I sent my ACT scores to the University of Chicago a long time ago, but later did not apply.
I received an email today, however, stating that I could submit my application from now until January 8 (deadline was January 2)!
Does anyone know more about this? How bad would the penalty be for submitting it late?
From the website:
“Admissions Updates
A Message to our Applicants
Over the past several days, many applicants have expressed concern about missing our January 2 deadline due to blizzards, flooding, power outages, or other extenuating circumstances that were out of their control. We understand these things happen and wanted to let you know that the UChicago application deadline has been extended to Monday, January 8 for any prospective students who may have been affected by circumstances out of their control. Please note: You do not need to request permission for an extension. If you have been affected, please submit your application any time before January 8.”
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/
So they probably mean it - esp. since they say you don’t have to request permission.
However, not sure if not applying by choice is the same thing as having extenuating circumstances out of your control. You are the best judge of that.
There won’t be any penalty for applying late. They want you to apply, whenever you do.
College admissions staffs are in the business of attracting applications, reading applications, and picking a class, not rejecting applications out of hand because a deadline was missed. Deadlines are something of a necessity on both ends – to get the applications in, and to get the final acceptance and then enrollment decisions made – but at the margin they would always extend the deadline a few extra days in order to get a few hundred more applications.
Before Chicago went on the Common App and its computer system (which enforces deadlines mechanically, as computers do, or used to do), the Chicago admissions staff played all kinds of winky games to make certain no one’s application was being disqualified for being late. Now they have to do something formal, so that’s what they are doing. If I recall correctly, they have found some reason to extend the deadline, no questions asked, in each of the last two years as well. My interpretation then, and now, is that they want to get their application numbers up a bit.
I saw they changed it this morning and I’m so thankful because I didn’t submit my supplements yet… I’m travelling up north and I haven’t had time to write them because of the weather, we are trying to go home soon but it’s proving difficult. I love how UChicago is so understanding. It says it applies to everyone!
My D got the email too. She had initially been interested but was turned off by the deluge of marketing materials sent almost weekly. It became a joke in our house (my brother in law is an alum). It seems they are really trying to get as many people to apply as possible…so they can look even more selective. Happy if it works for some with the deadline.
@Veryapparent “It seems they are really trying to get as many people to apply as possible…so they can look even more selective”
Ot maybe they just want more good applications, you know, to find and admit the best class they can.
Could be but I doubt it. It is a business like anything else. If my D went there I’d be furious our tuition money was paying for so much expensive marketing material.
One of many threads on this.
Hey! Those of us living in Minnesota suffer from lots of “winter.” Maybe U Chicago could push back the deadline to Feb. 1 for those from the North Star State, increasing their application numbers.
@Veryapparent Yes, they do a lot of marketing, and it is working for them. However, the marketing materials are not particularly expensive. UChicago runs the largest academic press in the world, and prints much of those materials in house. I seriously doubt it has any effect on the tuition.
^^ Has anyone noticed that colleges and universities offer around the same tuition? Things like marketing materials are small potatoes compared to faculty salaries.
BTW, the best way to get off their marketing list is to sign up for a visit. That’s what my daughter did as a junior and she ceased to receive anything other than e-mails. Annoying, sure, but at least the precious “tuition dollars” weren’t being wasted 
@Veryapparent “It seems they are really trying to get as many people to apply as possible…so they can look even more selective”
Ot maybe they just want more good applications, you know, to find and admit the best class they can.
@ThankYouforHelp both things can be true…
Here is some more reading on the subject-
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/colleges-ratchet-recruiting-applicants-just-turn
Postage is not free. Neither are mailing lists.
Nothing is free. But mass mailing postage is quite cheap, and the only mailing list needed is the same one that every other school gets - the one from the people who administer the SAT and ACT. I promise you, mass mailing to every potential applicant who got a standardized test score above X is far, far less expensive for a school than the alternative: trying to look at each individual potential applicant and determine without seeing an application whether they might be a good candidate. That would take a tremendous amount of manpower.
If you want to compete for the best candidates with HYPSM, the five elite schools with the highest name recognition and prestige and percieved desirability, you need to try to get your name recognition and student’s attention up to their level. UChicago (and Columbia) are going for that level, which is why students get more mailings from them.
Okay for reference my D is a National Merit Commended scholar. That means she was in the top 50,000 of high school juniors last year. That’s is an enormous amount of people, and that’s only one list. We have gotten 30 or more mailings, some glossy full page magazine types. Barely ANY emails. Schools like University of Chicago are not lacking in any way shape or form for qualified candidates. This is a factual statement if you look at the numbers.
I do think there’s some tension here that’s not being identified - while certainly not “hurting” for applications, last year, Chicago had one of the smallest application pools amongst the ivy plus group (I think only Dartmouth and MIT - two schools that are considerably smaller - received fewer apps.)
For a variety of reasons, Chicago has a vested interest in increasing the size of its applicant pool. It receives the lowest number of apps per available seat (maybe Cornell or UPenn are comparable), so it wants to increase the amount of apps received.
From an optics standpoint, for better or worse, receiving 20-30% less apps than Brown or Columbia (this happened last year) could indicate a “softer” reputation.
The fact of the matter is, UChicago has the biggest range of app options possible - ED1, EA, ED2, and RD - yet last year it received considerably fewer apps than most of its peers.
On the other hand, although the RD chance is miniscule, Brown or Columbia can easily get 30,000 RD apps. Chicago, it appears, gets more in the order of 15,000-20,000 RD apps. This would seem to indicate, again, that the reputation is a little softer, and it’s a bit less of a “dream shot” school for the random applicant. Make no mistake, Chicago wants to get into that game, too.
