The wealth is shown by the top 3 most popular schools–USC, NYU, & WashUStL–which are known to attract wealthy students.
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This. And really, no one here is going to be able to trick out what it is about HW that UChicago loves: money? the kids themselves? the curriculum? It’s probably a combination of many factors. Admissions departments like students who will come to their school, do well academically, take advantage of the resources, and have good exit outcomes. They are more likely to be engaged alums and while at UChicago their families are more likely to be donors. If a bunch of them are known to be found at one particular school, so much the better because Admissions needn’t spend as much time agonizing over their application and can instead devote their time to tracking down and agonizing over other deserving admits. This is very likely why they are willing to go a little lower on the GPA scale at HW. By spending less time on those 17-19 HW applications that weren’t “GPA-stellar” they are giving themselves more time on 17-19 other applications that deserve more deliberation. It’s about using your time optimally in order to give everyone a fair shake in the admissions process.
Multiply that effect by 50 - I bet there are at least 50 independent schools they know and love - and an ED2 round that is rich with students from those schools, and I can see it freeing up a lot of time in RD.
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Looking at the 5 year matriculation numbers above, it seems like plenty of “peers" also really like HW students. Here again are the ten schools enrolling the most HW kids:
That could be. However, I wouldn’t view ED2 as something reserved mostly for certain elite prep schools, nor should one’s admission strategy necessarily depend on what school they attend (NB: YMMV depending on what your GC is saying). ED2 is a great round because it enables someone to try their hand at an SCEA first and get two shots at a top school before the RD round. But that’s true regardless of your high school. For all we know, ED2 applicants are from all over the place and are selected as such.
Wow, what a manipulative and misleading article. And so ironic that it reads like self-satire. My favorite quote:
Three thousand miles away, in Los Angeles, another prep-school teacher says something similar. “It teaches people who have so much to see themselves as victims. They think they are suffering oppression at one of the poshest schools in the country.”
So are you saying that you think the author made up their sources or that parents at HW and other preps are over-dramatic and/or possibly unhinged?
I think you do have to look at 2/15 as such a small sample size that they are indeed outliers for UChicago only. The other schools are consistent in not admitting any in the 3.4-3.6 band. This means UChicago saw something else in these students that other schools wouldn’t seem to even consider.
Matriculation numbers can be misleading since they don’t tell you how many applied, yield, or anything about the applicants who did apply. However, the earlier page from the first post provides some more information. It’s not that the peers do not like HW kids. It’s that the peers are rarely admitting anyone but the high GPA kids. In contrast Chicago had a much larger admit rate for 3.6-3.8 GPA kids than the high GPA kids, among the sample group.
I’ll use Harvard as an example, which had an incredible 45 matriculating students over a 5 year period. I expect this puts HW among the ~10 HSs in the US with the most Harvard matriculants. One might assume this means Harvard loves Harvard-Westlake kids and attending HW gives students a huge advantage in chance of admission to Harvard. Looking in the stats from the first post, the admit rates to Harvard for non-ALDC hooked kids were:
3.8-4.0 GPA – 5/58 = 9% admit rate
3.6-4.0 GPA – 2/28 = 7% admit rate
3.4-3.6 GPA – 0/8 = 0% admit rate
Overall – 7/98 = 7% admit rate
The stats above paint a completely different picture from the huge matriculating numbers. HW kids average 98th percentile ACT score. I expect the ones who applied to Harvard average 99th+ percentile scores. They also took a rigorous HS curriculum, likely did extremely well in the rest of the application, most of the Harvard applicants were among the highest GPA grouping at Harvard Westlake, and a good portion probably applied REA. Yet the admit rate was only 7%… probably a bit lower than the overall average Harvard admit rate for applicants with similar stats. The stats above do not suggest that attending HW provides any advantage at all for getting in to Harvard, like it may for Chicago. Attending HW may even be a disadvantage in getting accepted to Harvard for most students, particularly those who do not stand out among the class of extremely talented students.
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Are those my only two choices?
My post did not say they were not outliers. It said if you consider them outliers, you have to also consider the 3.6-3.8 GPA at admits at peer colleges outliers. For example, my post above mentions 2/28 kids at Harvard were admitted with a 3.6-3.8 GPA compared to 2/15 at Chicago in 3.4-3.6 GPA band. Why are the 2/15 admits at Chicago outliers, and the 2/28 admits at Harvard not outliers?
