UChicago admissions strikes me as oddly orchestrated and potentially sleazy: massive junk-mail barrages, huge acceptance/enrollment numbers from elite prep schools (as if they’re trying to match HYP at their old feeder-school game by taking their runner-ups), a strangely high yield rate (higher than Harvard and Yale? really?), and total secrecy about internal numbers (CDS, anyone?). It left a bad taste in our mouths as we looked at schools for our S22, who partly as a result had zero interest.
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Meant to write my last post as a response to Data10’s discussion of UChicago, so want to highlight that ex post facto.
Interestingly, it may be a very strong strategy to game the system from their end. Accept qualified students who have shown a proficiency and intelligence, but might not be at the tippy top of their pool. Students who are unlikely to gain acceptance at HYP but will likely have applied.
Voila…very high yield rate as it’ll likely be their highest ranked acceptance. Now don’t publish data on it.
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So you want yield to be high but not too high?
Chicago should absolutely publish their CDS, and it doesn’t look good that they don’t. On the other hand, I do give them a lot of credit for posting the lowest standardized test score in each entering class rather than obscuring it in the weeds of the CDS. Class of 2027 Profile | College Admissions
Yes, that’s just how I understand it. The UC enrollment numbers from top prep schools are insanely high, likely in just the manner you describe. Still leaves a bad taste, though–a bit too much gaming involved, which seems beneath a school of Chicago’s caliber.
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Covid and the pervasiveness of TO have definitely made the last 2 years crazy and the outcomes unpredctable. But this is following a trend that has been evolving for years.
Many colleges that have traditionally pulled most strongly from their own backyards (and that really is most of them!) read the demographic tea leaves and realized their future depended on having a more national reach and reputation. Arguably, most are succeeding.
But that also means that the kids from the Boston suburbs and New England prep schools now have to compete with kids from Texas and CA and IL for places at schools in Maine and Vermont, for example, that would traditionally have been pretty sure things for a strong student with good stats. And because they might have been 75% of those schools in days past, getting cut to even less than 50% really makes a difference in how competitive it is. And while some of those kids might be enticed by a school in MN or Iowa, many may want to be closer to home, attendinga school relatives, neighbors, and friends have attended. It’s stressful. This is playing out everywhere!
If both your parents went to Tufts, you may feel like that’s your destiny. Rice might be an option they never heard of. And vice versa for a kid in the SW. The landscape has been changing, in many spots quite rapidly, and it’s when you’re in it that you see it. The kid who has “always gotten into xyz” isn’t being replaced by a lesser student but by one who may not have been in the pool for xyz 10-20 years ago. And that kid who has been squeezed put? Probably very attractive to someone outside the usual suspects.
My kid found some terrific schools in the midwest that were remarkably similar to schools in the northeast in terms of calibre of students and academics. Our school encouraged students to think beyond the places where they’d be competing with tons of kids just like them. Imho, that’s what a really good college counseling office does!
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No, I have no desire for yield rates one way or the other. Theirs is just unusually high, in a way that suggests something unnatural is at play–ie, that the rate itself, rather than an honest selection of the best students, is a primary interest. Lots of schools think this way, I know, but the degree to which UC appears to is embarrassing.
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Don’t think the emphasis on prestige is going anywhere, as attending a prestigious college is perceived to help one’s life/career prospects. And in our hugely unequal society, familiar will do everything they can to make sure their kids don’t drop out of the top X percent.
Colby is another school that, er, tinkered with its admissions practices so it has a sub-10% admit rate. That left such a bad taste in my mouth that I did not have my son even look at it.
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Colby legitimately has it going on now! Had you looked, you might have been surprised (especially if you’d been there back in the day!) They are one of the ones that realized that they needed to do something different or they’d be an also ran. And they have.
Denison is another that has been brilliant in its transformation.
Pitt! Wow!
There are scads of success stories. Believe it or not, there was a time relatively recently when Columbia accepted more than 50% of its applicants! So yes, different world.
My kid was considering a school for ED that my mother said “Don’t people apply there as a safety?”
What’s been good is that schools have had to think about what really differentiates them besides “it’s 3 hours from where lots of kids live.” I think this has been a good thing.
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Don’t forget NYU, which has gone from >30% to <15% in about 6-7 years.
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Yes, @confusedaboutfA! Very popular choice amongst prep school kids. Real change from BS!
