@marlowe1 and @JBStillFlying - we may need to drop the facade of egalitarianism here. I’d like current students to chime in, but here are some articles about Chicago that fly in the face of your assertions:
Further, I think going to a school where “smartness” matters so much - and academics are at the core of everything - may make it even harder for low SES students. Smartness - especially in classes like Hum and sosc, can simply be a proxy for upbringing and income. I remember in my hum classes, certain students seemed to talk a certain way, and it matched the way the professors talked - and it was all, frankly, the language of an elite educated class. Some high schoolers have access to that world more than others.
If anything, at ivies, there are MORE ways to determine and gauge one’s self worth - ways that extend well beyond the classroom. It’s not just all “smartness.”
Let’s be real - for all the high-falutin talk about what the College is, for a long time, it was basically grad school at the undergrad level. That’s what the college was. That’s why it prepared students so well for graduate school. That’s why professors loved teaching there - because the students were basically mini grad students, and professors love teaching graduate students the most. Faculty don’t have to worry about athletics and fraternities and singing clubs and other distractions - the undergrads, just like the grad students - centered on the academic experience.
This leads to some profound inequity, however, and does a disservice to low SES students going through, as @JHS notes. It’s one thing to struggle through Harvard undergrad and emerge on the other end with a network and pathways to prosperity. It’s another thing altogether to suffer through Chicago and emerge on the other end with a pathway that promises $40k a year as an adjunct.
Frankly, I still think a Chicago education is easier to navigate with a background from Andover or Exeter. I felt that way when I was an undergrad, and I doubt that’s changed much with a higher influx of east coast boarding school types and west coast wealth. Many of those folks went to schools where you pick up the language of elite higher ed much more quickly. That language helps when you first set foot in Hyde Park.
Sneering at smartness is a great American pastime, @Cue7 , but coming from a Chicago grad it’s disappointing. Of course there’s more to life than smarts - I’ll take good character over it if I have to make a choice. But at a great university it is or should be the coin of the realm. No social class has cornered the market in it. Likewise, feeling dumb is the privilege of all of us. Who doesn’t feel inadequate reading a classic author, much less trying to remember all the arguments and put them into one’s own words? I didn’t observe that it was any easier for prep-schoolers to do this than for the rest of us. Humility is an excellent lesson to learn in any event, and Chicago teaches that lesson very well to the rich and the poor.
You have your own experience, and it is not a unique one. Chicago is not the right place for many kids, including many smart ones. That’s the reason I’m so keen on detecting the right kind of smart ones at the front end rather than let the others in for several years of misery without the shiny reward Harvard offers. It’s no wonder that those aging kids want to turn Chicago into Harvard.
It does seem awfully strange, however, to see you make the point that a poor kid will be safer from the tyranny of the Andover kids at Harvard than at Chicago.
These alliances of first generation students appear to exist on all campuses. That there’s one at Chicago is hardly surprising. I certainly don’t think it’s evidence that the egalitarian ideal at Chicago (which you seemed to accept in your post #56) is, as you now say, just highfalutin talk.
@Cue7 you seem to be pigeonholing low SES as people who are uncomfortable with “smartness” - not something I’ve ever noticed from friends, several of whom happen to be low SES (Good grief!).
Perhaps UChicago has a more narrow goal than the Ivies precisely because they DO stress the importance of a great college education. Fortunately, there is choice among higher ed so that if your goals are different you can go elsewhere. Not sure what this has to do with SES, however.
Last time I checked EVERYONE was uncomfortable with the language that is taught at the College, esp. in the Core classes. “Talking a certain way” might mean an affected style of communication or it might mean more comfort with communicating at a certain abstract level. Certainly there will be differences depending on background but the kids from Boise or rural PA - or Beijing - might struggle a bit in that as well. The point is not to change the language but to help everyone speak it better. My understanding is that the College has done a great job with providing more overall support in general in order to assist with that.
Young Wickham in The Maroon article had very different issues than the kids in the Boston Globe piece. Compare his perspective to statements like “I feel I don’t belong”, “friends pair off based on what they can afford”, “I can’t relate to my peers who buy $200 shirts or plan exotic vacations”. That’s coming out of the Ivies. Where is such talk at UChicago? Doubtless it exists, but it’s not something that seems to defines the culture -or at least, define it anywhere near what the Ivies are like. And while the friend (fellow student? It doesn’t say) of Ms. Musielwicz was a bit harsh in the rhetorical “go back to the ghetto” statement, Ms. Musielwicz’s issues weren’t that she was being excluded from friendships based on income. Rather, she had to work part time to make ends meet (very difficult for anyone at UChicago, obviously). Ms. Lopez the Questbridge student noted that her differences were due to underlying culture and background differences, not because she didn’t deserve to be there. Compare that to the girl from Newark who thought she didn’t belong at Harvard. In sum, there seem to be differences between how SES students at UChicago view themselves and how those at the Ivies do. It seems that sizably greater class differences continue to persist at the latter.
