<p>I could not figure out why UC's acceptance rate is so high as 35%, could you ?</p>
<p>That's because it was 28%.</p>
<p>HAHAH it probably will drop even more</p>
<p>If you can't figure out why Chicago's acceptance percentage is higher than that of similar universities, you aren't trying very hard.</p>
<p>The #1 reason: It gets fewer applications relative to its size. Forget Yale and Princeton, whose numbers are crazy, but Chicago gets meaningfully fewer applications per slot than Hopkins, Dartmouth, Brown. Why? The traditional answer is that students self-select based on Chicago's all-work, little-play reputation, fussy core curriculum, and the need to write essays that you can't recycle much for other colleges. I'm sure that's true. Another part of it is that even though Chicago is a big city, the big population centers of the country are elsewhere, on the West and East Coasts, and in the Sunbelt, and not all of the kids there want to travel to Chicago for college. (Northwestern, which doesn't have a dour reputation, a core, or a quirky application, and which does have Big 10 sports, gets about the same number of applications per slot as Chicago, which leads me to believe that geography is more important than people acknowledge. Contra: Penn gets about the same applications per slot, too.) Also, it doesn't participate in the "Ivy" virtual marketing cooperative, which has been very, very successful at promoting its brand over the years.</p>
<p>The #2 reason: No ED. Except for HYPS and 2 or 3 others, most elite colleges have to offer admission to 2.5-3 students per slot in order to get a full class, except for students admitted under binding ED programs, where the ratio is 1 admission per slot. So, as I said, Chicago and Northwestern each get the same number of applications per slot, and there isn't a meaningful difference in the rate at which the students they accept non-ED choose to enroll. But Northwestern has an ED program that fills 25% of its class (which is actually very low for an ED college). So, if they each get 9-10 applications per slot (that's about right), Chicago is going to wind up accepting 3 applications per slot (actually, somewhat fewer, but that ballpark), and Northwestern will accept 2.33 applications per slot. That pretty much fully explains the acceptance rate difference between the schools.</p>
<p>The #3 reason: Chicago does a pretty good job of converting accepted students with a choice into enrolled students, but not as good a job as some of its rivals, mainly HYPS, MIT, Columbia. They accept a lot fewer applications per slot, from under 1.2 (Harvard) to 2.4 (Columbia for non-ED). </p>
<p>So, compare Chicago to three comparable schools of approximately the same size: Columbia, Brown, Hopkins. Last year, Chicago got about 9.7 applications per slot; the comparable numbers for the others were Columbia - 18, Brown - 17, Hopkins - 13.8. So right there, that guaranteed that Chicago would have a significantly higher admit rate than the others. Then, take ED into account. Columbia and Brown each filled almost half of its class from its ED pool (which in each case was about 60% the size of Chicago's EA pool), Hopkins about 40% (from an ED pool 25% the size of Chicago's EA pool). Chicago's EA admissions filled about the same percentage of its class -- a little less than half -- but because EA was not binding Chicago admitted twice the number of students as any of the others in the early round. Then, in the RD round Brown and Chicago each admitted almost exactly the same number of students (about 3.2/slot), Hopkins admitted far more (about 4.3 per slot), and Columbia meaningfully fewer (about 2.4/slot). When you put it all together, Chicago admitted about 2.7/9.7 for each place, Columbia 1.8/18, Brown 2.1/17, and Hopkins 2.9/13.8.</p>
<p>That's it in a nutshell. Fewer applications, EA vs. ED, and compared to some (but not all) rivals somewhat less success enrolling students accepted RD.</p>
<p>JHS covered most of it, but I'd just like to point out one other thing: from what I've seen UC doesn't appear to be as "OMG-WE-MUST-INCREASE-OUR-USNAWR-RANKING-AS-MUCH-AS-POSSIBLE-LETS-ENCOURAGE-PEOPLE-WHO-HAVE-NO-CHANCE-OF-GETTING-IN-TO-APPLY-EARLY" as other comparable colleges.</p>
<p>Well, there are those UChicago purists who consider adopting the Common App to be a concession to just that kind of mentality... ;)</p>
<p>The stated reason for the move to the common app was to continue the push to increase the diversity found in the applicant pool, but who knows?</p>
<p>The common app with Chicago supplement is easier on high school teachers and high schools that have to process these applications. I don't have much sympathy with the purists. It makes it harder for applicants now to apply, anyway, because they have to produce two unique extended essays.</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you JHS on the number-crunching. Another thing I've noticed about Chicago is that it's less midwest than a lot of schools on the East Coast are made of East Coasters. If we assume that students try to attend schools that are within a 5-hour driving radius from home, we have Chicago touching upon Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota. All of those states (particularly Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) have particularly reputable public schools. You may not think that comes into play that much, but I know a lot of students here who were on the fence between U of M or U of I in-state and U of C. So it's hard to make a potential Wolverine into a Maroon or a Wildcat, particularly when they comprise a large section of the applicant pool (probably).</p>
<p>Or let's consider states that border the Ivies: Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey. All have solid but unremarkable/unprestigious state school systems. Both also have a lot of wealth, so a big market of people who don't care too much that they're paying for Brown or Hopkins instead of TCNJ.</p>
<p>I don't have numbers to confirm this, but I suspect that Northwestern and the midwest LAC's may experience a similar phenomenon. Thus one could make the argument that they are "underrated" with respect to East Coast peers.</p>
<p>Very nice analysis. You must attend the...</p>
