# of EA Acceptances - Preliminary Stats

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
41

<p>Kafka - there would be a tilt toward ivy admission if the constituent groups (the sports teams, alums from the sports teams) had more pull in the process. Right now, sports just aren’t a big enough draw to influence admissions decisions all that significantly.</p>

<p>From what I know about how Chicago coaches recruit, they basically cast their net VERY wide. At the ivy schools, coaches more or less select and recruit who they want, and then tell these recruits that they pretty much can be assured admission to the college. Many of these athletes, then, are locked in quite early in the process.</p>

<p>On the other hand, Chicago coaches will endorse a very wide range of athletes, and hope that they can get as many as possible to help their teams. I think, then, that similar to last year, athlete status won’t be a tremendous hook in the app. Some of the recruits a Chicago coach endorses won’t get in, but others will. </p>

<p>Again, keep in mind, this is sports at the DIII level. It’s more or less comparable to good high school sports. Keep in mind further that, well, Chicago just isn’t very good, even on the DIII level. </p>

<p>With all that being said, I don’t see sports being a big factor in admissions this year. </p>

<p>In the FUTURE, sports might become more of a factor, but not because of coaches’ intent. Rather, just as in the ivies, Nondorf (who comes from an ivy background) might see participation in sports as a rough proxy for future success and potential in leadership, and if Nondorf wants to create a college more focused on producing future leaders rather than future academics, sports might have more pull. This has nothing to do with the sports infrastructure at Chicago, rather it has more to do with a changing goal for the College. </p>

<p>If this process occurs, it’ll take years to implement, and I’d assume we’re still 5-7 years away (at the earliest) of seeing any real edge given to athletes. Moreover, I doubt Chicago is going to go in this direction, because once you admit a bunch more serious athletes, you generally need to create a larger sports program, or these athletes will just go elsewhere so they can continue playing their sport. This is probably an investment Chicago doesn’t want to make.</p>

<p>I think what’s most likely is Chicago slightly modulates its core mission to be a training ground for future academics AND future leaders, and then maybe sports gets a bit more emphasis because of this. I don’t think this would be a drastic departure from Chicago today, however.</p>

<p>Again, I don’t think I can emphasis enough the difference in sports culture at a place like Princeton and a place like Chicago. Even the VERY best Chicago athletes aren’t really that great. The best athletes at Princeton, though, go on to be olympians or play major league baseball or play professional basketball in europe. It’s a totally different scene. </p>

<p>In the spring, sometimes Chicago teams scrimmage DI teams from colleges with similar reputations to Chicago. Back in the day when I was at U of C, I think Chicago men’s soccer scrimmaged an elite college’s soccer team - maybe Northwestern or Brown, I don’t remember. The DI school had a top soccer program, and Chicago was, as usual, pretty mediocre (or maybe sorta good that year). I remember watching parts of the scrimmage, and it was like men against boys. The Brown soccer team was bigger, stronger, faster, etc. The scrimmage was for 40 minutes or so, the Brown team scored 5 or 6 goals, and that was it. Any player on the Brown team would easily be the BEST athlete AT chicago - not the best forward or midfielder, that kid would literally have been the best athlete in the entire Chicago college.</p>

42

<p>A question came up among some parents I know whose kids are going through the applications and admissions stuff this year.</p>

<p>The general consensus seems to be that in may schools, RD kids should “give” the schools higher stats that help them raise/maintain their ranking, since schools admit some kids with somewhat lower (overall) stats during the EA/ED (especially ED) round.</p>

<p>Do you think this is true? Is this applicable to Chicago?</p>

<p>Meanwhile, I found this interesting data on how USNWR ranks schools.</p>

<p>[Methodology:</a> Undergraduate Ranking Criteria and Weights - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2009/08/19/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights.html]Methodology:”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2009/08/19/methodology-undergraduate-ranking-criteria-and-weights.html)</p>

<p>Note here that:</p>

<p>(1) SAT I CR+M accounts for 7.5% of the total scores used for ranking schools. This is more important than class room size of 1-19 (6%), faculty compensation (7%), graduation rate performance (5%), and % faculty with top terminal degree (3%), and alum giving (5%).</p>

<p>(2) % students in top 10% of the class accounts for 6% of the total score.</p>

<p>Combined (1) + (2), this is more important than all other factors except:</p>

<p>(a) average graduation rate (16%)
(b) peer assessment (25%). </p>

<p>So, choosing kids with high SAT and class ranking means more than financial resource per student (10%).</p>

