From Dean Nondorf’s online presentation today:
6.2% of applicants admitted
1518 SAT
34 ACT
274 first generation college students
156 from small towns/rural areas around the globe
More than 60 admitted students from both the UK and China, which are the foreign countries with the most admitted students
13% of the class from CA
11% NY
10% IL
6% TX (somewhat confirming BronxBorn’s post–Dean Nondorf also singled out “the great state of Texas”)
5% each FL and MA
@Mom2Melcs : may I assume this info is from the virtual admitted students event for the Class of 2024?
Yes–sorry, I should have made that clear.
Also, total applications were 34,400 which is nearly identical to last year.
No breakdown of admits or admit %'s based on round (ED1, EA, ED2, RD).
Assuming roughly the same percentages carry over to the matriculating class, that would mean around an even one hundred Texans will be arriving in Hyde Park next fall and not merely virtually (we hope). That is hard for this erstwhile Texan to comprehend, being one of only three from the Lone Star State in my own class of ‘67. Will the sweet fumes of mesquite smokers waft through the quads? Will Shiner Bock be on tap at Jimmy’s?
As recently as the class of 2022 the number was around fifty, a figure that blew my mind when I heard it then. Now two years later the number has doubled, notwithstanding a few naysayers in that recent @BronxBorn thread. Some pretty powerful outreach must be going on down there and, as Bronx foretold, had a big effect. Once again his dope on the Texas angle at the U of C is proving out.
I love the Texas strategy, but don’t forget about California! This class of 2024 is the first time that California is UChicago’s most represented state with 13%!
I have a lot of confidence in the administration/Nondorf’s strategy of going after the huge (and wealthy) talent pools of Cali (Silicon Valley/LA), Texas, and NY City/NJ while also maintaining a strong foothold in the Midwestern states which can differentiate Chicago from its Ivy/Stanford peers.
Just gotta hope Chicago’s endowment holds up during these economic times, but everyone else’s endowment will also take a big hit.
University of Chicago is a “UC”, after all. 
Yeah BronxBorn did it again!
I, for one, would like to see more representation from the South, in general. For sure, UChicago can convince a few more bright young kids to go there over Duke or Vandy, which have a comparably more jocky/sporty/fratty atmosphere.
(Although I would like the Midwest to still be overrepresented on a per capita basis, since it may be needed to preserve the school’s culture)
This is the Class of 2023 profile. I am not sure anything has changed at all regarding the geographical distribution of students:
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/apply/class-2023-profile
I agree. By the way, Dean Nondorf also gave several shout-outs to Stuyvesant High School. That makes a lot of sense–a great, meritocratic high school for urban strivers.
Application numbers Class of '24 vs. '23 along with delta:
Harvard 40,248 vs. 43,330 (-3100)
Yale 35,220 vs. 36,843 (-1623)
Brown 36,794 vs. 38,674 (-1900)
Dartmouth 21,394 vs. 23,650 (-2200)
Penn 42,205 vs. 44,960 (-2800)
Columbia 36,836 (per unverified 6.1% admit rate) vs. 42,569 (-5700)
Northwestern 39,261 vs. 40,579 (-1300)
Duke 36,249 vs. 41,613 (-5400)
UChicago: 34,400 (rounded) vs. 34,648 (-300)
One of these things is not like the others.
Princeton saw an increase. Cornell TBA
Did the international numbers change, I wonder in if Oof C can count on them showing up on campus in Sept.
Yes, International was 16% of Class of 2023 vs 13% of admitted Class of 2024. Given the COVID-19 uncertainties, very smart move to reduce relative number of International admits in favor of domestic, full-pay candidates. Regardless of the social politics/optics involved, it is imperative that private elite colleges become more need aware than need blind at this time and likely through the next several years. Nondorf also announced that all UChicago seniors will have an opportunity to enroll in Master’s program at Chicago next year at 50% of normal tuition in case they face uncertainty with job prospects which was awesome to hear. Stanford and many other private colleges have announced hiring freezes, you can bet Harvard’s $40 billion endowment is now $10 billion lower, and many tuition-dependent small LACs are about to face the death spiral.
Fortunately, it seems Nondorf and Zimmer are playing chess instead of some peer schools who are playing checkers.
Internationals have been creeping up from 13% of admits since Class of 2019 was admitted. Last couple of years were 15-16% of admits. They may have deliberately scaled it back to prior history; we are talking maybe 65 kids (out of an admitted class size of 2,130 or so).
There are likely to be hiring freezes at many if not most higher institutions (private and public). Endowments took a wallop.
