largely successful. As noted in my earlier post, Chicago had a huge explosion in applications – I expect a far higher increase in applications than any college Chicago would consider a peer. Chicago also had a large increase in USNWR ranking… reaching all the way to #3 – only behind Princeton and Harvard for the pre-COVID admission cycle.
That’s a reasonable synopsis of recent history, @Data10 , but many things could be added to it - a tripling of the size of the student body; the enhancement of facilities; a minor dilution and broadening of the Core requirements; greater counselling and job placement services. I am not the best person to provide the rationale for these many changes - I am not totally onboard with all of them - but others will tell you that they were necessary to preserve the viability of undergraduate education. The education itself was always top-notch, but it had acquired somewhat of a secret if not a cultish following that was not only lowering the quality of the applicants but diminishing the numbers admditted. At its worst Chicago was admitting over 60 percent of its applicants. The idea was to change all that.
You are right to link TO with this matter of giving out the minimum test scores and also right to observe that it fits with this program of re-invention. My point, which I can’t prove but feel intuitively, is that they are also part of an attempt amid all this shininess to preserve a place for the old-style kid who doesn’t quite fit into these new grooves - the inner-directed kid who hasn’t simply been cultivating his dossier and focussing his energies on objective measurements. That sort of kid - one like you describe from your high school - may not be the dominant strain nowadays, but my contention would be that the strain itself, slightly ivified, has itself become mainstream and that at Chicago it still has some pretty pure specimens. I hope that some of these are what the adcoms are attempting to glean from all this mass of applications. The world needs the odd Ari Schwarz.
UChicago had underutilized the College as an asset to the university for decades. Enrollments were way down as well. Those large increases in both was essentially making up for that.
Aggressive mailings, etc. - as well as a decision to join the Common App - started with Nondorf who became head of the dept of admissions in 2008/9. That’s when you saw the numbers explode. The college had essentially caught up with its peer groups by 2013 at around 30,000 applications. However, I believe UChicago has grown a lot more slowly than some of its peers since that time. My guess is that this history is not replicated among other peers:
So in the last 9-10 years, after finally catching up to peer schools in terms of national name recognition, UChicago’s application numbers increased a little over 25%, or about 2.5% per year. In your view, is that at all representative of a heavy marketing to low-scoring candidates?
This is true. UChicago’s SAT scores were well below selective universities until the 2000’s. Once Nondorf took over in 2008/9, they surpassed their top peer group. It was a huge debate at the time (now long over) as to whether the College would be able to improve both its enrollment numbers and selectivity.
If you look at the preceding years, the application totals as listed in IPEDS are as follows. There was a 218% increase in applications over a short 7 year period – far greater than any other peer college. If you want to evaluate whether a particular strategy is increasing applications, it’s most appropriate to compare applications shortly before and shortly after the strategy was implemented – not look at applications many years after the strategy was implemented and see that applications are not continuing to increase at the same high rate as when the strategy was first implemented. For example, if one was reviewing whether test optional increased applications, one wouldn’t focus on whether applications were still increasing at a high rate 10 years after the policy was first implemented.
I believe the mailings, posting minimum admitted score, and all other discussed strategies besides test optional were implemented during the period of rapid application increases listed below. Note that your earlier link in which Chicago posted the score distribution of the full class appears to end in the 2007-08 class – just before the rapid increase in applications. They are certainly not the only reason for increased applications, but they are likely a contributing factor and part of an overall pattern.
You have to go back further than 2010. The effort to bring the College to its current level of status has been 25 years in the making, with Boyer on the right side of history (albeit more quietly until everyone was on the same page). Nothing changed in 2010, other than the last of the puzzle got unlocked by hiring James Nondorf to run admissions and exit outcomes. The Zimmer/Nondorf/Boyer triumverate really got the ball rolling at that time.
2007/8 was prior to Common Ap. UChicago joined the Common App. in 2008 which explains the bump to 12,376 and then helps explain what followed in subsequent years. The biggest impact was the head of the admissions office. You can see a very clear change in application growth after Nondorf took over. The 200+% growth prior to that from 2000 - 2007 is due to Michael Behnke who they brought over from MIT to oversee “enrollments” (really admissions). Behnke broke the cycle of high admit rate/low yield simply by steering away from the myth that “self selectivity” resulted in better students. Prior to Behnke’s time, that was the prevailing wisdom at UChicago and it resulted in some pretty bad fits, as many seemed to land at UChicago rather than consider it a destination school. Behnke was more aggressive in finding students who were better fits for the college and convincing them to apply. Nondorf kicked that into high gear. The university also went on an aggressive building campaign to attract more and better students, improved its athletics and EC programs, etc.
I think your mistake is that you assume the so-called “self selected” UChicago students of yesteryear were pretty much the same quality as those who attend today. Some were (perhaps a third of the 2,500-3,000 or so attending at the time), but many were not. The college had a high transfer-out rate prior to Behnke/Nondorf, in addition to the significantly lower yield and higher admit rate. Behnke found that a majority of students showing up to the college listed UChicago as not anywhere close to their first choice school. That’s quite different today, despite numbers that place the College more than 2.5x the size it was 25 years ago. So it was about more than simply increasing the applicant pool - although surely it’s the case that a lot more low scoring kids apply today than 25 years ago. Same with a lot more high-scoring kids and kids in between. The difference is that a significantly larger proportion of those applicants are now applying to the university as a #1 or #2 choice.
Anyone with a wish to dig into the history of the college should read Boyer’s “The University of Chicago - A History” which provides a good amount of detail behind this discussion.
Many prior threads also reference the history of the College and Boyer’s accounting of it. One can argue that the winners of the battle are around to write the history - that’s certainly true in Boyer’s case
IPEDS goes back to 2001. During the 6 year period from 2001 to 2007 period, there was a 28% increase in applicants. A 28% increase in applications is not bad, but does not compare to the following 6 year period from 2007 to 2013, with the previously noted 218% increase in applications. Something changed in 2007-13 period that did not occur to the same extent in prior years.
I didn’t state or assume this. I stated that Chicago was self selecting and applicants were (generally) high quality and a good fit for the school, which allowed Chicago to create a great class, in spite of having a relatively high 38% admit rate. However, I did not compare quality of matriculating students in 2007-08 to present.
Comparing 2007-08 to current applicants, I think matriculating students average higher “quality” today at Chicago than decades in the past, with some variation depending on how you define “quality.” I’d make a similar comment about the overwhelming majority of highly selective private type colleges that have become far more selective over recent decades. For example, at my Stanford alumni interview training, they asked the group how many alumni thought they’d be accepted today… hardly anyone raised their hand. Kids who were admitted decades ago often would not be admitted today.
In general when selectivity increases, average quality of matriculating students also increases. And Chicago like many colleges that are regularly discussed on this website is more selective today than decades in the past. However, this doesn’t mean that Chicago has not historically made an effort to increase applications among students from more than just high score ranges, and that historical effort to increase applications may impact a variety of aspects that include, but are not limited to choice of stat publications on the Chicago website.
