As a whole, very few students are admitted with aid. When a school offers slots to 80% of students who can afford $43k+ in annual tuition and 20% of students who cannot it doesn’t really matter what an individual aid package looks like. That is not a “generous” approach. It is a deliberate choice.
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It depends how many lower income kids choose to apply to a $43k tuition private school instead of their local public, and are well qualified for admission, which expects things like having top ISEE scores (prior to COVID). I’d expect the overwhelming majority of students would still be wealthy, if fully need blind and other non-financial factors were unchanged. You would not see financial demographics that in any way resembled public schools or the population of CA as a whole.
That said, HW is not fully need blind. They would almost certainly have a smaller percentage of full pay type kids than their current 80% level if finances were not considered, but a very large portion of the class would still come from wealthy families.
Yes, it could be that.
Seems to buttress the point the University is going after prep school kids more vigorously than in the past and also cutting them some slack on admissions.
I doubt these unhooked kids are being cut much slack on Chicago admissions. As other posters have suggested this is a highly competitive school and even kids with a 3.6-3.8 UW average may be exceptional applicants. Same goes for the two unhooked kids Chicago accepted even though their UW GPA’s were below 3.6.
I doubt these unhooked kids are being cut much slack on Chicago admissions. As other posters have suggested this is a highly competitive school and even kids with a 3.6-3.8 UW average may be exceptional applicants"
I am afraid I may have to disagree since we do not see UChicago’s competitors accept H-W students in this grade range with such frequency.
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I am afraid I may have to disagree since we do not see UChicago’s competitors accept H-W students in this grade range with such frequency.
Not sure I follow. Wouldn’t a more plausible interpretation be that Chicago has to dip a bit deeper into the well of highly qualified students, because the top students don’t uniformly view Chicago as competitive with Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc?
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Yes. I guess that is my point. UChicago may be accepting applicants some its competitors would not. You are correct that does not mean they are cutting them slack if they would have accepted them in prior years which.
The HW admission stats would also suggest Chicago seems to be dipping a bit deeper in to the well of highly qualified students than schools like Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc. Among the 3.6-3.8 GPA group specifically Chicago’s acceptance rate was more on par with schools like Boston College, Tulane, UCSD/UCSB, etc.
There are many possible explanations. One possible explanation is this is a small sample size anomaly since there were only 36 applicants in the 3.6-3.8 GPA range. The handbook for the previous group of classes shows a similar pattern, but not as extreme, so I doubt that is purely due to small sample size.
If it is not a small sample size issue, then it’s also important to note that the Chicago admit rate for the 3.6-3.8 GPA group is much higher than the 3.8+ GPA group. There is something different about the middle GPA kids that leads to a higher admit rate than the highest GPA kids. Other colleges rarely show this pattern. . For example, a comparison between Northwestern and Chicago is below;
3.8+ GPA: Northwestern = 8/47 = 17%, Chicago = 8/37 = 22%
3.6-3.8 GPA: Northwestern =3/30 = 10%, Chicago = 17/36 = 47%
3.4-3.6 GPA: Northwestern = 0/17 = 0%, Chicago = 2/15 = 13%
One possible difference could be applying binding ED vs RD/EA. Perhaps HW GCs encourage 3.6-3.8 GPA kids who are interested in an Ivy Plus type college and get rejected in the early round to apply ED2 to Chicago. And HW GCs may give a different recommendation to the highest GPA kids who likely have a more realistic shot at Ivy Plus type type colleges in the RD round.
This would also imply that Chicago notably favors ED applicants from HW over RD/EA applicants from HW. This seems plausible, but I have no way to confirm. As others have speculated this pattern may be more true for HW than US HSs as whole. Possible reasons why Chicago might be willing to dip lower in GPA among HW kids than elsewhere include:
- HW kids are used to a rigorous curriculum and probably have a history of being successful at Chicago
- HW kids tend to have very high test scores
- HW kids are probably more likely to ace the non-stat application considerations, including things like essays
- HW kids are from CA
- HW kids tend to be wealthy
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@Data10 I think you are on to something. I hope your reasons 4 and 5 are not the reason for the higher acceptance rate, though.
