No American Rhodes Winners from UChicago Undergrad for 7th Consecutive Year

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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Chicago undergrad hasn’t had an American Rhodes Scholar recipient since 2013.

https://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/25/

http://www.rhodesscholar.org/news-and-announcements/american-rhodes-scholarship-winners-2020

This is a little weird- chicago actually did much better in the 90s and 00s, when the college was much, much smaller.

This also means, in 10 years, admissions dean/exit outcome guru Jim Nondorf hasn’t seen a single American Rhodes winner on his watch. The last American Chicago rhodes winner, samuel greene in 2013, was admitted under O’Neil/Behnke (to use @JBStillFlying proper moniker!).

It’s hard to draw rhyme or reason out of rhodes winners, but this clearly has not been a good span of years for Chicago.

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“The last American Chicago rhodes winner, samuel greene in 2013, was admitted under O’Neil/Behnke (to use @JBStillFlying proper moniker!).”

Actually, Samuel Greene seems to have won his Rhodes Scholarship as a 4th year in Nov. 2013. That means he was Class of 2014; assuming an on time or earlier graduation, that would, indeed, place him under Nondorf’s watch.

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^ And just to correct/clarify @Cue7’s original post- according to the link he provided, two additional students from the College have been named Rhodes Scholars in the years since Samuel Greene. That makes three under Nondorf to date. Not sure why @Cue7 is specifying that they have to be ‘American.’ That sounds a bit xenophobic.

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Ah good catch @JBStillFlying - one for Nondorf (who started in july 2009, not july 2010 as I previously thought) in his ten years at the helm!

When are all the rest of these admits going to start winning?

I hesitate to say this but it is astounding - Harvard had 5 winners this year.

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@Cue7 - you aren’t really helping your own argument concerning the “ivyfication” of UChicago’s college :wink:

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Oh it can be “ivyification” @JBStillFlying - just maybe not successful “Harvardification.” I keep telling you - there is diversity in the ivy league too! Remember?

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Here’s a simple explanation: the fix is in.

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@Cue7 - Hmm. Earlier you used “harvardification” specifically as one of your supporting points about 'ivyfication"- now it’s apparently no longer so? Or are you a bit panicked now?

And which ivy is UChicago copying this year: Cornell, Columbia or Dartmouth?

On a more serious note, I wouldn’t know if the fix was in (as @marlowe1 has suggested). UChicago seems to have a Rhodes Scholar or two every other year. The college specifically had an impressive run beginning in the '90’s but would go years w/o anything prior to that. Are these things cyclical? Or is Nondorf more focused on recruiting future I-bankers and management consultants than future PhD/intellectual types and so the latter are going over to Harvard, Yale and Princeton?

I guess next year’s batch will potentially include Class of '21 which, for UChicago, means the first class that entered ED. We’ll see what happens - and no doubt @Cue7 will keep us posted!

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Another question is, what type and how much support does Chicago give its applicants? It’s peer Unis have huge staffs available to support applicants in such international and national awards.

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@JBStillFlying - I’ve said often that Chicago has picked and chosen from its peer groups re what to mimic (e.g., admissions numbers from Columbia, residential life from Yale and Brown, etc.)

Harvardifaction in particular, though, is a very, very expensive endeavor.

Looking at Chicago’s changes on the aggregate, though, (and given their more modest budget), here are some thoughts:

  • Their admissions, experiential, and exit outcome schemas seem more similar to the general ivy model than ever before (an emphasis on a diversified and well-rounded student body, offering lots of extra-curricular and practical opportunities on campus, exiting grads with lots of success, etc.)
  • In terms of *specific* school as a comparator, I think recent Chicago changes reflect some similarities between Chicago and UPenn. Chicago's heavy use of ED, a 2yr residential requirement with lots of students in high-rise dorms, expanding greek life, new curricular opportunities in practical endeavors (business economics, linkages with the B school, more practical classes in comp sci, etc.), converge the schools in ways never seen before.

Please note, Penn is much more firmly rooted in practical pursuits, but the outcome of Chicago’s recent decisions bring the schools a little closer together in interesting ways. Especially for those interested in finding ways to study some business (but wanting liberal arts not seen at Wharton), Chicago undergrad seems like a good choice. (In the past, one could never attend the College to study anything about “business.”)

Of course, as I’ve said before, it’s not one ivy in particular - Chicago picks and chooses, and needs to be mindful of its budget! I’m sure it’d love to have the resources to institute more successful harvardifaction - more lavish, smaller dorms, lots of resources for rhodes applicants, 80% yield without ED, etc., but we can shoot for the stars and still end up with a little star light, right?

