Is geography a factor?

Greetings all!

I am a high school sophomore from the Northeast who is interested in applying Early Action (eventually) to UChicago. I have heard stories of colleges considering students outside of their immediate geographic scope more closely just for the diversity. If anyone has an answer, how much truth is there to this?

Note: To my knowledge, no one in my school has ever applied or has even heard of UChicago. My cousin is an alumna, and I plan to visit the campus next year for a tour of the campus as well as UIUC and Northwestern (double legacy at NWU).

Thank you all in advance.

Strong candidates from the Northeast, particularly from New England, get a little bump. If you look at the numbers, only about 7 or 8 percent of the UChicago student body hails from New England. I think this low representation from the region stems from so many top colleges being located there, qualified New England kids often wanting to go to college close to home, and people’s fixation there with the Ivy League. A good indication of the importance to UChicago of recruiting in the Northeast is that Jim Nondorf covers some top schools in New York. If you are serious about UChicago, you have to apply EA. Ggod luck.

This site: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg02_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=327

says that UChicago does not consider geographic residence/state residence, while the same site says that a lot of UChicago’s peer schools do consider geographic residence/state residence. Not sure how accurate it is though.

I mean they have to to an extent, I would think. For G-D’s sake, no one from around my neck of the woods has even heard of UChicago!

With all the mailings from UChicago, I thought everyone knew about them. In answer to your question, there are many students from the Chicagoland area that get in, for what it’s worth.

For whatever reason, they don’t bother to send mail to anyone down here! I signed up for all their mailing lists (for their band, Chabad, admissions offices, Computer Science department and Economics department) but even my GC raised eyebrows when I said it was one of my options.

Yeah, one of my cousins in the Chicago area is an alumna, but obviously everyone knows about it there.