How Is Chicago's Accept Rate 8% This Year?

“Chicago looks like it’s just trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the well, at the expense of applicants.”

I call it extracting that last bit of consumer surplus. LOL.

Admissions seems to update the application stuff for an August release, and then they update their webiste after that time. There may be a host of factors delaying till October (as opposed to summer) - are they revising their uncommon questions? Are they overhauling their application? Are they planning a roll out of new avenues (like Coalition or similar). Who knows?

Stupid Maroon didn’t even ask these questions. Perhaps they will be able to sit down with Jim Nondorf once the April Overnights and all the visits and so forth are over with and ask 'Sup?

Yeah but USNWR also makes subjective decisions, doesn’t it? Hard to downgrade a school (you just elevated) based on your suspicions about what the withheld data would show when you aren’t actually using that same year’s data for other schools. OTOH, if this year’s admissions debacle were already publicized, USNWR could just gesture in that direction to explain its concerns. But if the data hasn’t already been made public, the lag time will render it irrelevant. By the time USNWR is relying on 2021 data, it’ll look like a momentary aberration (new SAT, introduction of ED), because UofC will avoid making the same mistake twice.

I still maintain one of the numbers they do release publicly is off by a lot. They don’t release EA vs RD numbers, so Low RD admit rates are not it. There are three numbers they release. # of apps, # of admits , class size.

Maybe the # of apps tanked but now that I think about it, something else could be happening. What if their RD yield was higher than they expected. What if they land up with a really big class size. 1800, even 1900 because on top of the ED crowd a higher bunch of RD kids accepted. First years are guaranteed housing. Maybe they want to see what the housing situation is for second years and upperclassmen to see how many are returning to campus housing. Remember they only have 3,300 beds. They may be scrambling to figure that out before raising alarms about housing shortage among returning students

Hmmmm, will that would be outright obfuscation, so why listen to anyone’s numbers at all?

USNWR out published graduate school rankings. I don’t think the undergraduate one is coming out this year. I think they alternate.

@denydenzig total apps were 28000. That was made available at several receptions for admitted students. We also know 2 percent RD admits.

@Chrchill they update undergrad every year.

Did someone actually hear 2% from an admission’s person?

Yes. 2 percent was the RD admit figure was given by admissions folks at several receptions for admitted students.

@SouthernHope

They admit the application, not the student. What else can they do with 28,000 apps?

@Chrchill What they say informally may differ from what they will say formally. It may be close and then again it may not. In fact Chicago’s yield data was off by 3% last year from what was declared by the Maroon and what they put out on the website later.

Lets me hypothesize on this. It is possible that with the experiment, they dont like what they are seeing and that they need to 1) make time to figure out a way to spin it and avoid negative reactions 2) admit more RDs from the waitlist during the summer melt or offer more applicants gap year status to bump RD acceptance significantly up (why disclose its 1% right now when it could likely be 5% after the dust settles?) 3) Have next years applicants apply ED before they release results to shield the school from negative effects 4) They are planning a major marketing campaign around the results and secrecy, right now, is a factor 5) The ED experiment was driven by financial concerns and if they get their extra half billion, which they will know by summers end, then they would announce that they will revert to EA/RD because now they dont have to do ED 6) They are “developing” a donor that would commit a half billion dollars and would not risk any sort of news from risking that 7) They are firing Nondorf before they announce the results. 8) They want the USNews rankings to come out first so that they have positive news to match the super low acceptance rate in RD 9) Something is wrong with the composition of the incoming class (e.g. too many rich or internationals or East coasters or men) and they are trying to fix that over the summer melt 10) They accepted too many applicants because yield is too high and they are figuring out a plan on how to deal with the congestion.

Hmmm… okay so I failed, since there are just too many possibilities on why not saying anything is preferable to saying something.

I’m going to apply Occam’s razor here. I think between the number of kids admitted ED1/2, and a high yield on the limited number admitted RD, they overshot, aren’t going to be able to take many off the waitlist, and the RD admit rate looks really low. They hope summer melt will make it tick up a little bit before they have to announce something, but, given the fall in total apps, they’re worried about sending a signal that if you aren’t applying ED, you shouldn’t bother. If that’s the public perception, it could cause a further decrease in apps, which would be bad PR (people would be questioning if UChicago has peaked), and many of the apps they’d lose would come from kids who think they have a shot at HYPS and won’t want to apply ED to UChicago - i.e., some of the best candidates.

@DeepBlue86

Here’s the problem if you rely on summer melt though - if you accept a ton of people ED, it is much less likely they will go elsewhere. Where else will they go? They haven’t applied anywhere else. So, you have less summer melt.

