It will be interesting to see if any of the schools now using ED heavily will ever feel they have reached the stature with applicants that they can give up ED and join HYPSM and go (back) to EA or SCEA. My guess is it will be seen as too risky (this post could just as easily go on the threads of several other universities).
It is a lot easier to manage admissions and numbers with ED. I don’t think they will give it up.
I know the rankings but somehow it doesn’t have the same reputation as Yale or Harvard. It’s more like Cornell and Dartmouth.
@preppedparent wrote
I’ve been wondering about this as I keep reading about acceptance rates and yields. If a student applies to a school with competitive stats their chances of admission is not 1 in how ever many applicants there are since a portion of them have no chance of being accepted. It would be far more accurate to gauge acceptance if you stripped away all the applicants that just were not competitive for admission. I’d be interested to see if you did that, if the acceptance rate for qualified applicants was really all that much different than in the past. Just because the common app results in more students to applying to a given school doesn’t actually make it tougher to get in unless they are all qualified for admission.
^^^Yes, @gwnorth That’s the number game. Don’t know if selectivity is part of the rankings, but colleges definitely want to get those denominators up (# who submit an application), whether applicants are qualified or not, so they can report low, low admission rates. “We’re so great, everyone wants a piece of us.” I think in lots of cases, students want a piece of prestige, so are willing to buy a lottery ticket even when they have no chance. Getting into a college with a low, low acceptance rate might connote some level of importance to them and others. In our case, I wouldn’t even let my kids apply to UChicago, no matter how highly ranked or how low acceptance rate. Too cold, nowhere I wanted to send my kids. They both ended up on the west coast.
“I’d be interested to see if you did that, if the acceptance rate for qualified applicants was really all that much different than in the past.”
It is for the top research U’s even if you look only at Americans.
The reason for that is because kids outside of the traditional recruiting grounds are also aiming at the top schools now.
Many bright kids in rural areas and non-wealthy urban areas may have just aimed for their state flagship or local urban college (in part because fin aid just wasn’t that terrific and they didn’t know much about elite schools) 1-2 generations ago. Heck, just going to any college was a major achievement in many communities 2 generations ago.
22 and #24
I am so happy to hear that U of C reputation is below HYPS and is on par with Dartmouth and Cornell. And kids that are afraid of cold are not going to apply here. That would weed out the prestige chasers, the tailgaters 
and all others that are not dedicated to the U of C intellectual tradition.
I had a friend at Harvard (early 70s) who was the first person in her high school to ever apply to an out of state school. (She was from Wisconsin.) Colleges have gotten much more diverse geographically. I don’t think anyone in my East Coast prep school applied to U of C. Everyone in my husband’s family did, (they attended a different nearby prep school), but only because both their parents went there, so they knew it was a hidden gems. My younger son applied in 2010 when U of C still had EA (admissions rate for EA was around 25% that year). The overall admissions rate I believe was around 15%. He was a bit of a diamond in the rough candidate, but got accepted EA.
We didn’t get many mailings before he applied, but were inundated after he was accepted. I think that was the first or second year Nondorf took over admissions.
Do we have firm info on this? The admit rate makes total sense given the number of total apps posted earlier. But they don’t release this info. till the fall now, so where has it come from?
BTW that’s an admitted class size of around 2200. If the yield is 75% that’s an enrollment of 1650. Nice.
I hope U of Chicago’s admission rate drops below 2% and displace Princeton as number one ranked college in US Newsweek. I have a feeling Stanford will drop below top 5 in the same ranking because their class size will go up 10% every year do next 5 or 6 years.
@JBStillFlying If I were Peak Campus, I would be raising the rent of Vue53 now. The housing shortage for income freshmen will continue.
@85bears46 Yes, you can keep it. That’s why Baskin and Robbins has so many flavors. Different strokes for different folks. Just because it may be ranked with Yale doesn’t mean I want me or my kids to attend. I prefer Yale and about 20 more further down the ranking list.
“It will be interesting to see if any of the schools now using ED heavily will ever feel they have reached the stature with applicants that they can give up ED and join HYPSM and go (back) to EA or SCEA.”
If you choose to apply to an SCEA school, you can’t apply early (EA or ED) to any other top 20 school. So SCEA (even though non-binding) as a practical matter is barely different from ED. I’d guess half the class comes in through the SCEA door and the SCEA offer yield is like 90%.
So I think Columbia (6% admit rate, 45% of seats filled via ED) or Chicago could probably join the SCEA club if they wanted to without much adverse impact. As long as the very top sticks with the SC in SCEA, the kids really can’t go early anywhere else within the top 20, except for geeks (MIT, Caltech) and Catholics (ND, Gtown).
@85bears46 my kid can only hope! She would love to move into Vue53.
Came from someone who got it directly from Nondorf.
@preppedparent LOL ! you sound rather personally hostile to UChicago. I wonder why. Your Cornell and Dartmouth comment is hilarious. I am sure your kids are much happier at University of San Diego. Best to them.
“In our case, I wouldn’t even let my kids apply to UChicago, no matter how highly ranked or how low acceptance rate. Too cold, nowhere I wanted to send my kids. They both ended up on the west coast.”
“Just because it may be ranked with Yale doesn’t mean I want me or my kids to attend. I prefer Yale and about 20 more further down the ranking list.”
@preppedparent you dictate to your kids where they are allowed to apply based on your own comfort and weather tolerance? That’s a new one. That blizzard that shut down New England recently must have been a real shocker.
Sigh, Nondorf needs to watch what he is saying these days (even in private) . Soon his words will be more heavily monitored than Tim Cook talking about the next iPhone or Jerome Powell hinting about the next Fed rate hike.
So let’s play with some numbers:
32,000 + applications per this thread: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2054640-ea-ed-stats-2017-2018-admissions-year-p1.html
7.1% admit rate means around 2300 accepts (I said 2200 upthread but that’s probably underestimating a bit).
At the previous yield of around 72% that’s an enrolled class size of a tad more than 1650. If yield increases to 75% they are well within Vue53 territory again if there isn’t much melt or uppers decide they like the dorms again. Bets on how much UChicago will be “shocked . … shocked” that they’ve oversubscribed yet another class?