Or both. The world is going to be a very different in 10-15 years. It is already a different place than it was 2 years ago. Thankfully these kids of ours are up to the challenge.
Love that your daughter is thriving. When kiddo came home for winter break freshman year, I was sold on his school. He was clearly evolving in such a great way. I would totally choose spending the money on high school for him over an elite college any day. These schools have a lot to offer beyond college matriculation.
I think the schools have known this change has been coming for a while. They rebranded as “independent schools” instead of prep schools for a reason.
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This is a great post. Taking advantage of what’s available is key. My eldest didn’t go to prep school and started at Bates as a classic average excellent student. She’s now headed to a PhD program at one of the top universities in the world. Her bff from college is headed to Stanford for the same. As high schoolers, both girls were denied from some of the same colleges: Brown, Tufts and Carleton.
Bingo. That’s why my daughter and her friend probably didn’t get into to their reachier schools back in the day. It’s clear though that they didn’t need the reachier schools to succeed.
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I guess it’s working, though, right? UChicago has skyrocketed up rankings, most specifically US News. Vandy hired their Chancellor from UChicago, primarily to do the same for them.
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I don’t blame schools like University of Chicago, NYU, Colgate, Northeastern for trying to manipulate the system. The problem isn’t the “unsavory” admission methods of the schools themselves. The real problem is the broken college admissions process that isn’t very fair and definitely isn’t very transparent. Those schools are merely responding to what the free market wants, namely what the family of graduating HS students wants. Every HS senior wants to attend the “best” school that he/she can get accepted into. And for many students, that means that they want to attend an “elite” university. Schools that have extremely low acceptance rates and high yields reinforce the public’s perception that those specific schools are elite. Looking at the trends, their methods work! So we really should be blaming ourselves and not the schools for trying to give us what we want. HYPMS don’t have to resort to those tactics because they are already at the pinnacle of the college pyramid. They just have to maintain the status quo. U of Chicago doesn’t belong in that tier. That school has structural deficiencies which it has to overcome: location in a flyover state in an unsafe area of a big city, no association with a glamorous college consortium (i.e. Ivy League), lack of attractive sports teams, and a culture that may be appealing to a select few. It has to work extra hard to attract and more importantly keep the students it wants.
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I might argue that UChicago is not gaming the system, but exploiting it. My D absolutely LOVED writing their essays. It wasn’t work for her, allowed her to be creative and a little bold, and was so different than every other school. She effectively wrote two freestyle essays for UChicago in her PE and general one, then went a bit off on her semi why Chicago essay.
I might argue that a school can tell a lot more about a student from their essays than they can from comparing a 1580 to a 1530 or a 4.3 to a 4.1. I believe AOs when they say they can tell when an essay was written by a HS’er and edited by an adult as opposed to being written by an adult using notes from a HSer.
As my first boss liked to say…the biggest “go-getters” are often not the most successful. He preferred approachable people who “connected” better than the computer-type machines of a human. Is it possible UChicago looks for a particular type of student that they fell will better fit their academic landscape? I’d venture to guess it’s a combination of all of the above.
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Yes, your daughter seems exactly like the HS student that U Chicago wants to attract. And this is purely meant as a compliment to your daughter.
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And those “many” consumers are flat out mistaken. This is precisely why looking at matriculation #s to the elites was a fools errand prior to 2020 and even more so now. It just isn’t or shouldn’t be “why you go.”
For our part this recent shift changes nothing. We did not go to BS to get into college X, but rather so that kids could hit the ground running at college X, regardless of what school X turns out to be.
Exactly. And agreed.
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Thx. She LOVED Northwestern and we did a quick walking tour of Chicago on our own. But NW’s essays were super dry and tough to show much color. Her stats are competitive for NW, but I simply don’t see how she will “stand out”. UChicago, however, I think she gave herself a fighter’s chance.
The public schools around us don’t send many to UChicago, but the privates absolutely do.
I agree with what you are saying. However, tuition for private schools is extremely expensive in our area. The day schools are approaching $50K a year. In view of the exorbitant cost as well as the fact that the public school system in our area is considered very good, it is understandable that many families consider ROI when making that decision. Matriculation rates (to the uninformed eye) are easier to understand to help justify spending a lot of money (compared to $0) for the next 4 years.