Rather than compare to T20 USNWR colleges, if you compare Chicago to other colleges with similar 3.6-3.8 GPA admit rates, then all of the similar 3.6-3.8 admit rate colleges also have a few admits in the next GPA step down (when there is sufficient sample size). Why is Chicago expected to be different? For example, comparing to Chicago to UCSB:
3.6-3.8 GPA: Chicago = 17/36 = 47%, UCSB = 19/50 = 38%
3.4-3.6 GPA: Chicago = 2/15 = 13%, UCSB = 8/55 = 15%
3.2-3.4 GPA: Chicago = 0/1= 0%, UCSB = 0/31 = 0%
The percentage comparison is so oversimplified, lacking any context, that it is simply not useful. (e.g. Duke rejecting everyone has nothing to do with UCSB, or Harvard, or UChicago)…you are making GIANT leaps with so little data…outliers are significant deviations from the norm…maybe you don’t consider this an outlier but I would offer that this is a significant deviation from what the peer group has done.
We’ve already established that Chicago appears to have different admission behavior from their peer group (among HW kids). That’s been one of the primary points of this thread. It makes little sense to assume Chicago with a 47% admit rate and reasonably sized sample size in the 3.6-3.8 GPA group is going to have admission results like other T20 USNWR colleges in the next GPA range down, which had a median 8% admit rate for the 3.6-3.8 GPA grange.
As stated, I don’t have a problem calling the 2/15 admits range in the next GPA range down outliers, but the point is if you call them outliers, then to be consistent you also need to call the 3.6.-3.8 GPA admits at peer colleges outliers, which all had lower admit rates in 3.6-3.8 GPA than Chicago did at 3.4-3.6 GPA, and also had a small number of admits in the 3.6-3.8 GPA when non-zero… usually only 1-3. You should not instead group all T20 USNWR colleges together and assume admit rates and GPA thresholds will all be similar if USNWR ranking is similar.
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I guess a third would be that the parents are lying, but I was including that in choice #2. If there is another you were thinking of, you are welcome to share.
In fact, if 45 have matriculated in 5 years, but only 7 were admitted (in three years so perhaps 15 upper bound admitted unhooked in five?) that means that to get into Harvard from HW you need to be an athlete or legacy.
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There are lots of good theories here, but most of those go towards why U Chicago would be interested in HW students: students are strong and well-prepared generally, U Chicago is interested in cultivating a relationship with a wealthy and well-regarded prep school, geographic diversity (California), etc.
Most don’t address why U Chicago apparently seems to favor the lower GPA range kids over the higher GPA. I’d suggest a simple reason is just yield protection (some of this may be reflected in the distribution of EA/ED1/ED2/RA applicants from HW, which we do not know).
Yield protection is a real phenomenon with many T20 schools below the HYPSM group.
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Actually, the fact that they only admit a smidgeon from the highest GPA group and hardly anyone from the slightly lower one is consistent with the fact that you really can’t get into Harvard from HW w/o having some sort of “special distinction” (ie athlete or legacy).
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Well, that also suggests that UChicago couldn’t choose a higher GPA from among the majority who otherwise weren’t admitted - which seems unlikely given the distribution of grades at HW (which skews high). Could be those two students demonstrated something else in their application that UChicago liked. We’ll never know.
I don’t disagree with respect to those two 3.4-3.6 GPA students. I should have been more clear, I was referring to the 3.6-3.8 GPA students, who enjoyed the extraordinarily high 47% admit rate in this sample.
Even granting that HW is a rigorous school, filled with generally well-prepared students, I find it hard to believe that U Chicago is not massaging its normal admissions criteria for this middle GPA group. It’s no big deal, I am sure that the students are more than capable and will do just fine even at a rigorous place like Chicago, it just looks like being at HW is sort of like a “hook.”
My own kid, from a different private school but with top grades and scores and also a few hooks, was admitted to a number of very selective universities (including two of HYPS, one R/SCEA the other RA), but only waitlisted at a few schools ranked around 15-25 on the USNWR list; partially for this reason I do think yield protection can be an issue for some strong students, including no doubt some of the 3.8-4.0 HW applicants to U Chicago. It is already clear that the university likes HW students very much.
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