even a great grandad…
Ida Noyes’ daddy donated a building but only after she was drowned by her classmates . . .
Max Palevsky donated a building but only after his son Nick got the heebie-jeebies from prolonged exposure to the gray walls of BJ. Now that eponymous building gives everyone else the heebie-jeebies.
The Facebook page which is a closed group is already upto 1150 and it’s possible all kids haven’t joined yet
Am just hapoy and grateful D got in and the stress is over
What’s wrong the the heebie-jeebies??? Or in shortened form “hebegebe”???
For you, @hebegebe , I will make an exception and declare the heebie-jeebies a beautiful thing in the right hands. The U of C is hardly known, anyhow, as a place of serenity. I think Aristotle in his discussion of the good life must somewhere deal with the correct proportionality.
If we assume a 7% early admit rate, what might be a good estimate for this year’s overall admit rate?
You can essentially derive it from DeepBlue86’s analysis above, if you think you know the total number of applications. People have been throwing around ~40,000 for that number. 2,200 admits/40,000 applications would be 5.5%. Within a few basis points of that. Or maybe a few more than a few.
Depends on whether they are really going to have a smaller entering class (more often said than done) and if they really got 40,000 applications. If you assume the class stays around 1,800, and “only” 38,000 applications, that would mean an overall admission rate somewhat above 6%.
What difference does that make to anyone? It’s tiny, whatever it is.
Why can’t they under-admit in the RD round, then pull from the waitlist to get their 1700 number? Kind of an up-from-below strategy. And if it turns out that even with “under-admitting” they oversubscribe a bit, then they needn’t pull anyone off the waitlist and they’ll still probably be far closer to their professed long-term goal than they were last year. If they truly wanted close to 1700 they can achieve that. It comes down to whether they yet want that class size.
Its also highly possible that this is just a shift of applicants from RD and ED2 to EA and ED1. The total pool could have stayed the same. We wont know
@JBStillFlying - they already do that, as I know anecdotally from someone who was waitlisted three years ago and offered a spot conditional on their immediately accepting it. Some call this “ED3”…and it necessarily means that the numbers being admitted without a commitment to enroll are overstated to some degree.
“Dean of the College John Boyer said in a recent meeting with students that the College plans to eventually have about 1,700 students per class for a population of around 7,000 undergraduates.”
There are so many qualifying words in this statement (plans, eventually, about, around) that you can drive a few trucks through it :)) .
The class size should be 7,000/4 => 1,750. But there is no reason why it can’t be 1,800 again this year. The main reason why AO does not want another big class is that there are not enough dorm rooms and the Housing and Residence Life is not happy about putting people in Vue53 due to high cost.
But Woodlawn Residential Commons will be done by the time Class of 2025 arrive and AO can always admit 100 more full pay students to help out the cost of putting students at Vue53.
I agree with @JBStillFlying that the most likely AO strategy is absolutely lowball on RD and then pull kids off waitlisted in late May or June if the class comes in size of 1,650. Somehow I just don’t see the 1,650 matriculation number on May 1st happening. If it does happen, there will be many happy kids receiving phone calls in May or June.
Where do people get 40,0000 number from? If that is the case that would be a 25% growth over last year’s 32,200. I just don’t see that happen, unless you believe that the new test optional policy is doing its magic.
The situation @DeepBlue86 describes sounds to me like it would be exceptional and not statistically very significant - something that might be done as part of the last strokes of filling a class when certainty had become a priority. At that point there would be already a diminishing number of good candidates further diminishing rapidly as they are being taken off the waitlists of other schools or making commitments to schools who have selected them RD. Time would be of the essence. It sounds plausible and reasonable to me that at that stage a kid would be asked whether he/she would accept an offer if made. If that question were not asked and if the kid ultimately declined, another very viable kid may have lost his/her chance.
@marlowe1 The strategy described by DeepBlue86 (and by JBStillFlying) – to under-admit RD, and then fill the class to a precise limit through waitlist offers to applicants who have indicated they will accept a waitlist offer – has indeed been used by any number of colleges for different reasons (maybe), ranging from making a fundamental mistake in gauging the number of accepted applicants who will enroll to wanting to produce the lowest possible admission rate. However, it’s somewhat at odds with the goal of getting the best class, so it’s not in such good odor.
I speculate that they consistently overshoot their target because it’s really hard to reject great kids. Admissions officers at Chicago didn’t have to reject so many kids until recently. You can waitlist them, but when the time comes to offer to pull them off the waitlist they may already be committed to Dartmouth or Columbia or Swarthmore.
“I speculate that they consistently overshoot their target because it’s really hard to reject great kids.”
Was also wondering that and it would explain the previous two years’ significantly larger class sizes.
@jzducol the 40,000 comes from a video of Zimmer nodding when the applicant number was mentioned. Some conference but forget which. Hopefully someone can re-post here. No one knows for sure, of course. Early numbers increased by 15% but that’s consistent with early growth rates for other schools and it’s possible, as @FStratford has pointed out, that total applicant numbers might not have changed overall, just shifted more into the Early camp. Still, that’s one sizable leap. The early pool was always huge to begin with, and it had been stable at about 12 - 13K for a few years prior to this one.
It was at Davos, where Zimmer was on a panel discussion. It happens in the exchange starting around 40:14.
https://voices.uchicago.edu/weforum/2019/01/29/2019-video-and-photos/
I thought Rubenstein did a great job with that panel. He was provocative without being rude. He has a very good sense of humor.
JBS and JHS: Surely there’s a practical reason, rather than a smelly or a strategic one, for underadmitting at the RD stage. A school can’t know with certainty how many will take up offers made at that stage. There is the risk of overshooting the target, something that in fact seems to have happened last year. Wouldn’t good planning be to err on the side of a possible shortfall - and correct for it through the waitlist?
The rationale for any waitlist is that it permits the ultimate target to be approached in a more refined and controlled way. I got off a waitlist recently for a concert. They asked me whether I still wanted to come. That was logical. And why in the first place would they have run the risk of overbooking the hall when they had a stable of people like me waiting to step in and fill the empty seats?
I have no knowledge of the numbers, much less the thinking, of the Chicago Admissions Office, but sometimes the logical explanation is the actual one. I would tend to believe it unless someone can refute it with real knowledge of numbers and motivations of that office. In light of the final size of the matriculating class last year very few must have come in via the waitlist. If it was merely a strategy designed to increase yield it would hardly have moved the needle.