Almost all the colleges game the rankings and every applicant has more than a few “stalker” schools, most of which are totally irrelevant to the student’s interests. This is why it’s so important to ignore the rankings and find a school where 1) you’ll be a good fit and 2) you have a good shot at getting in.
For god sake the engineering school is 4 years old. What alumni are gonna be there?
As for consulting (which I’m leaning against), I’ve heard tale of someone who worked in Wall Street for 20 years meeting 5 Fellow Uchicago alums, and all informally too.
And for pre-law or pre-med, all I can say is yikes for that grade deflation.
Of COURSE, U of Chicago is just attempting to get the USNWR ranking up! And also nab another app fee.
It should be free to apply everywhere. They get enough money when you pay tuition.
Oh, engineering. Very fair.
And that period was probably more suited to academics, I’ll grant you (though it did produce Mansueto). Recent years have seen a significant uptick in terms of recruitment by both Wall Street and Consulting.
And the average GPA is around 3.4 or so, so that isn’t bad either.
(sorry to be so off-topic, but there’s a lot of mythbusting to do when it comes to Chicago)
Edit:
@TranquilMind I really doubt that much money is made off the app fees that isn’t immediately eaten by the expenses of having to pay a person to process the app, pay the common app, and to pay for the marketing campaign. But I do have to agree–applying should be free for everyone. Also, we’ve reached our effective peak in the USNWR rankings, and as I’ve said previously, the selectivity doesn’t make a significant difference.
Marketing schmarketing, DS liked the T-shirt. Got in early at his first choice, so he never applied to Chicago. Still wears the T-shirt, though.
I’d agree. In 20 or so years for consulting, once there’s an alum base built, it should be right below hypW for consulting/banking. Already, a fair number of people I hear are going there with that intention. Engineering might take a bit longer as the education has to first be established and then reel in top-tier engineering talent as well. It woudln’t surprise me to hear that Uchicago might be engaging in more grade inflation now either.
It right now seems to be in a state of transition, from essentially a somewhat prestigious liberal-arts style (although I think it had some grad schools) to a top 8 institution (see the massive drop in admit rates from
Over 40 to 8% in the last decade) more along the lines of a Harvard or Princeton (perhaps the most apt comparison?) or Columbia. For now, I’d say it’s still worse than those for pre-professionals. That’s also why it still has such a massive marketing campaign to lower it’s admit rates and thus increase prestige.
@theanaconda That’s fair, especially regarding the alum base.
Though considering we have one of the top business schools (Booth) and one of the top law schools (formerly with Obama and now with Posner), I have to disagree with your “it had some grad schools” comment.
A prodigious amount of nobel laureates has been produced by Chicago, more than Yale, Stanford, MIT and Princeton, Penn, and other ivies aside from Harvard and Columbia. Chicago has a strong identity as a university - one that many others seem to lack, and has been a leader in education and research since its founding. It was an original founder of the American Association of Universities - the original collection of great Research Universities in the US, of which the original members were Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, Michigan, Penn, and Wisconsin-Madison. Per student, it has a higher endowment than Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell, and Duke. Its renowned undergraduate programs have been celebrated as some of the most rigorous in the US, if not the world. Its prestige has existed for a long time - it just hasn’t been considered “prestigious” by the average layman in the US because the average layman cares more about football, rather than the people who produced the people who discovered the structure of DNA, nursed the intellectual revolution that swept US politics in the 1980s, and created the economics that helped South Korea to shoot to prosperity. It is not just the case that Chicago sent out a bunch of letters and suddenly became prestigious. That doesn’t happen. It is not just a city college in the middle of a blighted south side neighbourhood in Chicago. It has a legitimate product to back up its claims. And as for rankings, when the first US News rankings came out in 1983, Chicago was ranked 6. It is now ranked 4, along with Stanford and Columbia, so it is in fact ranked in the same position (4 - 6). Over the long-term, it has barely “risen” in the rankings, just from its mid-2000s slump.
As for the advertising, people on CC decry the way that chance threads say that some schools are “completely out of reach” for students that have scores below the median. These same people even encourage students to apply to “some reach schools.” Yet when colleges encourage applicants to apply - (for they have no way of judging students before applications are submitted) - they are termed “predatory.” It is a college’s prerogative to seek the best students from everywhere. Chicago has just been doing what schools like Penn, Duke, and Columbia have been doing for ages.
Why blame Chicago for the marketing ploys? As long as one recognizes correctly what the repeated mailings and the increased tilting at more avenues for applicants for what it is!
You cannot blame Chicago for having abandoned most of its previous obnoxious approach to admissions that yielded the off-putting choice of essays and made the school nothing more than a second choice for most very competitive applicants. The applications number were way too low for the school prestige and the school “attitude” did not convince many applicants who could get into academic peers to decide on Chicago.
The new tactics of lowering the targets’ qualifications a few nods yielded an increasing number of applicants; the revamping of the reporting to Bob Morse did its magic; and the combination of the two is now history.
The strategy looks remarkable now, and this because it represents such a departure from the failure of the previous “uncommon” approach.
It took a while to get rid of the ones who did cling to their “past century” approach. Chicago learned and hired people who understood the 21st century a bit better. Now, let’s hope the school also learns what terms such as transparency and timeliness mean.
@xiggi You know we still have the uncommon essays as a part of the application, right? Those didn’t go away, they just made it to the supplement (and I suspect we could get a much larger number of applications if we did away with those, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be worth it AT ALL).
@AlbionGirl – Univ. of Chicago was a joke in my house, too, same reason. Crazy amounts of mail and my S had indicated no interest, plus he would likely have been borderline to get in. Very transparent IMO.
When our household received a lot of school marketing material from many many schools including Columbia, Yale, WashU, Chicago, Tulane, etc, I did not find them standing jokes in our house. In a lesser degree, we also received material from Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, among many well known schools that generally do not need introduction or marketing. I found them doing a good job reaching out to families like ours that would presumably have slim chance to none to get accepted to those schools.
They all do marketing one form or another. With due respect, if parents think some schools did more so than the others, just recycle the papers as I did or put them away for future reference as I did. It’s so unnecessary for the overreaction, just in my humble opinion.
A tiny bit OT, but the USNWR rankings are quite irrelevant. They rank Stetson higher than UNC Wilmington in the South and Fairfield and TCNJ higher than Bentley in the North, for goodness sake.
The USNWR rankings are relevant, because they’re the rankings that get the most readership. I could point out the fact that ‘clearly’ UChicago and Columbia should be ranked below Stanford and that Cornell should ‘clearly’ be ranked above Wash U, but the ranking says what it says, and people listen to it because it matches (for the most part) their own views.
The relevance of the rankings on actual scholarship or education quality is, IMO, only somewhat existent.
Edit: @lbad96, I should perhaps point out that the USNWR rankings aren’t specialized to measure schools like Stetson, UNC Wilmington, Fairfield, and TCNJ. They’re built to put the Ivy+ schools on top, with HYP leading the way–thus giving a sense of legitimacy.
Oof. Just took a look at those comments. A lot of people think that higher education is ridiculous and that its purpose is exclusively to get gainful employment. Chicago gets trashed on a bit, but I think that’s more a result of the author’s decision to highlight Chicago than anything else.