@bluebayou brings up a good point - while the college has grown 80% in 20 years or so, I don’t know if support for scholarships has scaled in quite the same way. It is strange, though, because this is the worst drought since the mid-80s. One would’ve thought that expanding the class size and strength of the student body would’ve at least kept American rhodes production somewhat similar, but it’s dropped off a cliff.

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On CC, I got the feel from Chicago alums/parents that Chicago is a great learning place for intellectually curious students who are intelligent and willing to challenge themselves in wide pursuits of knowledge. When we visited it, the impression we got from the administration is its aggressive promotion and marketing of its pre-professional tracks/opportunities, (business, law, medicine). I found the dichotomy to be interesting and a bit surprising, nothing wrong with either of course. But the administration’s tactics might be attracting different breeds of bright students to Chicago?

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@makemesmart - you make a really nice point. Chicago - the actual environment - still seems like a great place to learn, but I echo your contention that the admin is aggressively marketing its pre-professional/exit opportunities. Continual marketing of this, at some point, may change (or already has changed) the types attending.

If for nothing else, I certainly think it’s diversified the types of students attending. I try to go to as many admitted student receptions in my area as I can, and I think the types accepted are more diverse. There are some wonky types, but even more who seem to know what they want to “do.”

I think it comes back to the “AND” feature. Chicago can be a great place to learn AND a place where you can get basics of accounting or advertising! A great place to learn AND a pathway to Goldman! That then diversifies who enters.

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I haven’t looked at the profiles or schools of this year’s crop - no doubt the winners are all excellent and appealing young people, as in past years. It has, however, always seemed to me that this Victorian spirit of training leaders for an expectant Establishment (with a whiff of noblesse oblige and sportiness a la Chariots of Fire) fits naturally with the American branch of this ethos embodied in the Ivy League. It does not fit Chicago’s ethos, as so often described on this board.

There is nothing new about this. In the sixties (when the place was hardly loaded with would-be Wall Street tycoons) I remember none of the very bright kids here aspiring to a Rhodes. I and my friends would have laughed at this ambition as the ultimate sell-out, an ivy prestige thing. That was enough to put us off it. Thus I’m inclined to see the mini-thaw of the nineties as the real aberration. Perhaps, however, it is no accident that Chicago’s confidence in its own mission flagged in that era.

There will no doubt always be a few Rhodes-seeking Chicago kids, and the Rhodes committee, having filled its ivy quota, will occasionally find one of them as it seeks to fill a further quota of kids from far-flung hinterland institutions - crumbs falling from the imperial table. A pox on them!

So, Cue, your schadenfreude is misplaced to the extent you crazily want to lay it at Nondorf’s doorstep - and also cognitively dissonant, as JB says, to the extent it fails to fit your thesis of Chicago’s ivyfication. This Rhodes shut-out is really nothing more than the latest hand dealt from this stacked deck. Chicago, the anti-Ivy, ought to be too proud to accept the the marked cards next time around.

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@makemesmart and @Cue7

When we attended the April Overnight last spring there was no mention of the school’s history as a PhD feeder, while the opportunities for post-graduate employment and professional schools were aggressively marketed. Suspect the decision to squelch even a mere hint that only future PhD’s are welcome was above even Nondorf’s pay grade. Someone decided that “PhD” was equated to “where fun comes to die.”

Whether this means that the intellectually curious, inquisitive types - even future PhD’s - do NOT feel welcome, however, is another question entirely. To date I have not heard that from anyone nor has that been our experience; in fact, it’s been quite the opposite. We also know from prior comments on CC that at other places it can be considered “uncool” to talk about your schoolwork or academic experience outside the classroom - but not so at UChicago. So perhaps Admissions is taking as given its obvious reputation as a school for serious students - after all, it knows the kinds of kids it has admitted - and is using the time to promote the kind of outcomes that a good number of students and families would actually be interested in, and that the school can now provide. That would explain the heavy push on professional outcomes.

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As for the lack of Rhodes Scholars, one possibility is that it’s less about the type of UChicago student applying for this award and more about how the qualifications have changed over the years. When you read the bios of the Chicago college winners from the 90’s and '00’s, you get the impression that their academic and intellectual insterests were the primary drivers to achievement. There’s little mentioned about involvement in social causes, ventures or College-sponsored EC’s; indeed, according to @cue7, those really didn’t exist at UChicago anywhere as much as they do today.

Compare that to the current crop of Harvard winners: one is the first black woman president of The Harvard Crimson. Another is treasurer of a Harvard student-run company that is the largest in the world. A couple more are editors-in-chief of student-run publications, and another is a co-founder of “multiple social ventures.”