I’ve been struck by the apparent practicality and frugality of UChicago students. The best example I can think of is a student seeking 5 others to share the cost of a box of 12 common pens. Other examples include auctioning off services like cleaning a dorm room or painting a picture to raise cash for Scav and a dumpster diving session to find items that might be useful for Scav. At some schools, wealthy students might just donate cash to the Scav fund or go on a shopping trip. I read an account of a spirited debate at a house meeting about whether to use limited house funds to purchase a new sleeve of ping pong balls! Examples like this have left me with the impression that it is not an ostentatiously wealthy student body. My child does live in one of the older dorms without air conditioning and these students might be a self-selecting group that devalue creature comforts and materialism.
When touring the school, we asked our guide why so many students move off campus after a year or two. It’s just one opinion, but he replied that it was to save money on the meal plan.
I agree with Marlow1 that there is something about the culture of UChicago that attracts those who are seeking something other than wealth and material success. My child, as an example, has always been a bit embarrassed by his family’s wealth and gone out of his way to hide it. Even now, he won’t charge an Uber to our credit card because he gets a transit pass with tuition and says he can go anywhere with that. I think the impression that Chicago students displayed less wealth and materialistic ambition was part of what attracted him to UChicago over other Ivy choices.
Finally, I think Millennials, wealthy or not, generally value wealth and materialism less than prior generations and this may be contributing the increasing popularity of UChicago.
I don’t think Chicago or Harvard is easy on kids who are really pinching pennies to get by. Someone who can’t afford to chip in his share of an occasional pizza with friends is periodically going to feel embarrassed and a little angry, and maybe a little invisible, too. That’s true everywhere, but it’s probably more true at colleges where there are fewer such kids.
Chicago doesn’t have Harvard’s final clubs, but no one I have known at Harvard ever paid a whit of attention to the final clubs. If it weren’t for the movie of The Social Network and for occasional hostile actions by the Harvard administration, I would think they were essentially invisible. What Chicago does have, that Harvard doesn’t, is practically all of the upperclasspeople living off campus and sorting themselves by how much they can afford to pay for housing. There’s a wide range of that, as you might imagine, with some kids sharing rooms in Woodlawn, and others living in luxury doorman buildings along the lake, with pools, private gyms and shuttle service.
I also believe Chicago has about the same relative numbers of kids from Andover and the like as Harvard. Maybe more, since kids from Andover have always known about Chicago. Chicago has probably gotten less preppie in the Nondorf era, but the Chicago my kids entered (my younger child was in Ted O’Neil’s last class) was full of preppies. I’ve said this before: Six (out of 24) kids from my daughter’s fourth grade classroom at an elite private school in Philadelphia overlapped with her at Chicago. That wasn’t so surprising, because at the time, looking back 10 years, Chicago was the third most common destination for graduates of that school, after only Penn and – you guessed it – Harvard, and just before Yale. Now, kids from that Quaker school were not big on flaunting their wealth. Chicago’s modesty appealed to them, and once there they helped preserve it. But when my kids left that school to finish high school at a large public magnet, they were smacked in the face by the difference between being with affluent kids living modestly and being with kids who were actually working class or poor. Chicago was much more the former than the latter.
That’s not to say it didn’t have a culture of intellectualism above all. It did, absolutely. But a culture of intellectualism above all is a culture of very affluent people, of people who don’t feel burdened by trying to earn enough to get their younger siblings a decent place to live ASAP. Who aren’t afraid of earning little or nothing for most of a decade while they get a PhD.
This is just a subjective observation: compared to the 1980’s when I was a graduate student, the U of C now certainly has far more “beautiful” people. In my days, other than MBA or Law School students going for on campus interview, almost everyone dressed casually in a functional manner. I am not saying that there were no rich kids then but there simply were not too many blatant displays of wealth or even fashion awareness. Nowadays, Canadian Goose parka seems to be winter uniform. I would see girls in short skirt and high heel winter boots in the Main Quad and this is definitely not my generation of U of C students.
That said, I think (or I hope) U of C has not degenerated into another generic Midwest Ivy. There is a YouTube video that you definitely should watch: Sh*t UChicago Students Say. At the end of the video, a boy was holding a girl’s hand at Mansueto Library and he told her: “You’re so UChicago pretty.” If this nerdiness actually holds true, I still have high hope for the quirky intellectualism of U of C.
Also, @marlowe1 I’m not sneering at smartness, but, to use a phrase that had a lot of traction in my day at Chicago - smartness is a construct.
I worry about the glorification or supposed egalitarianism of the old Chicago. I haven’t yet heard a better description than the old Chicago being an incubator for future academics (whether they get PhDs or not) - and that myopic vision isn’t a good thing.
If there are more Canadian goose parkas and also more students looking to use Chicago as an escalator to some tangible goal, that’s not a bad thing.
The reason, @JBStillFlying Chicago’s class divisions feel different than the Ivies (back in the day) is precisely because chicagos undergrad felt more like grad school. I think the atmosphere at Chicago’s undergrad would absolutely resemble Penn’s grad program in history or Harvard’s grad program in chemistry - but it wouldn’t at all look like Wharton or HBS.