It’s possible some will take gap years, but not many. Also, summer melt never really changes the numbers that much - maybe a couple percentage points. If your ED rate is 30%, it doesn’t make much of a difference if your RD rate is 2% or 3.5%. It still looks lopsided.

Further, by NOT saying anything, when everyone else is providing data, it just looks bad. Not speaking does not outweigh speaking in this instance.

It looks like Chicago messed up this year and it exposes Nondorf in a way that shows him doing what he does best - playing games at the expense of the applicant pool.

I’m disappointed because, while all ad comms engage in some bad practices, it really looks like Chicago is the worst of the bunch.

A good wake up call would be for chicagos ranking to drop. It deserves it after these shenanigans.

@Chrchill I could have misheard him, but then others around me did also. Yesterday afternoon, at Rockefeller Chapel, Nondorf said the overall acceptance rate was 8% and the RD acceptance rate was “one half of one percent”. Did anyone else hear this?

One half of one percent RD rate. At this point, I think I’m going to look at Breitbart news to figure out the real number, or maybe Info wars. I’ve heard they only deal with hard facts.

Seriously though, Rockefeller has the worst acoustics. Sometimes you can barely hear what the speaker is saying

Wow. Earlier posts maintained that this .5% pertained only to the EA-deferred portion of RD but that seems like an odd group for which to release stats!

All the accepted RD’s we’ve met (a small group, of course) were not EA-deferreds but kids who are looking at HYPS as well. Some have merit aid. All the EA-deferreds we know about who stayed in the RD pool have been waitlisted or rejected. Small samples on both, keep in mind. However, our anecdotal evidence suggests that they have plucked kids out of the RD pool who are exceptionally talented and accepted to a variety of tippy tops.

Key question: does anyone know an EA-Deferred (or an EDI-Deferred if they deferred rather than waitlisted that pool) who actually got in RD?

To me, it’s simple. You don’t want to put out data that people will base decisions on when you think that data will not reflect what you’ll do in the future. UofC isn’t a democratic government – it doesn’t have an obligation to provide students, alumns, or potential applicants full and timely disclosure of this information. And students, alumns, and potential applicants are free agents who can protest, transfer, refuse to donate, decide not to apply, etc. if they don’t approve of what the administration is doing.

Basically, admissions has put the school in a situation where its two basic choices are (1) publicize the data now and exacerbate the problem or (2) delay release of the data to minimize its impact on next year’s admissions cycle. Option #1 encourages potential applicants to base their decisions on mistaken assumptions/to play the odds and Option #2 forces them to make decisions knowing they don’t know WTF UofC is going to do next year. Personally, option 2 strikes me as better for both the applicant (reduces the complexity of decisionmaking and encourages a focus on the right questions) and for the university (got to experiment, gets to learn from its mistake, and to rethink both its goal and its methods). What we’re seeing, on this analysis, is a move from taking admissions gamesmanship to a whole other level (this year) to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction and the beginning of a reset.

Re PR. Fall release of data vs. Spring release is non-news. There’s been enough talk generally about the insanity of the college admissions process and the perverse effect of smaller and smaller admissions rates that UChicago can just say (if asked) everybody is realizing this kind of publicity is counterproductive so we’ve decided to wait til the data is final before releasing it. No scandal there. No juicy story.

Will UofC lose RD applications next year as a result? Yeah, probably. But they’d also lose them as a result of pursuing strategy #1. What the “known unknown” scenario means, though, is that the RD pool will consist of applicants who decide it’s worth the effort (substantial, given the essays) of applying to UChicago even if the odds of getting in are unknown but no doubt slim. Who do you lose in the RD round? Kids for whom it’s not worth the effort – e.g. those who’d believe they’d be equally happy at a dozen other well-regarded schools – that are easier to apply to and where probably have a better shot at getting in. Meanwhile, people/schools that pay attention to these things see that ED gives applicants a real edge vs. EA and that ED2 enables an applicant to get that edge w/o sacrificing his/her best shot at ONE Ivy. So EA apps go down, making it easier to phase that out in subsequent years (but keeping it around long enough to obscure how dramatic the ED advantage was at first).

I agree that summer melt wouldn’t be expected to move the needle substantially, @Cue7, but every kid that drops and has to be replaced makes the RD admit rate look a little more reasonable, so maybe UChicago views this as another reason to wait as long as possible before disclosing the final numbers. I wonder, too, whether financial aid has anything to do with it - an unprecedentedly large proportion of the class has been admitted ED, but if some of the kids admitted ED can’t make it work with the packages they’ve been offered, they’ll drop, and that could also make a difference.

“Will they lose RD applications next year as a result? Yeah, probably.”

No they won’t because those numbers will be released well before RD apps. are due.