Ah - thank you for clarifying. While I’ve seen a graph, I haven’t looked at the underlying numbers. But eye-balling the visual I have, it appears that from about 1973 through 1997 (the year Behnke arrived) applications increased from about 2,500 per year to about 5,000, or a little less than 3% per year. Behnke retired in 2009 after doubling applications again during his 12 years; the growth rate doubled as well, to about about 6% per year. So double the growth rate in half the time. Then Nondorf took over and tripled the number of apps in just a few years which is pretty astounding. The reason I mentioned 2013 before is that’s the year that the College caught up to the peer group in application numbers. It’s one thing to look at growth rates, but you have to consider the number of applications as well. Remember the quotes you provided above: Boyer (the head of the College) and Zimmer (the head of the university and a UChicago professor himself) didn’t think they should be getting fewer applications than peer schools. That was hardly a new idea on their part. The weird thing wasn’t that they increased applications all of a sudden, but that applications were so low to begin with.
UChicago has always had a subset of “self-selecting” students. Prior to the era of ED, these would be the types who acted like they were applying ED anyway. However, most of the “self-selection” that the school was known for historically, at least prior to the College expansion, is a myth that simply didn’t hold up when things like student satisfaction or retention were examined. One survey conducted in the '90’s found that about a third of students were seriously thinking about transferring (this on top of the 10% or so who had not returned from freshman year). Totally agree that things were significantly better in 2008! However, one benefit of increasing your applicant pool by 200% of interested, enthusiastic right-fit candidates is that you can select even better admits than you could just a few years prior. This is why, for instance, the matriculated pool in Fall 2008 had mid-range ACT scores of 28-33 but the matriculated pool in Fall 2018 (the year before TO) had scores ranging from 33-35. In other words, the bottom 25th had a score equivalent to the top 25th just a decade earlier.
Agree. UChicago shouldn’t trend any differently from other top schools. The question is whether it has increased more in those aspects than its peers due to a “come from behind” - similar to the application numbers. One person I know mentioned to me that, luckily, they were admitted the last year before the big explosion in applications started. Usually when people say “I wouldn’t be admitted today” they weren’t talking about their admission the prior year!
One way to check on UChicago’s relative progress over, say, the last 10-15 years would be to compare things like freshman retention and four/six year grad rates to the peers. It’s my impression that UChicago might lead in a couple of those, but haven’t looked lately.
Agree. As I mentioned above, the SAT “min” of 1020 seems completely unrealistic compared to just a few years ago when the min was higher (and varied a bit from year to year). It’s baffling, frankly. I just don’t believe that the purpose is to juice up numbers from “low scoring” individuals. Why bother, if you have TO? Perhaps it’s merely to take some of the focus off of test scores in the first place - something that UChicago has professed to do for years (well before Nondorf’s era) but wasn’t believable due to detailed score distributions on the “class profile” page. Over the years, test scores may be less correlated to performance at UChicago or other top schools. Part of the requirement at the former is that the student still needs to be able to do the work, and it’s harder to float through than perhaps at a few other places. Whether the college uses scores or other things to figure out probability of success is part of the mystery of Admissions Methodology.