Why the app numbers at the U of C should be out-of-synch with almost all its peers is interesting and counter-intuitive. We are forever being told that ED and the low rates of admission in other categories will drive the overall numbers down - and yet this never seems to happen. I hazard the intuition that recognition by high school students of Chicago’s desirability is still on the upswing, whereas the desirability of the peer schools cannot be any more well-known now than it has been for many years. Thus, while Chicago may have lost applicants for many reasons (including from the non-ED categories as described above and for the same reasons the peer schools lost applicants) there was a countervailing trend unique to the U of C in which bright kids (including quite obviously a bunch from Texas) were discovering a school their counterparts might not have known about or considered a few years ago.
Speaking of the Texas trend, could it be that its big numbers came at the expense of the internationals? But that’s not exactly correct since “Texas is a whole ‘nother country”. It should be counted as such! [joke]
Not so sure, @Zoom10 , about your speculation that Chicago is abandoning “needs blind” as an admissions policy. That policy is of extremely long-standing, going back to before my own day in the sixties and is especially appropriate at a school that has always honored intellectual achievement above all else and has not historically attempted to recruit the wealthy. No doubt the Administration is modeling the demographic effects of the College’s new-found popularity. It must be a welcome consequence to them that there are more children of wealth at Chicago than ever before - though ones suited to this College in the same way that the less wealthy and the poor are suited to it. However, I would need some proof in order to believe the cynical assertion that the admissions people, faced with two applicants of precisely equal merit, one poor and one wealthy, will now choose the latter. That would be a scandal. Someone in Admissions would be very upset about it, and a plain vanilla envelope would rapidly appear under the door of the offices of the Maroon.
Marlowe1, my comment about need blind/aware was mainly in the context of the economic crisis/recession brought about by COVID-19 and how colleges will need to react in light of a 25% hit to their endowments, hiring freezes, and budget cuts.
However, even before COVID-19, the notion that any college, even Harvard, is truly need blind in admissions is a myth. All college departments, including the admissions office, has an annual budget that they are expected to meet. If a college were truly need blind, it would run the theoretical risk of admitting 100% of its class who need financial aid and this would blow a hole thru its given annual financial aid budget. Yes, colleges gladly spend their entire allocated financial aid budget to support worthy students but this is finely calibrated during the review process well before final decisions are issued. This way, the college can ensure it meets its target of X% first-generation and other needy students while not spending more than its budget. Now, that whole calculus has been upended with the looming recession. Do you really think financial aid budgets aren’t going to be cut next year when all other departments are faced with budget cuts?
Chicago’s multiple rounds of ED1, EA, and ED2 are ideal in enabling the school to finely calibrate and lock in its desired proportions of all demographics, including the number of 1st gen and rural students and others requiring aid, and then using RD and waitlist to secure commitments from full-pay students. I would bet that the kids getting off the waitlist now are domestic, full-pay students (with great stats and credentials, of course) and this is exactly the right strategy given the circumstances.
In any case, there is no such thing as need blind before, during, or after an economic crisis because a fixed financial aid budget by definition precludes need blind admissions.
You make cogent points on the budgetary front, @Zoom10 , but I think you are making a category error in linking all this to needs-blind.
You speak of what you call the ”risk” of admitting 100 percent of a class needing financial assistance (which I take to mean more than nominal assistance). But that’s no more a risk than that all the atoms in a confined space will crowd into a corner of that space - something possible in theory only. For that risk to materialize one would have to assume that the children of parents capable of full or nearly full pay are proportionally less talented than the kids of the merely middle or lower middle class, not to mention the kids of first-gens, minorities, rural folk, truck drivers, waitresses and bankrupt entrepreneurs. Whereas all the evidence is precisely to the contrary. That’s a problem in our society and the true source of the inequality that exists at highly competitive schools like Chicago. In that competition between the more-privileged and the less- or un-privileged everything indicates that the former disproportionately win out on all objective measurements of academic excellence. Privilege has bought them that, together with the mating habits of their educated and successful parents. That’s a shame in my book, and those groups need help, but it is unrelated to needs-blind.
I would put money on the proposition that the Admissions people will always jump at the possibility of recruiting anyone from these less privileged groups who shows the same outstanding attributes as do the children of privilege. I would reconsider that bet only if I could be convinced that admitting all these equally attractive non-full-payers for admission would drive the University to insolvency. I don’t believe that. I do believe that the University has a pretty good handle on how far it can lower the bar to recruit poorly represented groups and stay solvent. The degree to which it can do that could undergo reconsideration in the present climate. That would be too bad. However, it has nothing to do with dismantling the needs-blind policy, rather the contrary.