<p>Having seen this data, I can’t help but be extremely skeptical about all this feel good brouhaha from admission officers about “how we don’t really take SATs and such that seriously” mantra. You can’t change reputation (peer assessment) over night. You can’t drastically increase graduating rate over night. You can’t print money. But, it’s really not that difficult to choose applicants on the higher end of the stats. Now, combine this with the fact that many top colleges have to put together the “balanced student body” with requisite athletes, URMs, legacies, development cases, etc. Somehow, somewhere, some people have to provide terrific stats that raises the overall average. Who would that be? Unhooked RD kids.</p>

<p>Am I being too paranoid? Having seen all this, I am convinced that next year my S2 has to go for the ED. As a totally unhooked candidate (I call him a “teflon” candidate: No sticky hook), ED is about the only piece of strategy left.</p>

<p>What are your thoughts?</p>

43

<p>Brown alum says: This is a fascinating thread. I’ve been waiting for Chicago’s rise for thirty years.
Speaking from the other pole of the two curricular polarities of American education (Chicago and Brown) – and speaking also as an admirer of Chicago, which, I’m happy to admit, is a more important place at the graduate level – I do hope Chicago can begin to attract the applicant pool that Brown has been attracting since, roughly, 1975.
You deserve it, and you inhabit a great city (although not as quaint as the College Hill National Historic District in Providence).
APPLICANT POOL QUALITY and GENUINE YIELD (no bookkeeping tricks) are the determiners. Discussions of university selectivity must begin with these two criteria.
A superficial way to gauge your applicant pool is to look at its occurrence in the pools ABOVE it: It’s not Harvard’s incidence in Chicago’s pool; it’s Chicago’s incidence in Harvard’s pool. From that standpoint, Chicago has some heavy-duty recruiting to do.
There are problems with the NBER selectivity rankings (it’s now nearly 10 years old), but it’s the best we have and it centers on overlap dymamics. Chicago was ranked 28th by NBER and in none of the 27 Fiske overlap pools above it does Chicago even occur.
(The pools are provided by the 2010 Fiske Guide, whose methodolgy I know and which gets a very good return on its overlap questionnaire.
Now, Fiske 2011 will no doubt show Chicago’s apps leap from 2010, but Chicago really must definitively change its pool outreach to equal the diverse quality of Harvard (and idiosyncratic Brown).<br>
(Parenthetically, Brown is ranked 7 in NBER, occurs in Yale and Stanford above it, and in schools as distant as Pomona and Carleton. Brown had occurred in Harvard through Fiske 2009, always as the fifth-place overlap, but Fiske printed only the top 4 overlaps this year and Brown’s spot was phantomized.)<br>

[quote=Cue7]
overall accept rates … Harvard (8%) Yale (8%) Princeton (9%) Stanford (9%) MIT (11%) Cal Tech (16%) Columbia (10%) Brown (11%) Dartmouth (13%) Penn (17%) Chicago (18%)

[quote/]

Your projections need updating, now that the earlies are in.
Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn are static. Yale is down a bit. MIT is up quite a bit. Brown is up hugely.
In Providence, the numbers from November implied an overall accept rate of 9 percent and the actual ED figures support that: Up 21 percent and, even so, fewer EDs accepted.
Brown AD Jim Miller tells the press, mysteriously, that a larger piece of the RD pie must be reserved, implying significant RD apps increase. Insiders say signally significant. Hence, 9 percent.

Brown and Chicago have (a decade late) decided to play the Columbia game (Columbia’s legendary Eric Furda now works for Penn).
In 2010 Brown will be 9 percent and at long last single-digit, but Brown might have been single-digit a decade ago had its AO been less sleepy.
Columbia stole a march.
Chicago may well go to 11 percent, but I have to say that there is at least as much further dramatic movement available to Brown as there will be for Chicago.
Brown’s unexploited metric is its too-high numerator. For years Brown set a target class size of 1425. Then, to pay the bills, it bought an old residence hotel, scandalously grew the enrollment by 400 and made the numerator 1525, with consequent admit-rate results.
An element of the Brown AO has been agitating for years to lower the numerator and go single-digit 9 percent. Finally, alumni alarm at our US News ranking got everyone’s attention. A brilliant new AD was brought in (alumnus Jim Miller). He has grown the denominator by 10,000 in just two years and is now going to work on the numerator.
Look for Brown at 8.8 percent by 2011.
Chicago, nobody in this ridiculous game is standing still. We’re all moving targets.</p>

