<p>@PizaGirl: YEP. Everyone tells me that. It annoys my boyfriend so much, but eh. I’m a scientific person and I must believe in what I see.</p>
<p>@ the above users: Soo…one approach my friends use is that prestigious (am I confusing with popular?) elite universities are universities that are “better” than Cornell, the “weakest” Ivy. They say that entails Stanford, MIT, Duke, UChicago, and Northwestern (which are higher than Cornell in the USNews). Exceptions are WUSTL and Brown (the latter of whom is included while the former is interestingly excluded).
Berkeley is apparently a debatable cause.</p>
<p>Berkeley has stronger faculty and a larger variety of stronger academic programs than most colleges. It’s not always about selectivity and high SAT scoring 18 year holds.</p>
<p>CapnJack - your friends are fellow high schoolers. They’ve likely lived in just one part of the country. They’re not familiar with different regions or social classes. Their info on prestige is largely filtered through familiarity and what they’ve heard. They think that in the real world, people make a huge deal of someone’s college. They haven’t a clue that many successful people are successful through routes other than academic success. They aren’t worldly. They simply aren’t good sources to judge prestige.</p>
<p>If I asked a bunch of hs seniors who makes the best watch, they’d say Rolex. That doesn’t indeed make it so. If I said the best car, they’d say Mercedes. That doesn’t make it so. If I said the best singer, they’d say Lady Gaga. That doe ant make it so. They have no life experience, and yet you think their opinions are meaningful? Whatever for?</p>
<p>“Berkeley has stronger faculty and a larger variety of stronger academic programs than most colleges. It’s not always about selectivity and high SAT scoring 18 year holds.”</p>
<p>Same goes for Michigan, except that it even has a larger variety of stronger academic programs than Berkeley. :-)</p>
<p>Chicago for ages had a relatively high admit rate (compared to the Ivies), but also high average stats. It was never the kind of place that would attract large numbers of under-qualified applicants interested in it only for social prestige, for a good time, or due to parental pressure. It was, as Pizzagirl describes, “self-selecting”. </p>
<p>In recent years, a rising demographic tide has lifted many boats (application numbers), but Chicago’s admit rates have dropped even faster than many peer schools’. The “overflow from the Ivies” theory does not explain this difference. The more likely explanation, I think, has to do with marketing changes. A popular Dean of Admissions who had introduced Chicago’s quirky application essays resigned in 2009 after a 20 year tenure. Chicago began using the Common Application in recent years, and has increased its volume of direct mail marketing. Since the mid-90’s, Common Core requirements have been relaxed. Money has been invested in infrastructure affecting quality of life (new dorms, athletic facilities). Enrollments have been shifted toward more emphasis on the College relative to the graduate divisions.</p>
<p>The Internet may be a factor, too. An abundance of objective information online now makes it easier for potential applicants to learn about Chicago’s objective strengths (including class sizes, faculty achievements, facilities, and student outcomes that rival the Ivies).</p>
<p>Ding ding ding. Chicago used to have the most esoteric, specific, and/or thought-provoking essay questions of any top school. Unless you knew that it was one of your top few choices, the vast majority of students are not going to take the effort to write an essay on these topics like “How did you get caught?” You can’t substitute your other essays to answer that. Now, UChicago has the common app and you can write your own question. Thus, top students who may be interested in UChicago in the past but didn’t see it as a top choice now say “what the heck; might as well apply” whereas before writing that additional essay on a topic that can’t be re-used for any other school wasn’t worth the effort. I honestly think the change in applications and selectivity is as simply as that - or, at least, accounts for something like 2/3 of the change. Look at what happened to Columbia when they changed to the common app and they didn’t even have crazy essay questions beforehand like UChicago did.</p>
<p>Hmm. I think that this goes back to a classic conundrum in trying to rank colleges or punch up league tables. Do we look at quality of research/faculty or quality of education for undergrads? If we choose the former, than we really ought to drop Brown and Dartmouth from our top schools and add Berkeley and Michigan. A few other publics could feasibly break the top 15 and JHU could go into the top 10. I think that MIT and Stanford might go over Harvard/Yale/Princeton. I think that this is pretty close to what the peer assessment rankings measure. </p>
<p>If it’s just about quality of education, than there would be compelling arguments for bringing a lot of small, private schools to the top of the heap. I used to go to a school outside of the US News top 50 and they put tons of effort into educating undergrads and providing support services. If our rankings emphasized quality of education, you’d see lots of small schools beating big “brand name” universities and I doubt people would accept the list. </p>
<p>US News basically tries to combine those two approaches so the best ranked schools have small undergraduate programs as well as big research programs and professional schools.</p>
Actually, you could. Chicago’s 5th essay prompt has always been an essay of your choice. Many applicants chose to submit the essay they wrote for the Common App, quite a few of them successfully. I do recall some uniquely Chicago short answer essays, however. </p>
<p>The self-selection argument only goes so far. Chicago’s yield has always average (~30-33%) for a top university, and one would expect higher from a truly self-selecting pool. For example, BYU’s yield has always hovered between 75% and 85%. </p>
<p>I think TK’s arguments are more on point. Chicago has, quite frankly, become much more mainstream over the last few years. Among other things, it has outpaced virtually any other top university in aggressively pursuing applicants via mailed publications. </p>
<p>My cynical side wonders how much Chicago’s popularity has to do with the avarice of high schoolers. Investment banking, finance, and similar fields have boomed in popularity lately, and let’s face it - most CC posters practically wet themselves with excitement whenever Chicago Econ is mentioned.</p>
<p>I do hope Chicago does not, like at least one other top 10 school, turn into the kind of place where up to 40% of seniors entering the workforce flock to jobs in business, consulting, and finance after graduation. That would suggest to me that the faculty may not be doing an adequate good job exciting students about the diverse subjects they teach.</p>
<p>Chicago’s Peace Corps volunteer rate is 3rd among national universities. Its graduates also rank 3rd among national universities for PhD completions per capita (after CalTech and MIT). In 2009, the second largest employer of graduating Chicago 4th year students was Teach for America.</p>
Oh, I don’t know. Programs can need a lot of funding they don’t always get from the university itself, and donors - many of whom are dreaded alumni bankers - are often quite important.</p>
<p>For example, the Joukowskys at Brown recently donated an 8 figure gift (i.e. an endowment for a single department equivalent to that of many LACs) to found an archaeology institute. That money is allowing it to leapfrog past more established programs in the field, and I don’t doubt that it will soon leave the more poorly funded programs (especially at publics) in its dust.</p>
<p>One wonders if many departments would rather turn out one or two less adjunct professors and another banker or two instead. ;)</p>
<p>But 40% going to banking, finance and consulting seems awfully high to me. That was the peak reached at Harvard in 2007. Evidently it seemed high to some people in a position to do something about it, too.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard President Drew Faust … has received attention nationwide for her preoccupation with the vocational direction of todays college graduates. Her September article for the New York Times, Crossroads: The Universitys Crisis of Purpose, focused on the disproportionate number of students at Harvard and at other universities who enter finance and business instead of jobs in public service. When asked how universities could encourage students to enter other professions, President Faust responded, First, to develop paths of recruitment and job placement in other areas so students can see other paths clearly marked [Another] part is trying to identify careers and make them visible.<a href=“%22The%20Siren%20Call%22,%20Harvard%20Crimson,%20December%2020,%202009”>/quote</a></p>