Doesn’t the application for the 17-18 cycle come out soon? Like, over the summer? If so, Chicago has to move quickly in deciding it’s admission options (EA, ED, ED2, etc.)…
@exacademic, yes. UChicago originally told deferred EAs that they would advance straight to the RD round. Then people started asking to be switched to EDII, the school consented and sent an email to all the deferred students advising them.
@denydenzig Well, when you applied ED2 it became your first choice by default…
@exacademic at #158, they didn’t revise. They added. LOL.
EA deferreds were automatically deferred to regular. That didn’t change from their original communications. They did offer the chance to switch to EDII as part of the decision communicated in December. Regardless of whether it was a last-minute thought or a calculated strategy, betting it worked out very well for them. Still think a bunch of their EDII pool was EA-deferred from Chicago (rather than from elsewhere).
Yes, EA remains for next year, but will the option to switch from EA to ED2 post-deferral remain? Or be added again depending on results/demand?
I am having lunch with Nondorf today. Will ask him 
@denydenzig and ask him why they do not publish their stats and are delaying and tell him it is bad PR.
@Sam-I-Am we found out you could switch immediately. It was posted either in their blog or somewhere else (can’t remember). Perhaps kids asked before decisions actually came out. Not sure. But D17 started thinking immediately about EDII - like the evening of Dec. 19th (the decision day).
Pretty sure I saw two sets of info. about EDI’s. one was they could defer to regular, the other is that the decision is waitlist, reject or accept. So they were playing with these as the application cycle progressed.
Doesn’t matter because for this next cycle they will have a very clear idea of what they want to offer. If they’ve already said EA is staying, that must be because they benefitted from it. Although at this point I’m a bit like those who are saying only official #'s matter. IMHO, only the official application choices as stated on the website this Aug. will matter.
@denydenzig are you an AO mole? Don’t blow your cover! Or ours. LOL.
Lol. I was just kidding
Well, it’s a dance. They may know what they want to offer but they aren’t quite sure how applicants will respond to/interpret their offer, so it’s worth preserving room to maneuver. I think the advantage of EA this year was that it obscured how great the ED advantage was vis a vis RD. Once they get more people opting into ED and/or fewer RD applications, it’ll be easier to get both rates (and the differential) to sane/acceptable/respectable levels.
Lol. No. I have no contacts. I was just being silly.
I have read several times here that whatever proves to be the final RD acceptance rate, it must be much lower than the Admissions people anticipated or wanted and can only be explained as some kind of mistake. But how could that be the case? Nondorf et. al. knew and controlled how many ED applicants were accepted. They knew that virtually all those acceptees would matriculate. The math seems laughably simple, even for as number-challenged a guy as me: Desired class size less ED portion of class equals RD (including EA) portion (the numbers accepted in the last category to be adjusted upwards to account for less than 100 per cent yield).
One can disagree with a low-RD policy, but it can’t have come as a surprise. It must reflect a genuine policy of privileging the ED’s - those who made the University either their first choice (ED1’s) or second choice (ED2’s) - but it probably also reflects an ED pool that was so inherently strong that they ended up almost necessarily filling the class: they were too good to be refused. If Nondorf is as manipulative and canny a guy as everyone says he is, he must surely have recognized that this would have an adverse effect on acceptance rates in future years in that it will discourage and reduce what someone has called the “fodder” of many unqualified RD applicants. He took all those ED’s notwithstanding that adverse effect. That was rather brave, but it also seems simply sound: resulting in a class composed of very high-quality first-choicers. That’s got to be a better and higher value to the University than fiddling the acceptance rate by pumping up RD’s. Others on this board clearly disagree. Fair enough. But an unforeseen result? I don’t think so.
What if it was the number of RD apps received that surprised the Ad comm? By all accounts here, Chicago only received about 16k RD apps. That’s like 50-100% less than many of its peers.
I wonder if Chicago was banking on receiving more RD apps. Since they didn’t, they may just be playing everything else cautiously (and to the detriment of future applicants).
If they received lots of RD apps, they could’ve just made their usual announcement - 8% accept rate on 28k total apps, and not release any figures on EA/ED. As they received considerably less apps than pretty much all their peers, maybe they changed their minds.
Weeeelllll…based on what @marlowe1 is saying, there’s another, more cynical interpretation of everything. UChicago wants to pump up yield and full-payers to the absolute max, and pick and choose to get a desired stats level for the class, so they’re going to accept virtually everyone ED and never disclose the proportion of ED vs. RD. UChicago wants applicants to believe that they have a chance in RD, but they’re only going to admit a small number of applicants in that round who they really hope to get but may lose to HYPS/others, and are offering them a lot of merit money (available because so many full-payers were admitted ED) and courting them hard. The school is actually never going to disclose the number of RD admits because that would cause total app numbers (particularly RD apps) to tank. In this scenario, the school knows exactly what they’re doing. What do posters think of this interpretation?
That sounds downright ruthless. With all the bad pub about ED - accepting like 80%+ of the class ED is unfathomable. Even Penn would never do that. With such a move, the distant visage of meritocracy/egalitarianism goes right out the window when you favor the proven-to-be wealthier applicant pool so much more.
Knowing Nondorf, I wouldn’t put it past him, but that’s just cold.
For what it’s worth, you can count my daughter among the 2000 fewer who did not apply to UC this year. You could’ve toilet trained 101 newborn Dalmations with the advertisements they sent to her, but much of that paper came around the time of the arrogant, sneering letter making fun of “safe spaces.” Defensible position or not, the tone of that letter turned her off & she wasn’t interested in going to a school filled with students attracted to that kind of simplistic rhetoric.
You all know UC a million times better than I do, but possibly, connected to or apart from all the yield protection and absurd multiplication of options & dates to apply, the school is trying to (re)shape itself ideologically by pulling right? I have no dog in this fight but it does seem like something weird is going on.
We know from multiple sources that EDI and EDII accounted for atleast 750 offers and probably 99% yield.
28k @ 8% rate is about 2240 +/- offers less EDI/EDII is 1,490+/- for EA and RD combined (400 EA and 790 RD)
Even at a 50% yield and the 2021 class is @ 1,500. Historical yield @ 65+% means the class is atleast 1,700, but that may fluctuate based on ED this year but doubt it as the top 10 all had lowest years
This assumes the total application numbers are legit and do not have double counting.
On a side note, anyone have any analysis on why ED would allow for higher pay at a University that meets 100% of demonstrated need. I understand the correlation between higher test scores, but full pay is a real stretch in my opinion.
@marlow1 I agree with what you are saying and Admissions has kind of hinted at this in all their presentations (not just to admits but in what they’ve communicated to the university in general. You can lie to your admits, perhaps, but you can’t lie to your superiors and not expect to get called on it).
@cue7 at #175 - if UChicago was truly concerned about bad publicity concerning ED then why would they offer TWO choices there? No evidence that this concerns them anywhere as much as finding the niche kids for their niche school.
@LadyMeowMeow at #176. Thank you. You are just one data point but your post my theory concerning a big reason why applications might have dropped. Those who disagree with the safe space / free speech letter are best off not applying and I’m betting a whole bunch of them turned their attentions elsewhere.
Brown and Oberlin would make an excellent choice for the safe space crowd. As would the local pet store.