Thanks for the detailed response. Not sure what you mean by “not as extreme?” Keep in mind that previously this school used weighted gpa, so the old numbers don’t directly line up. For example, for the Classes of 2016-2018, Chicago accepted 36% of the unhooked applicants (32 of 89.) Here is the breakdown:
4.3+: 10/30 (33%)
4.1-4.3: 12/27 (44%)
3.9-4.1: 7/22 (32%)
3.7-3.9 3/8 (38%)
3.5-3.7 0/2 (0%)
Not sure what it was three years ago, but looking at the distribution on the linked school fact sheet, the weighted gpas skew high, with the current median weighted gpa between 3.9 and 4.1.
Since University of Chicago was test optional in the relevant time period, and high scores would probably be a positive factor in admissions at its competitors, it probably isn’t #2.
Same with rigor. The weighted gpa stats of admitted students is relevant- if the weighted gpas skew high, that is an indicator of students doing well in rigorous classes. But rigor is supposed to be the priority for University of Chicago competitors, too, so I don’t think it is #1.
The University of Chicago essays are different than its competitors, but I would think that a good essay writer could nail both the Chicago essays and competitor essays - and no reason to think HW creates students that do especially well at Chicago essays. So I don’t think it is #3.
I like the ED2 theory. Which is not a bad thing. They are scooping up talented kids with rigorous coursework that would otherwise take a risk on RD with their competitors - with no risk to their yield. That they can pay full freight and come from a geographical desirable area (my guess is that the same thing is happening at elite high schools across the country, though) just means, as stated up thread, that they use their RD to focus more on kids who need financial aid. Presumably the percentage of financial aid recipients is the same overall as if they didn’t do ED2. Seems pretty smart to me.
Eta: GCs are probably very aware that non-hooked kids are not as likely to break into the Ivies, so the ED2 advice is particularly appealing to those unhooked high performers. Do we have info on percentage of hooked Chicago students compared to their competition? It is another reason to like the approach if it gets unhooked kids a better chance.
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The only thing that you can glean from this data is that UChicago is recruiting/admitting HW kids at a higher rate than its peers.
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You need a 3.6+ GPA at HW to have a shot at getting into a T20 school.
The 2 admits to UChicago with a 3.4-3.6 are outliers, and the reasons admissions found them to be a fit are unknowable.
Any other conclusions are just too speculative.
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UChicago probably has a higher percentage of unhooked relative to the top competition among the Ivy Plus. While the racial demographics don’t vary all that much, UChicago has a larger percentage of internationals and lower percentage of Pells (at least through Class of '22; I haven’t seen Class of '23 data yet). And the athletics program is excellent but D3, not D1. However, athletes must apply ED, is my understanding. The year my D was admitted ED2 saw athletic admissions in that round. Not sure if that’s still the case or they have moved to ED1. Not sure about development or legacy; while some in the latter category get in, others don’t. My D was deferred EA; I like to say it was her legacy status, her NM standing AND her switch to ED2 that got her into UChicago 
I do think ED will give unhooked kids a better chance at UChicago because they distinguish themselves by their expressed interest in attending. However, not sure whether ED2 is a favorable or less favorabe round compared to ED1.
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Agree. Also, we don’t know where those GPA’s actually fall (closer to 3.799 or 3.601) or what courses were taken. In a holistic review process, once you get past certain threshholds the adcom is moving on to consider other factors.
Your second point seems correct with regard to admission to Chicago, but not in the T20 generally
Yes, in the reference sample Chicago did not have a higher admit than peers among the high GPA kids. Instead it was the 3.6-3.8 GPA kids for which Chicago had a far higher admit rate than peers, including peers ranked among T20 USNWR. So if you want to set a minimum GPA threshold for realistic chance, the stats suggest there would be one threshold for Chicago and a different threshold for peers.
Along the same lines, I don’t think you can assume the 2/15 = 13% Chicago admit rate for 3.4-3.6 were outliers (also had low admit rate among lower GPA kids in earlier sample group posted above), unless you write off the low admit rate among 3.6-.3.8 GPA kids as outliers at all of Chicago’s peer colleges. For reference the 3.6-3.8 GPA admit rates for the other T20 colleges are below. Chicago had a 47% admit rate compared to a median admit rate of 8.5% among the 20 colleges.