<p>Playing devil's advocate and presuming a little more bad faith, it should be added that UChicago has already maxed out the actual value of gaming the rankings, and hence this might explain its present lack of wizardry. It is already alongside of its real and percieved peer schools - Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Duke etc. - and so engaging in admissions number spinning in the manner that WUSTL did over the last decade is not a pressing concern. It does not seem possible to me to use USNews gerrymandering, for lack of a better word, to actually increase an institution's status far beyond what is deserved.</p>
<p>But admissions rate is not as much wizardry as much as it is making sure a lot of students apply and also making sure enough of those who apply want to attend...? It doesn't seem to me there is much the school can do to manipulate admissions rate, other than consider files that don't get completed "rejections" and the like.</p>
<p>But in the case of overall rank, I see your point.</p>
<p>Unalove does present a very good point, I must admit that as an East Coast resident having 3 Ivies within a 2-hr driving radius, I didn't even know what UC was until after my college counselor pushed me to check it out. Keep in mind that my father considers USNAWR to be holier than any religious text in existence, and that the only reason I was permitted to apply to UC EA was because it ranked equally with Columbia in USNAWR >_></p>
<p>Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that despite the USNAWR rankings (and I don't think UC will ever be able to beat out HPYSM in this regard), UC suffers considerably from lack of "name recognition", for lack of a better term, as I had no idea what UC was in spite of its USNAWR rankings (which only served, in my mind, to differentiate among schools I already knew of).</p>
<p><em>sips kool-aid</em> XD</p>
<p>An interesting aside is that many older alumni I speak with consider the Chicago curriculum and rigor to have been superior in the days when it admitted 60% or 70% of the applicants. Many feel that in order to attract more applicants the school has had to water down its undergraduate curriculum to compete for students with the Ivies. An interesting point of view when one is evaluating based on "selectivity."</p>
<p>A quote from an article written for the The Atlantic in 2001 kind of makes this point as well:
[quote]
Do the most highly selective colleges really offer a better education than less selective ones? This would be a much easier question to answer if the University of Chicago weren't such an unfashionable place among so many undergraduates. There it sits, with its dreamy Gothic architecture of the precise type that kids nowadays go in for, its bumper crop of Nobel laureates (the most in the nation), its hugely impressive student-faculty ratio, its demonstrably extraordinary programs and departments. But the kids don't really like it. Why? It's too intellectual. What, then, do they mean by the term "good education"? Good but not too good, I guess. It's the kind of education you can get at certain places but not others—at Georgetown but not at the University of Washington; at Duke but not at Chapel Hill. It's the kind of education you can get definitely at Stanford, less so at Berkeley, much less so at Michigan, hardly at all at Wisconsin, and not at all at the University of Illinois. That kind of thinking has always bewildered me.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Confessions</a> of a Prep School College Counselor - The Atlantic (September 2001)</p>
<p>^What? The kids don't like it because it's too intellectual? I thought that was the whole POINT of UC, a highly intellectual learning community? I mean, that's the biggest thing I've gotten from these boards, the UC website, the UC blogs, the UC propaganda mailed to my house, and my entire 1-hr long alumna interview, but I guess those could all be wrong...</p>
<p><em>Edit</em> Oops, I was reading that totally wrong. I don't think anyone not prepared for a highly intellectual atmosphere would apply to UC, though. Besides, they attract more people looking for a UC-type school, like me, as demonstrated in my above post, through boosting their USNAWR ranking, which never hurts (the college at least). I know I never would have considered UC unless it had both the intellecual community AND the USNAWR ranking, but that's just me. <em>chugs kool-aid</em></p>
<p>To be fair, there are plenty of smart people out there who want a good education and are probably not attracted to the U of C. But I do agree that name brands factor in way more than they should in determining a "good" education.</p>
<p>Couldn't agree more, unalove. Colleges/college admissions are just businesses, not institutions of learning; the education is just the product the business is trying to sell you.</p>
<p>Not meaning to bash UC in any way, but it's as simple as...</p>
<p>1) Not as many people apply (compared to other schools of its caliber)
2) Out of the ones who do apply, not as many (again, compared to other schools of its caliber) matriculate--and UC knows this</p>
<p>All colleges aim for a given (approximate) class size, and they know how many applicants they have to accept in order for all the spots to be filled.</p>
<p>Knat, your first point is clearly true. The second point is true only by comparison to six or seven schools. In terms of enrollment of accepted students who have a choice (i.e., not ED), Chicago is on a par with places like Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, Cal Tech.</p>
<p>@JHS:</p>
<p>Yes, I agree. However, that's only because for many of those schools, a significant portion of their admitted students applied ED. For example, UPenn 2012, 1,147 of 3,888 total admitted applied ED. Without that, the % matriculated are about the same (in the thirties), but imo, that ED population does make a difference.</p>
<p>The fact that UC does non-binding EA forces them to accept more applicants than schools with ED.</p>
<p>Once again, I'm not trying to bash UC at all. I'm not at all saying that it's a less-desirable school. I'm just trying to explain why they have to admit more students that other schools of equal standing.</p>