https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/harvard-university
Well, this was posted in Harvard forum, but I cannot help noticing UChicago is the dead last among the top twelve schools in categories that define college educational success :
Chance a poor student has to become a rich adult
Median student income at age 34
Married in 2014 (ten years after college)
What the heck?!
That mostly reflects the other stats in there that mostly are good things. UChicago parents have the lowest family income, the school has the lowest percentage of students from families in the 1 percent, or in the top 20%, a higher percentage of students from the bottom 20%, etc. The children of the wealthy are far likelier to be wealthy than the children of the middle class or the poor, no matter how they are educated.
Add in the fact that a larger percentage of the UChicago class chooses to go into academia than any of the other top 12 schools, and these results become entirely predictable.
Well, their unofficial motto is “where fun goes to die”.
@MotherOfDragons When I went there, another unofficial motto was the “Teacher of Professors” Professors don’t get rich but they really like their jobs.
My cousin graduated from there (he’s doing very well), and he loves to make jokes about the school, but he’s an investment banker so he may be an outlier.
My reaction at looking at those tables is a sigh of relief: my U of C is still the same. I would hate the intellectual bastion of my grad school years turns into the temporary residence/playground for the descendants of the rich and powerful for 4 years. Indeed it is great to see U of C is the lowest in terms of representation of the 1% and the highest in representation of the lowest 20%. You come to U of C to learn, not to SOLELY make network connection and go for the Goldman Sachs or McKinsey interview.
These numbers will be very different in 10 years if the school continues with its new Early Decision policy.
And yet we have the third highest mobility index! The last thing I want is become a Princeton - a school that admits the children of rich people and turns them more rich people.
As for our ranking in “chance a poor student has to become a rich adult” - we are only last compared to the Ivy+ schools! We are 6th in Illinois and in the top 7% of all schools. It isn’t that we are taking poor kids and not making them rich, it’s that we are graduating higher rates of teachers and grad students. They only seem “poor” compared to the alumni of the other schools that more commonly go on to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, and bankers.
Sorry @jzducol and @HydeSnark - this data is out of date. It looked at Chicago grads from rough 2000 - 2012. This is BEFORE most of Chicago’s major admissions changes happened. So, this data really doesn’t tell us much about the current Chicago college. I’d imagine the number of top 1 percenters has gone up considerably, and salaries have probably increased as well. If you look at career advancements numbers btw, they do look much more similar to the rest of th ivy plus than ever before (lots of people going into banking and consulting, etc).
Married 10 years after college is a measure of “educational success”?!?!?!!
@Cue7 what does that have anything to do with what I said? If you have more recent numbers to substantiate what you are saying, please share.
@HydeSnark - the lack of recent data negates everything you’ve said. The recent data we have - that UChicago moved heavily to ED - indicates that the incoming class will be significantly wealthier than in the past, and recent career advancement data shows Chicago grads with more similar outcomes to their ivy plus peers.
So, without more recent data, it’s hard to say just where Chicago falls - and whether it looks more like Princeton or not.
Having old data does most disservice to Chicago, because the new admissions regime probably changed socio-economic factors most significantly at the school.
Now if you look at FORBE’s ranking of top 10 colleges worth every penny just out in April based on income of graduates, you will see Uchicago fourth – ahead of all Ivy’s and Stanford. Go figure.
The data cited by @HydeSnark is actual. I prefer actual data to the speculation offered by @Cue7, but speculation is also good. Will the move to ED “probably” change the socioeconomic profile of future classes? That’s a highly contestable proposition in light of the peculiar factors that have always influenced kids to choose Chicago (the famous “self-selection” of years gone by), which ED continues in different form in an era in which Chicago has suddenly become much more generally popular and much more selective than it ever was before. It is that general increase in popularity among kids who would previously have opted for the ivies - or who, as @JHS says, are fully qualified for the ivies but get squeezed out in the numbers game - that has likely resulted in some incremental changes of profile of the classes of the present and will perhaps do more so in the future. In a much larger college population there will be proportionally - and perhaps greater than proportionally - higher numbers of kids from those upper-20 and even upper-1 families, the kinds who create the rah-rah spirit of a place and go on to have careers in finance and run businesses - and subsequently pay back more to the University than future academics are able to do. This is far from a bad thing, for the reasons many have stated, provided that it does not become a relentless pursuit of replicating the ivy league model and abandoning the spirit of the University of Chicago. I believe from everything I know, including a recent visit to the campus during which I and my Class of '67 friends, did some quality schmoozing with several Class of 2020 kids, that this will not happen. We found these present-day students very much like ourselves a half-century ago - very focussed on figuring out the meaning of things, very serious about their course work, idealistic and progressive in political terms and not very interested in climbing the greasy pole. There will always be exceptions to this profile - there were exceptions in the Class of '67 and are likely more of them in the Class of 20. The world and the University also need those exceptions (one of these in my class has recently made a very large gift to the University). But beyond these stereotypes stands the unique education that the College offers and, as @kaukauna tells us, the uniquely appealing kid who comes to Chicago, is shaped there and emerges to confront the world Chicago-style.
“Married 10 years after college is a measure of “educational success”?!?!?!!” @CU123 at #9:
The researchers must think this statistic is a signal for things not picked up by the available tax return data. Perhaps it’s correlated with having a steady job, raising children in a home that you own, etc. (note that if they had access to Schedule A data, they could also - very easily - figure out home ownership from the mortgage interest deduction). In any case, according to the latest media reports millennial are marrying at much lower rates and/or later ages than in the past so that statistic may not be as relevant going forward. It assumes an underlying cultural norm that may well be changing.
@JBStillFlying married for the third time within ten years of graduation is a measure of success … 
The above discussion illustrates to me that with all its many flaws and imperfections, USNWR is still the only ranking worthy of attention, especially for discerning trends
Would you have said the same a decade ago? Back then, the U of C was ranked 15th, below the likes of Hopkins, Northwestern, and (gasp) Cornell.
ED, development admits, and Common App aside, the College hasn’t changed that much since 2006. Then, UChicago was as good as, or better than, its ranking. Its ranking now may be slightly inflated (and Dean Nondorf is paid to keep it that way). The US News rankings aren’t hard to game for a school with resources, and the U of C is gaming them now. This means more whimsical applications and more donations from happy alums (the latter was one argument for the move to ED, according to a friend in admissions), but hasn’t made the College a noticeably better (or worse) place. IMHO.
@Chuchill - most serious social scientists realize that to marry three times in 10 years is probably NOT very correlated with much college at all. Also, @DunBoyer is correct that you can game the USNWR rankings pretty easily. Take a look at the controversy behind NEU, for instance. And the jury is still out on whether UChicago’s own increase is more like that institution’s, Stanford’s.
One shouldn’t depend on one particular ranking. Looking at the group of rankings as a whole (and understanding that there may well be some interdependence among the ranking agencies), one can see some consistency in terms of the ordering.
@JBStillFlying seriously ???