@Cue7 the College definitely did appear, by casual observation, to be a training ground for PhD’s in the 80’s and 90’s. - although do we actually know what percent of the graduating class went on to earn a PhD in something? Was it a higher percentage than, say Harvard or Princeton (who generally produce a decent share of PhD-bound graduates)? The Pomona Study (sadly, removed from the website so going off memory) had UChicago third after these other two; however the data was based on more recent graduates than 25+ years ago. While an argument can be made that a smaller, more “academically focused” graduating class is going to have a good concentration who are PhD-bound and who, in turn, affect the culture of the College, that argument might not hold water if actual percentages aren’t higher than the presumably-more-diverse Ivies.
Also, when you look at the overall history of the College, is that time period more “the norm” or more the exception? Obviously it doesn’t have the storied legacy of HYP - nor some of the baggage (not allowed in unless you are white, male, upper class and Protestant). At one point, the University of Chicago WAS ethnically, racially, economically, and gender-wise more diverse than the Ivies. It had to be, since the Ivies defined themselves in such a narrow manner - really for centuries. So - the question becomes: did the “spirit of egalitarianism” arise as a RESULT of the College shrinking in size, or was it always there - at least to some degree - and defined the school from the outset? Seems to me that any institution which NEVER restricted groups of people based on skin color, background, social status, or gender in the first place is going to have an advantage in the “egalitarian” corner.
By the way, watch this video a while ago by Professor Fefferman describing how Marshall Stone transformed the Math Department in 1940’s and 1950’s into one of the best in the world by thinking out of the box at that time and hiring a whole bunch of non WASPish great mathematicians. Of course Fefferman himself recruits Beilison and Drinfield (from Russia), the two absolutely world class leading experts on algebraic geometry according to my mathematician friend. I do hope that some form of egalitarianism of 1970’s and 1980’s U of C remains. I would hate to see U of C becoming playground of the plutocratic kids.
@JHS , I am not contending that Chicago is particularly a destination of poor kids or that its studious culture suits them more than their affluent classmates. I do say the culture suits a type of kid who could come from anywhere. Once in that melting pot the common element is the predominant one. This is not to say that all other elements disappear. I would argue, however (and use myself as Exhibit A) that four years of that sort of testing experience puts a strong stamp on mind and character - and not, pace @Cue7 , simply to drive everyone to become an academic. None of my personal friends from those days nor I myself followed that path. The one kid I knew well in the English Department who always knew he wanted to be a Prof seemed to all of us very un-Chicago-like in his pre-professionalism.
As for “smartness” being merely a social construct or such postmodernist folderol, I refute that argument as Dr, Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley’s contention that there is not a material world: I hurl myself against the craggy minds on this board!
After reading this article, I have two thoughts. One, why do such a small percentage of graduates actually marry who are graduates of the very top of the academic food chain? I’m hoping for grandchildren some day…
And two, the topic most of this thread has touched upon. We toured many top LACs on the east coast and a couple Ivies in our college search. I believe one of the things that stood out to us was that the UChicago community did not walk around with their “noses-in-the-air.” It was welcoming and less cliquish. I attended a reception for accepted students in Philly this past weekend and while I met some pretty impressive families that are above my “son-of-two-factory workers” circle, I never felt like I was looked at as an outsider looking in. In our process, that atmosphere of lack of importance of SES seemed to be one of the major reasons my son chose UChicago over Williams and JHU and Bowdoin.
@marlowe1 - To me, Chicago’s undergrad felt like grad school - but that does NOT mean tons of Chicago collegians went on to obtain PHDs… I’m just saying, in terms of culture, it’s the closest thing to grad school at the undergrad level.
I imagine, if you polled an elite PHD program in history or biology, materialism and outlandish displays of wealth don’t run the roost. There may be folks from considerable wealth at those programs, but the emphasis is different.
Now, I don’t know whether we should glorify the fact that Chicago undergrad felt like grad school in the liberal arts. You seem to cherish that, but I’m more ambivalent.
“One, why do such a small percentage of graduates actually marry who are graduates of the very top of the academic food chain?”
Well its a known fact that in general people and countries who have higher educational attainment have lower marriage rates and take longer to get married and have children. Hence, Singapore’s and Japan’s demographic problems
^^It’s a bit more complicated. Obviously birth rates in many developed countries have plummeted. Looking at the US specifically, it’s also true that birthrates decline by income group:
However, here’s where it gets interesting. Looking specifically at women and educational attainment, birthrates are actually HIGHEST at the graduate/professional degree level:
Specifically, while it’s true that women who obtain a bachelors produce fewer children (per 1000 women) than women who are only educated through high school or a two-year college, women who obtain a professional or graduate degree have significantly higher birth rates than those at the bachelor’s level. This is a big reason why, over the past few years, we’ve seen articles proclaiming that the richest women in the US are also the ones having the most kids.