NYT: UChicago winning 40% of cross-admits vs. Harvard/Yale, 60% vs. Princeton

<p>The parchment numbers are not accurate. From the Stanford report mentioned above which includes institutional data, Stanford only loses in the single digits to UChicago, no where near 37%.</p>

<p>I’m sure those Stanford report numbers are correct, for the limited set of schools they cover. The numbers from Chris Avery and colleagues seem to be based on a robust sample but they’re 10+ years old at this point. </p>

<p>Otherwise Parchment seems to have the only readily available current numbers, though they’re almost certainly not statistically representative for most school pairs. If there are 200 cross admits for example and we want 95% confidence and +/- 5% precision, we’d need data from 132 of those 200, which seems pretty unlikely. So no telling how accurate the numbers are, but when taken with a grain of salt they’re better than nothing in my opinion.</p>

<p>Seriously, never trust Parchment results. They are historically suspect for sure.</p>

<p>The Parchment numbers do seem to vary quite a bit in a short period of time. E.g. the post above (citing an article from only 3 months ago) notes Chicago winning 60% versus Princeton, now Parchment says 35%. For Yale, 25% now versus 44% in the post. </p>

<p>What a pointless discussion. Visiting the university and talk to students. Very, very few turned down Harvard to attend Chicago. Chicago is a great university but I fail to see why people need to go to such lengths to prove it is.</p>

<p>@excanuck99‌ </p>

<p>Three reasons:</p>

<p>1) Chicago tends to be overlooked in discussions about the great Undergraduate programs, mostly because until recently it wasn’t very selective (and to those who say it was merely self-selective, well, yield rates demonstrate that was wrong) and as such wasn’t really part of the Ivy+ discussion that dominates high-achieving high school seniors’ heads.</p>

<p>2) “University of Chicago” sound like a mediocre city college. At least Penn has a good shortened form they can go by (seriously, we’d be more recognized if we combined our stature with the name “Rockefeller University,” but no, an all-graduate school in NYC gets that honor).</p>

<p>3) Before WWII, many people would have dismissed P&S and replaced them with Columbia and Chicago. Both schools (albeit less so with our brothers in NYC) fell in terms of relevance compared to Palo Alto and desire what they once had in terms of across-the-board academic dominance, and are trying to come back. </p>

<p>As such, anything that helps make our institution’s reputation return to what it once was is welcomed, even if it is (extremely) inaccurate.</p>

<p>@kaarboer‌ Interesting observations. To your first point, do you have a sense of the trend in admission rates at Chicago? Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford have followed a very similar trajectory - 18-20% admitted for the class of 1994, 7-9% for the class of 2014 and obviously below the class of 2014 numbers today. I took a quick look but wasn’t able to find the comparable numbers for Chicago.‌</p>

<p>@bluewater2015‌ </p>

<p>UChicago went from a ~50% acceptance rate in the 90s, to 18.4% for the class of 2014, to 8.38% for 2018.</p>

<p>@kaarboer Thanks, that is a big change.</p>