44

<p>Brown alum says: This is a fascinating thread. I’ve been waiting for Chicago’s rise for thirty years.
Speaking from the other pole of the two curricular polarities of American education (Chicago and Brown) – and speaking also as an admirer of Chicago, which, I’m happy to admit, is a more important place at the graduate level – I do hope Chicago can begin to attract the applicant pool that Brown has been attracting since, roughly, 1975.
You deserve it, and you inhabit a great city (although not as quaint as the College Hill National Historic District in Providence).
APPLICANT POOL QUALITY and GENUINE YIELD (no bookkeeping tricks) are the determiners. Discussions of university selectivity must begin with these two criteria.
A superficial way to gauge your applicant pool is to look at its occurrence in the pools ABOVE it: It’s not Harvard’s incidence in Chicago’s pool; it’s Chicago’s incidence in Harvard’s pool. From that standpoint, Chicago has some heavy-duty recruiting to do.
There are problems with the NBER selectivity rankings (it’s now nearly 10 years old), but it’s the best we have and it centers on overlap dymamics. Chicago was ranked 28th by NBER and in none of the 27 Fiske overlap pools above it does Chicago even occur.
(The pools are provided by the 2010 Fiske Guide, whose methodolgy I know and which gets a very good return on its overlap questionnaire.
Now, Fiske 2011 will no doubt show Chicago’s apps leap from 2010, but Chicago really must definitively change its pool outreach to equal the diverse quality of Harvard (and idiosyncratic Brown).<br>
(Parenthetically, Brown is ranked 7 in NBER, occurs in Yale and Stanford above it, and in schools as distant as Pomona and Carleton. Brown had occurred in Harvard through Fiske 2009, always as the fifth-place overlap, but Fiske printed only the top 4 overlaps this year and Brown’s spot was phantomized.)<br>

Your projections need updating, now that the earlies are in.
Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn are static. Yale is down a bit. MIT is up quite a bit. Brown is up hugely.
In Providence, the numbers from November implied an overall accept rate of 9 percent and the actual ED figures support that: Up 21 percent and, even so, fewer EDs accepted.
Brown AD Jim Miller tells the press, mysteriously, that a larger piece of the RD pie must be reserved, implying significant RD apps increase. Insiders say signally significant. Hence, 9 percent.

Brown and Chicago have (a decade late) decided to play the Columbia game (Columbia’s legendary Eric Furda now works for Penn).
In 2010 Brown will be 9 percent and at long last single-digit, but Brown might have been single-digit a decade ago had its AO been less sleepy.
Columbia stole a march.
Chicago may well go to 11 percent, but I have to say that there is at least as much further dramatic movement available to Brown as there will be for Chicago.
Brown’s unexploited metric is its too-high numerator. For years Brown set a target class size of 1425. Then, to pay the bills, it bought an old residence hotel, scandalously grew the enrollment by 400 and made the numerator 1525, with consequent admit-rate results.
An element of the Brown AO has been agitating for years to lower the numerator and go single-digit 9 percent. Finally, alumni alarm at our US News ranking got everyone’s attention. A brilliant new AD was brought in (alumnus Jim Miller). He has grown the denominator by 10,000 in just two years and is now going to work on the numerator.
Look for Brown at 8.8 percent by 2011.
Chicago, nobody in this ridiculous game is standing still. We’re all moving targets.</p>

45

<p>Interesting thoughts, Brown alum-we’ve been waiting for Chicago’s rise too! Although Brown and Chicago’s respective curricula are indeed at the opposite ends of the laissez faire/thou shalt spectrum, I have always found Brown and Chicago students similar in their love of learning and if I may, quirkiness. My work life btw teems with very impressive and fiercely loyal Brownies.</p>

46

<p>A CC veteran, mini, posted an analysis a couple of years ago that showed that as admit percentage declined schools may actually become less selective, from the schools point of view. (A search of the parents forum should find it.) Finding a class that matches the needs of the school may be easier and produce an overall better class when a school gets fewer applications. If one looks at SAT range one finds that Chicago and Brown have been quite close for many years, even back in the days of Chicago’s 40% admit rates. Chicago is typically slightly higher for critical reading and Brown slightly higher for math. This has not changed with declining admit rates. I for one am not all that enthused about declining admit rates and do not assume that either the school or the student body is particularly benefited by declining rates.</p>