Looks like too many admitted students accepted their offers from UChicago this year and the summer melt did not change the situation. Students who had signed contracts to return to college housing for 2017 are being offered alternative housing at the luxurious Vue53 complex at the same price as on-campus apartments.
They are trying to find space for the incoming freshmen on campus by offering to move returning students to off-campus facilities. I don’t think this has ever happened before!!
What are the thoughts as to class size?
Yeah, there were rumors of triples floating around for a while. I much prefer this.
Oh wow. You would think this might change the number of students they admit next year?
This is slipshod planning on the University’s part, and is likely costing them some money to subsidize housing in a luxury apt complex.
No idea why they want to grow so fast so hard!
Frankly, I think The University over admitted and underestimated the yield for the Class of 2021. I have no doubts that the admission office will make adjustment in the coming year.
@theluckystar - they’ve been over-admitting and underestimating yield for many years now. This isn’t a new problem.
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/2012/05/22/large-admitted-class-forces-adjustments-on-college/
When will they learn to be more conservative in their approach? It’s hard to establish good overall house/dorm culture if you do this year after year…
Given that ED1/ED2 yield prediction is quite easy, the issue must have been under estimation in the EA/RD yields. RD yield rates can fluctuate between 37% to 50% at elite private schools with an ED option. Assuming they admitted around 1,200 in those two rounds, the difference between a yield of 37% and 50% could be as much as 150 extra students that the College did not plan for.
Looks like class size is most likely going to be over 1,700.
@pupflier - so why not just admit EA/RD conservatively, and draw from the waitlist if the yield falls below expectations?
This isn’t rocket science - and almost all the other top schools don’t have the rampant over-enrollment issues Chicago’s had for the past 5 years…
@Cue7 Because I don’t think the administration is bothered about the issues that bother you. Their priorities are different from yours and many others on this forum.
Here is what I speculate happened
The administration decided that it was time to play the ED game because it is more advantageous to the school and attracts more affluent students (Chicago sorely needs that demographic to make up for the many decades of lack luster endowment growth). ED kids who choose Chicago as their first choice will also be happier and probably have a better feeling towards the school. However the administration did not know how strong or how deep the potential ED pool was, so they decided to play it safe with an ED2 option, in case the ED1 number was quite low.
Surprisingly they got a decent number of kids applying ED1 and then ED2. If they reject or wait list too many to make room for the EA/RD pool, then they would be sending the message that “ED is not a big advantage at Chicago”, which is exactly the opposite message they want to send. They would also be making room for kids who are either price shopping or not as enthusiastic about the school. These kids may never show up at Chicago or may cost Chicago a lot of financial aid money. So they admit kids they feel would be a good fit and have good stats in the two ED pools. That number is quite large because the pool is strong.
Even with the lower number of apps in the deferred EA/RD pool, they now don’t have too much room for the RD/deferred EA crowd. They cut back quite a bit but they still need to admit enough so as not to make that pool totally irrelevant going forward. At this point, they are probably hoping for a lower yield in this pool, but unfortunately for them, too many kids accept and so they have a larger class size than they anticipated.
I think in coming years Chicago will probably settle in at around 55% of the class in the ED/ED2 pool, but this being the first year, they wanted to send a strong message that applying ED to Chicago matters.
Having introduced ED1/ED2, it makes absolutely no sense to “admit conservatively”. That would be a terrible idea for the school, even if it would be great for the EA/RD pool applicants.
We can argue about whether Chicago should have joined the ED bandwagon, but once they did, given their ranking and recent surge in popularity, the probability of what just happened was pretty high.
It will take them a few years to tweak the admit rates in each pool, but I suspect they will eventually look more like their peers.
Chicago has ED1 and ED2, so it already doesn’t look like its peers.
Also, conservative estimates are that the RD accept rate was maybe 2%, and the EA accept rate was abysmally low too. So if they take 1.5% or 2%, isn’t the signalling the same?
The more you signal ED, the smaller the app pool for EA and RD. Chicago is narrowing themselves into a corner for no good reason.
Also, if the Chicago admin isn’t bothered by issues that bother me (fairness to applicants, socioeconomic diversity, creation of college culture, etc.), that’s an issue.
Quite possible that the EA and RD rates will come up some due to the rush of ED applications they will be getting this next year 
A lot depends on whether the total number of applications will return to 31,000 or so (and of course how that increase will be allocated among binding vs. non-binding).
@Cue7 It is very easy to advocate for fairness to applicants and socioeconomic diversity etc from the sidelines when somebody else has to pay for it. It makes the advocate feel all righteous and moral,while pushing off the financial costs of those decisions onto the backs of the full pay students and the University’s budget.
I have two words for you: “Cooper Union”.
Only “HYPS” and a handful of other schools have the endowment size to freely practice this “social nirvana” that you advocate. And even they can’t totally afford it. Chicago is definitely not in that group, even though it is quite rich when you compare it with other private schools.