Chicago – 17/36 = 47%
WUSTL – 12/49 = 24%
Cornell – 7/34 = 21%
UCLA – 11/57 = 19%
MIT – 1/6 = 17%
Penn – 4/35 = 11%
Rice – 1/9 = 11%
Brown – 3/30 = 10%
Northwestern – 3/30 = 10%
Johns Hopkins – 2/22 = 9%
Dartmouth – 2/25 = 8%
Harvard – 2/29 = 7%
Yale – 1/16 = 6%
Stanford – 1/18 = 6%
Vanderbilt – 1/22 = 5%
Columbia – 1/24 = 4%
Duke – 0/21 = 0%
Princeton – 0/13 = 0%
Notre Dame – 0/4 = 0%
Caltech – 0/2 = 0%
I take from these figures that Chicago really really likes the kids who come from this school - likes them more than any of its peers like them. Why would that be, I wonder? Are there more “Chicago types” to be found there? Is their performance in the College superior to that of students from elsewhere? Is there some clumping phenomenon at work here under which the magnetic field of a serious and demanding school in a cold crime-ridden city far from coastal allures gets a boost from being communicated collectively? That is, can Chicago-inclined kids in HW find validation around them - in prior graduating classes as well as in their own - that can’t be found elsewhere? Nondorf’s reported words suggest that targetting of some sort is going on. If so, it doesn’t have to be to the exclusion of more general efforts but be simply a strategy at particular schools rich in Chicago types. Perhaps such things develop slowly at first, then suddenly. Perhaps they subside over time.
Another question interests me: Are there any generalizable differences at HW or elsewhere as between the small cohort of super-high gpa earners and the somewhat larger one of merely high gpa’s? At first blush one would assume that the former group is comprised simply of the best of the lot, smarter and more talented and more motivated, period. But here I cast my fading memory back to my own high school days and to my recollection of the top 25 kids in my own graduating class. The valedictorian, salutatorian and next three or four highest gpas were not seen by most of us to be more talented than the next twenty or so of their peers. We would have found several in the second cohort that we would have placed higher on the scale of raw talent, and overall we would have seen the gradations in the entire group of all those kids who were smart and interested in their studies as determined primarily by a focus on the narrow objective of achieving perfection in exams and other course requirements. That emphasis could come at the expense of a more expansive interest in the various subject matters that gripped more restless and talented minds and took those minds outside the bounds of the text books and even the subject matters of the prescribed courses. For some very very talented kids it could be sufficient to cruise to “good enough” marks. Their own idiosyncratic energies were stimulated by the classroom but not utterly contained within its bounds.
Things have changed, I am aware. It is a hyper-competitive world out there. However, I doubt that the phenomenon I remember, rooted as it is in human nature, has entirely disappeared. If my speculation has any substance Chicago may have noted this as well and have come to the conclusion that in these second-cohort gpa kids there is real talent - possibly the more idiosyncratic talent that Chicago has traditionally valued.
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This data is from one school. Take the data from another and you will have a whole new set of numbers. For whatever reason, Uchicago finds the students at HW very desirable and are willing to lower their GPA threshold. Those other colleges most likely have other high schools that they target and potentially lower their typical GPA standards for.
Many of those other schools are much more lenient with their recruited athlete’s grades and test scores than Uchicago is. I know for a fact that many of the athletes at Ivy+ have much lower academic profiles than UChicago’s athletes. This also gives Uchicago a bit of a cushion, regarding grades and test scores.
My point is, all these top schools will make allowances for certain kids who they really want to attend. For whatever reason, Uchicago loves HW.
Typically there is a significant difference in talent from DIII athletes (UChicago) to DI athletes in the Ivy League plus Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, & Vanderbilt. Essentially, DI athletic talent is a much bigger hook than is DIII athleticism.
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Personally, I think this is part of the reason that UChicago has made a big emphasis on prep school kids, to tap into that wealth.
I believe that the leaders of UChicago are playing the long game, and tapping into this wealth fits with that. UChicago’s endowment is much lower than the HYPSM colleges, and it is the return from the endowment that allows them to be excellent across so many fields. These prep school kids are hopefully future donors.
Note also that the HYP colleges are not immune from being concerned about wealth, despite their “need-blind” posturing. The main benefit of having legacy preferences is to shift the incomes of the incoming families upward, making them likely future donors as well.
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