When Chicago was handing out over half of its acceptances to EA applicants, it was getting more EA applications than anybody. When its applications peaked a few years ago, it got ~12,000 EA applications. For comparison, that year MIT and Georgetown got around 7,000 EA applications, and Notre Dame 5,000, and the HYPS SCEA crowd got 5,000-6,000 each.
But now, with so few acceptances going to EA applicants, it’s hard to believe that Chicago will have maintained its EA volume. Of course, it now accepts ED applications, and some of the EA volume will have switched to ED. But because ED is so much less applicant-friendly than EA, no college gets much more than 5,000 ED applications. (Penn and Cornell are pretty much the only colleges to get 6,000 or more ED applications, and they are a lot larger. Brown and Columbia don’t get anywhere near as many as 5,000.) Unless a lot of the types of people who used to apply EA are shifting over to RD (last year’s 2% RD acceptance rate sure doesn’t encourage that), Chicago was risking a big drop in application volume this year or next. I suspect that’s happening.
I agree with @Cue7 and @JHS. My impression is that UChicago is trying to pursue two objectives that they believe will help them to be grouped by the general public with HYPSM, but that the ways they’re pursuing those objectives are fundamentally incompatible.
On the one hand, they want to look as selective as HYPSM, which means they need to gin up as many applications as possible, thereby producing a very low admit rate - hence, all those mailings. On the other, they want to be perceived as similarly desirable to HYPSM, which means they need to have a yield as high as those schools, which in turn has led them to fill possibly more than two-thirds of the class admitted in last year’s admissions season from the EDI/II pools - guaranteeing a very high yield but leaving relatively little room for applicants who aren’t willing to apply ED.
Unfortunately, a perception that you have very little chance unless you apply ED, especially when coupled with UChicago’s very idiosyncratic application form, can be expected (and probably has) led to a significant decline in EA and RD apps. Hitting the gas on objective #2 reduces their ability to achieve objective #1 - they can look more desirable but less selective, or vice versa, but really need to be both.
UChicago doesn’t disclose numbers of applicants and admits by pool, so only they know the truth, but that’s what seems to me to be going on.
Well, ludicrous as it sounds, someone on the other thread claims 18 - 19K early applications. I have a laptop-eating bet on that one . . .
The aggressive marketing I hear about is a bit of a turn-off for me as well, but I don’t reach the conclusion that this is being done for any reason other than the obvious one - to reach (as a small subset of those who get the materials) kids who wouldn’t otherwise know about the school. Lack of name recognition is something that’s long been a problem for the University of Chicago and has been often discussed on this board. Over the years there must have been many kids who would have loved the peculiar characteristics of the place but just never got the message about it. If you’re a kid who isn’t really interested and if you keep getting this material, you’re bound to be irritated. So what? You were never going to apply anyhow. Some other kid might have discarded the first couple of mailings but started looking more closely at the third or fourth, perhaps even started doing some research about the place or made a visit, things which might not have happened absent the mailings. I can’t see anything negative about any of that, nor do I think one has to cynically assume that it’s all to gin up applications so as to produce a low admit rate - as if that were the desired end and not merely an effect. How about the more obvious one of giving as many excellent potential future students a look at the place as possible?
Nor do I see any incompatibility with that objective and the different but not inconsistent one of encouraging that greater pool of potential applicants, enhanced by the mailings, to choose between ED and EA on the basis of just how serious those applicants are about Chicago. @DeepBlue86 , you’re suggesting a trivial motivation for this - that “they want to look as selective as HYPSM” or “guarantee a very high yield” as if that was an end in itself - as against the, to me, far more obvious objectives - that they want, firstly, to reach through the mailings as many potential Chicago-type kids as possible and secondly, to identify through the application process the ones who most want to come to Chicago. There are reasons to disagree with this strategy, voiced cogently by all you gentlemen. However, I myself see no dissonance in it. We’ll see whether it results in fewer overall applications. It sounds like it might. It’ll be fine in my book if after all the marketing has been done some kids fall away but a sufficient core remains. The objective is for Chicago to get the kids it wants and for those kids to get Chicago.
I have never had a problem with Chicago’s extensive marketing. For the most part, it has been very high-quality, and very much in tune with the character of the institution. Notwithstanding that they came from a family where the University of Chicago was a known, respected brand, the marketing was absolutely critical for making my kids enthusiastic about going there . . . and also for putting them into the right mindset to appreciate it once they got there. That’s not a trivial thing, when you are dealing with an institution that does not offer the generic college experience. It also benefits the University if people who choose not to apply there, or to go there – including people not eligible to apply, like employers – understand better what a Chicago education means. There are lots of perfectly good reasons to engage in the kind of marketing campaign Chicago does. And I agree that it’s a good thing to attract more applications from a broader population of applicants who might be a great fit.
But @marlowe1 is one toke over the line if he thinks filling more than half of the class spots from ED applicants is good for doing anything other than (a) ensuring the lowest possible publicly reported admission rate in a particular year, and (b) ensuring that at least half the class solidly reflects the narrow demographic characteristics of ED applicants anywhere. It’s a lovely, romantic idea to imagine that what differentiates ED applicants from EA or RD applicants is their greater appreciation of what is unique about Chicago, or their self-assessment of fit. But very few people are willing to submit ED applications anywhere unless they have the essential characteristics of ED applicants, namely minimal price sensitivity and high sophistication about the gaming aspects of college admissions. And Chicago’s embrace of ED II effectively guarantees that a substantial number of applicants accepted ED are people who were disappointed at not being admitted ED or SCEA at some college they preferred to Chicago. That doesn’t bother me so much – it was always the case with both EA and RD applicants – but it completely undercuts @marlowe1 's fantasy.