None of this is to deny that ED has some undetermined but real effect of favoring the wealthy. Many have argued on this board that that is its sole rationale. I doubt that, given the other beneficial effects of the policy, but that’s a different discussion. To the extent it does have that effect it helps to fund what is in effect a redistribution to the talented but poor kids who are not full payers and thus helps to fund needs-blind.
As usual, the UC thread is generating an interesting discussion. Lots of food for thought from both @marlowe1 and @Zoom10.
Colleges can gather plenty of information about a candidate’s potential financial status just from the application. Parents’ job, education levels, number of siblings, their year in school (including college) and their institution, applicant’s zip code and high school, EC’s etc. are all factors that can be analyzed to predict degree of need from your admit pools, regardless of their admission plan. And then, of course, there is the historical data as well, including what was actually handed out (by school/zip code/number of siblings, etc.). My guess is that both the admissions and financial aid offices are crunching a lot of numbers to keep fully aware of how the admit pool might impact funds available for financial aid. This doesn’t mean that they are violating “need-blind” policies during the admissions process or that they don’t have an effective information barrier between the two offices.
(Matching programs such as QB and targeted outreach efforts are specifically designed to bring in more high-need candidates and the institution will typically have the dedicated funds for those groups. They know how many to admit and how much to give out. At that point, “need-blind” becomes irrelevant but so does making an admission decision by ability to pay)
In recent years UChicago has pivoted to “no barriers” (ie meeting 100% of “full demonstrated need”) so clearly they have to be able to afford that; it requires hitting a magic number of available yearly funds as well as understanding the parameters (best case, expected, worst case) on the draw-down of those funds. As long as they have done the proper analysis to establish those parameters, they can be reasonably confident as to funding availability for this or that class, including those pulled from the waitlist.
It’s too early to speculate on the full impact of the pandemic on university financial aid funds, but I know that year-end 2018 saw some pretty bad market performance as well (our portfolio lost 15%, for instance) and yet both my kids at UChicago received about what we expected for need-based aid. There’s a lot more to a financial aid calculation than what the market is doing that quarter. A long-run recession or depression might be another matter.
Marlowe1, I love your analogy to probabilistic distribution of ideal gas molecules with respect to probability of busting financial aid budgets, it brings back warm memories of Chemistry and why these U of C threads are unlike any other.
My only point was a college is truly need blind insofar as its fixed financial aid budget. If Chicago has a target class size of 1700 and its tuition is $50K, then Chicago is truly need blind is its financial aid budget is $85 million. However, the reality is all admissions offices are given both an annual financial aid budget and a tuition revenue budget by the President, Provost, and Board of Trustees and Dean Nondorf is expected to meet both of those numbers, which I am sure he does with superb accuracy.
Yes, I agree with everything you posted that, in reality, wealthy students will inevitably comprise X% of the class because they will have stats and accomplishments that are disproportionate to their demographic numbers, but I am also very confident that no admissions office will ever find itself in a position where it “accidentally” exceeded its annual financial aid budget by >5%, forcing it to ask the President and Board for more money to support needy admits. Bottom line, Nondorf and his peers all have to meet their target numbers (both aid and tuition) and they do so in a very calculated and deliberate way.
Perhaps in the end, Zoom, I am merely quibbling with you over terminology. What I can admit is that for the needs-blind policy to continue as it has in the past the University must be able to fund it. The bean counters must be alert to the effects of this as of every other policy at the U of C and must find the money to pay for it. JB says this more respectfully and precisely, but I put it that way because as I see it this particular policy, at least for all domestic applicants, comes first and is the given. It is sacrosanct at this University, and its deletion is virtually unthinkable. Whereas the means of giving effect to it are fungible.
It certainly helps and is perhaps not entirely serendipitous that in recent years the U of C has increasingly become a magnet for a certain kind of intellectually ambitious full-pay student whose parents would not previously have considered the undiluted cost of attendance at this institution to be justified by the education - or, to speak frankly, the value of the diploma - obtained therein. That is a significant change. There are undoubtedly many more full or nearly full payers now being admitted than there ever were in the past. This is not because the bar is being lowered to let them in. Rather there are simply more of them of higher quality who are also “Chicago types” than there ever were before. In a perfectly need-blind competition they will win most of the spots without anyone’s thumb needing to be placed on the scales on their behalf. The non-full-payers capable of winning spots in the competition will in part be funded by the full payers. That’s a happy outcome of needs-blind, not a defect. Other sources, including endowment funds, are also important. And, yes, someone has to make all this add up. There we are agreed.