When you read these descriptions of accomplishments, they sound so very- well - “Harvard.” I’m reminded of the Pinker article complaining that no one at Harvard goes to class anymore. No doubt these students were all high academic achievers as well, but the “AND” that Cue references simply outpaces UChicago, depsite the latter’s aggressive adventure into more RSO’s. It probably always will. If that “AND” is important to the Rhodes committee, Harvard will always get picked and UChicago may never be. Harvard has a lot more money to help students start up these ventures, and its overall educational goals, which are (still) quite distinct from those of UChicago, support that specific kind of investment. And admitting that specific kind of student.

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@JBStillFlying and @marlowe1 - so, the criteria the Rhodes Trust uses to select winners, and how that varies over time, is a fascinating question.

My sense is, the Rhodes winners seem more diverse (in many dimensions) now than in decades back. They seem to be as focused as ever on brilliance and promise linked to promotion of change. That may be seen in the “Harvard” model of brilliant “doers,” but if you look at MIT’s list of 5 winner (5 winners! If only Chicago could claim that in any given year), the MIT roster seems a little bit more like Chicago winners in the past:

http://news.mit.edu/2019/five-mit-students-named-2020-rhodes-scholars-1123

Also, @marlowe1 - I think the Rhodes now is much less about promoting the “old guard” as it once was. As research promise and academic brilliance became more a part of the criteria, Chicago did very well, as seen in the 90s and 00s. In Chicago’s current climate, I’d be very surprised if students sneered at (or shunned) the Rhodes. I imagine it’s as coveted at Chicago as anywhere else nowadays.

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The MIT selections are all engineers and have practical engineering-type EC activities to their credit. Those activities and that orientation must have supplied the extra thing that got the attention of the committee. Chicago of course does not have engineering and does not generally attract this practical kind of kid even in the hard sciences.

Also, I am highly suspicious that the committee, for its own prestige-mongering purposes, tends to favor kids from the name-brand American schools - of which MIT, though not an ivy, has such a name. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me if some of the members of the committee failed to recognize the University of Chicago as the “Academic Ivy” of Cue’s dreams but instead flipped through applications from that nondescript municipal institution.

Then there is the explicit orientation toward leaders. That is not the focus of the culture of the U of C but rather comes straight from the playing fields of Eton and Oxbridge. These were institutions for turning out the gentlemen who would run the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes might not recognize all the present-day scholars from across the Atlantic who have won the right to drink from that well, but they are in some way fulfilling his creepy dream. For some of us it all seems a little silly, parasitic and anachronous.

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None of that explains why Chicago had lots of winners 10-20 years ago, but none recently. In my daughter’s class, or maybe the class before hers, there were three U.S. winners, and my son’s class had three U.S. winners, too. The last Chicago undergraduate to be selected by the U.S. committee was six years ago. (This was the sixth, not the seventh, consecutive year without a Chicago winner.)

The different regional subcommittees have, I think, somewhat different preferences. The Northeast, Great Lakes, and West Coast areas tend to produce more prestige-college winners than you get from the South or Southwest, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule. I don’t think there has been some radical change in the types of people who do the picking. In recent memory, Chicago was on the very short list of colleges from which U.S. Rhodes Scholars were chosen on a regular basis, and now it seems not so much.

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@JHS - any idea why Chicago doesn’t seem to be on that short list of colleges any more? That was a nice list to be on!

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I know that in many cases, Rhodes applicants (and therefore Rhodes winners) are carefully groomed and promoted by their colleges. If you look at the bios of this year’s winners, many of them have won other prestigious awards and fellowships – Goldwaters, Trumans, etc. – which shows an effective machine at work.

I am familiar with the background of only one of the successful University of Chicago candidates from the oughts, and that was very much her story. Her academic advisor (who was experienced, and who stuck around all four years, unlike my kids’ advisors) started “working” her the first year, telling her what she should do to get into position to apply for each level of honors goodies, and introducing her to the people she needed to meet to move forward. One of my kids’ childhood friends was in the same kind of situation at the Naval Academy. He was identified fairly early as a legit candidate, and was groomed and mentored toward that goal starting his first year. In his case, however, he was not successful at the Rhodes level. (Nor were his odds that high – they almost always take one or two military academy applicants, but each of the military academies may put forward 3-4 candidates. There are lots of carefully groomed candidates who are not chosen.)

Maybe Chicago’s machine isn’t functioning that well anymore. Maybe it is, but they are just having bad luck with the Rhodes committee. My sense is that the academic advising system has really decayed. A decade ago, it was inconsistent, but there were individuals who were very good in the system. I don’t know if that’s still true, or if the people there have what it takes to do a good job identifying viable candidates at a very early point.