@marlowe1 - agree they could plan well for 1700 and that in any given year the waitlist would easily consist of several great fits ready to sign up if given the chance. The real question is whether and when it makes sense to waitlist those kids as opposed to going ahead and admitting at least some of them, even if they overshoot by doing so. Clearly, they would overshoot if there is a benefit. But at some point a bulging at the seams college will undo the benefit of having so many superlative kids. Hence, a goal and a means to reach it is a smart move - but perhaps they don’t have to be so strict every year. A lot may depend on the particular applicant pool in a given year.
This year they seemed to have turned away some surprisingly stellar applications. One can’t know for sure; however, to me at least it suggests a plan to stick closer to a 1700 number.
Though the readership for it might not be as large as we cc junkies think, a tell-all memoir written by someone inside the belly of the beast - the Chicago Admissions Office of the Nondorf era - would make for fascinating reading. Would it definitively settle these vexed questions? Not likely! Not on this board!
^ All that would do is generate about 10,000 more threads. When a perfectly simple comment such as “we’d like to shoot for a College enrollment of 7,000” is picked apart linguistically and cross-examined in the context of historical and economic behavior, pretty much anything they do or say is up for major discussion and debate.
@marlowe1 It’s not I who is always ascribing some bad motive to things admissions staffs do, at Chicago or anywhere else. We disagree on the legitimacy and wisdom of Chicago using ED to admit as high a percentage of its class as it does, but that doesn’t mean I think everything Chicago admissions does is nefarious.
Using the waitlist to hit a target precisely can be perfectly legitimate, and I said that above. However, there have been cases in the past decade of colleges (not Chicago) taking 200+ people off their waitlists in circumstances where it seemed very credible the college was trying to make its acceptance rate look more competitive by holding the number of people to whom it offered admission to a bare minimum. For most colleges, yield rates for people who have a choice (the key independent variable that drives the number of applicants admitted through the regular decision process) are pretty stable year-to-year. Chicago is one of a very few colleges with wild swings in yield year-to-year that make it possible to make big, obvious mistakes in the number of kids who get accepted.
"We disagree on the legitimacy and wisdom of Chicago using ED to admit as high a percentage of its class as it does . . . "
Wondering if they are able to bring in a critical number of Empower kids using ED. After all, those scholarships are automatic. Same with the full tuition Fire and Police scholarship. What’s wrong with a more modest family taking advantage of the ED process if UChicago is their first choice and they would attend if admitted?