You want Chicago to have the brand strength of “Harvard” but want it to spend like Cooper Union. There is severe cognitive dissonance going on here. HYP did not amass their huge endowments and become the gorillas of the education business by practicing policies that enhanced “socioeconomic diversity and fairness to students”. Now that they are incredibly rich, they can afford to have “benign” policies that seem applicant friendly but make no mistake about it. That $20+Billion endowment was not built by bringing in busloads of underprivileged and disenfranchised students into these institutions. They practiced all kinds of despicable forms of discrimination and outright nepotism in their admission process for decades.
And just like Microsoft and Google got rich by crushing their small competitors with questionable business practices and just like John D Rockefeller and Leland Stanford became unimaginably rich by sticking it to the little guy, HYP became the golden elite of education by adopting practices that benefited these institutions for decades at the expense of Jews, women, minorities and many others. Now having become the richest institutions, they have suddenly become benevolent.
That’s the way the world has always worked, and that’s the way the world will always work. For decades Chicago was crazy enough to believe that the world worked differently. They have just decided to accept reality now and for that they are being shamed.
Both @Cue7 and @pupflier believe that ED is intended to and will have the result of recruiting higher-income full-pay students of the rah-rah stripe who will go on to be big donors in future years. Pupflier believes this to be desirable, Cue professes to believe it to be undesirable (though why he says this in the context of ED mystifies me in light of his often stated objective elsewhere of increasing the numbers of exactly that sort of student). It must be that there are statistics or statements of intention made by other universities which support this assumption. It’s certainly the common wisdom expressed on this board. I suppose the reasoning must go like this: Universities know that these ED applicants have committed themselves to attend the school, so why wouldn’t the school skew its offers toward favoring the full-payers? Maybe that actually happens in some schools. I’m not at all convinced that it happens at Chicago. Everything I read on this board about the experience of real kids in the application process suggests that the admissions people very much want to identify kids who are especially suited for the unique Chicago education. It seems logical to me that they would use ED as a tool in that very legitimate search. I believe some here are projecting their own preferences when they reduce ED to being simply a mechanism to cherry-pick rich kids.
Consider also the objection that ED has the side-effect of reducing the numbers of RD applicants. I see no reason to care about this - unless one believes it is important to keep up the selectivity percentage in support of rankings. But that’s trivial. Indeed, those who excoriate ED as being designed to enhance certain rankings statistics (yield percentages) seem to me quite illogical in pointing out that it also has the effect of reducing the acceptance rate because of driving down RD applicants. These supposed motivations, if that is what they are, cancel out. Could it be that it’s not about rankings statistics at all?
I care only about identifying kids who (a) demonstrably want to come to Chicago, and (b) are qualified to do so, as demonstrated not only by the objective measurements that apply to all good students like scores and grades but by being the right fit for the special education Chicago offers. If ED assists in that process I’m for it. If it doesn’t I’m against it.
There are certainly vastly more than 1,600 kids every year all around the world who fit that criteria. If you care only about that then the University should just use a dart board and randomly pick names after doing initial screening to fill the lottery pot with XX times the 1,600 number.
The question is when you have the luxury to cherry pick from your applicant pool, as only the elite schools do, how should you pick? and should others legitimately shame you on your strategy, if they are disgusted by your priorities. Or are they just being sanctimonious jerks?
Certainly there are more than 1,600 kids in any given year who could handle a Chicago education, but the goal ought to be to find the ones that not only bring good grades and general intelligence with them but who are truly into the spirit of the place. That has always been the tradition here, what with the famously self-selecting kids of yore. A Chicago education has always been recognized as different and more intense than that of peer schools, and the same could be said of the sort of kid who comes here, the kind with a longing for exactly that sort of education. Finding those special kids is not a matter of throwing darts, and it certainly shouldn’t be a matter of favoring the rich ones. If that was what ED was about it would be an outrage. You could call this sanctimony, I suppose, but that would suggest I don’t really believe it. No one who has read my posts on this board over the years would say that. However, we’re all jerks from time to time - mea culpa on that front.
College set their admissions and fin. aid. policies to maximize the quality of the incoming class. That’s their job. They wouldn’t be offering ED - or, for that matter, partnering with low-income outreach programs like QuestBridge - if doing so didn’t improve quality.
For those families in the middle, would going ED really squeeze them dry if the college offers to meet financial need? Signing the ED Agreement does not obligate a family to pay in full and UChicago, like many private elite schools, has the institutional resources to meet “need” in a way that many other schools simply cannot.
Perhaps it’s best to wait and read how much the college has doled out on FA for the class of 2021 this year - conventional wisdom would suggest a smaller amount than previous years, given the significant number of ED matriculants. Hopefully that information will be made available soon.
As you both may hold the Chicago admin in higher regard than I do, why is the admin not more transparent with its data? Why is it waiting until the fall to release numbers, unlike all of its peers?
What’s the benefit in withholding this info?
When we stopped by the FA office at admitted student day, the person we talked to told us that they had a 130 million dollar budget and they had used 110 million of it. Although this was in April and there was still merit money being given out to entice some of the RD applicants.
@Cue7: Who knows? My experience with college administrations is that everybody is pretty much hiding something for some reason or other. The data will be released eventually. And Uchicago isn’t always clamoring to be like other nations, despite what a few on CC might think.