Some interesting stats

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
81

“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.”

True, and it’s been true for decades, if not since the university’s founding. Vue53 is swanky and they are obviously building more luxury housing in HP than what existed back in the day. But no one’s saying income distributions (though, of late, widening overall) never existed at UChicago till now. The question is whether wealth differences impact culture and environment. One interesting phenomena seems to be - at least according to the College - that more upperclass (ie 3rd/4th years) are opting to remain on campus. That’s probably expected to increase further once they build Woodlawn Commons. Seems reasonable to think that everyone’s living together at the res. hall. would help mitigate negative consequences from income or other diparities. But again, if the Ivies, with their “affluence” issues, have more housing for everyone, it’s pretty obvious that communal living doesn’t really solve this problem.

82

Given the abnormally high rates of mental issues - especially anxiety and depression - among graduate students, it’s doubtful that’s a good thing.

People tend to look through increasingly rose-tinted glasses as the years since graduation fly by.

83

This “grad school feel” to the place in part was inevitable just due to the ratio of grads to undergrads. At the time, the College was about a third of its current size. First years weren’t exactly being exposed to graduate-level coursework as much as they were lacking in the support and other services that many other colleges at elite uni’s offered at the time. While this undoubtedly meant a brutal experience for some, others not only didn’t mind the environment, they enjoyed it! So it was a mixed bag of outcomes and preferences. Clearly, the College had a big problem with basic things like yield, admission and retention rates - all the key metrics for “quality” that we value in colleges today. However, when Sonnenschein first introduced the concept of letting the college kids “have more fun” he was famously mocked by those same college kids! So there was a lot of self-selection going on, even if some were clearly not a good fit and transferred out. BTW, many of the (non professional) grad school programs lacked good support services as well. Things are in place now such as how to present your research paper or improve your interview skills were unheard-of in those days, though they definitely did exist at other PhD programs.

84

@Cue7 , I majored in English in the College and then stuck around for a year to do an M.A., so I can make a very direct comparison. I think I know what you’re getting at but don’t really agree. As an undergrad I did want to be very serious about studies and the general universe of thought and culture (which might have seemed grad-school-like), but it had a more youthful tone. It had the pop and fizz of discovery. That was different from grad school as I experienced it, which was also serious but more technical and disciplined. The profs treated you somewhat as colleagues but also expected more of you. Your fellow-students talked shop about practicing the scholarly trade rather than about the meaning of things. Demonstrations of enthusiasm for writers wasn’t quite the done thing. For me it was less fun, but then I had a peculiar idea of fun - it was what brought me to the College!

85

@JBStillFlying The Yale where I went to college had “affluence issues” to the extent that someone who was actually poor could feel alienated, or someone who was ultra-sensitive to class issues could feel angry that the student body as a whole skewed so significantly to the most affluent segment of society. I knew some of both types of people there. But I think Chicago then, and now, had and has the same structural features, and thus the same issues.

What Yale then had practically none of was social stratification between students from families that were actually rich and students from families that were middle class or working class. Conspicuous displays of wealth were treated with utter disdain. The most exclusive social organizations – the secret societies for seniors – did involve some legacy preferences, but on the whole were (and were perceived to be) meritocracies. All but a handful of legacies were tapped based on their achievements and personalities, not their wealth or which prep school they went to.

Living together in the colleges for four years definitely fostered that. Most people I knew had friends that spanned the economic spectrum of people in the college. The same was true of people who lived off campus, too. My wife’s six-person house her senior year included both the “Jr.” of a prominent industrialist and Yale Corporation member and an artist who was one of eight children from a working-class Southie family in Boston. Their house was a slum, and they all lived very frugally.

Two friends from college days are current members of the Yale Corporation. One is fabulously wealthy now, having been part of the founding group of Bain Capital, but in college he was a smart, ambitious, middle-class Jewish kid. The other is CEO of an inner-city hospital system who came from a working-class Irish-Catholic family – her father was a cop – and originally planned to be a nurse. Both were popular and respected as students, but neither had a whit of social cachet beyond being legitimately nice, interesting people.

86

@JHS no doubt students at Yale were as you said. Always thought of Yale as attracting more who were like “the Professor” than Harvard-man “Thurston Howelll III”. And I knew they accepted Irish Catholics 75 - 80 years ago since we had a (now deceased) relative who attended around that time. Though by no means working-class and the son of an educated man himself, he was still among that large first-gen crowd who attended university around mid-20th century (many of them military veterans and destined for comfortable middle or upper class status as a result of both education and the go-go economy). All of the Ivies no doubt participated in the significant cultural shifts that occurred post WWII, in terms of who they were admitting and educating.

87

Thinking a bit about this “grad-school” feel to UChicago in light of what @Marlowe1 posted in #83 and also what @Cue7 has posted about profs loving to teach at Uchicago because the undergrads were like “mini-grad students”.

First of all - and this will no doubt vary by field of specialty as well as individual instructor - I know very few profs who actually ENJOY teaching any undergrads, UChicago or other - and this was true back in the day. Tenure/tenure track profs. at a research uni. will always prioritize their grad. students and their research over the undergrads and they of course aren’t at UChicago in order to teach the latter. In general, those who really love teaching the next generation of BA/BS recipients tend to gravitate to the LAC’s. BTW, this is not to say that tenured profs. don’t recognize a particularly bright kid who seems to have the potential for higher academics in the subject - they do. And they are happy to advise those kids and write letters of recommendation to their colleagues vouching for the kid’s potential. But in general that’s the exception, not the focus.

Second, we’ve actually posed the question of what faculty likes about UChicago undergrads to those academics who have actually taught them. Not once have we heard that they are mini grad students, and our academic friends would laugh at that characterization. In the words of a famous Duke prof. who was advising a friend of ours contemplating a topic for his senior thesis: “Eh . …the problem is, you know nothing.” (that “know nothing” went on to earn a PhD so definitely had learned SOMETHING by that time). He wasn’t trying to insult the kid, who was bright and had a ton of potential. But he meant it - because at the BA level your skill set and discipline is just not anywhere like it would be even during the first year of a rigorous grad school program.

So what DO these academic types enjoy about the UChicago undergrads? Well, they enjoy that the kids enjoy the subject and want to attend class to learn more about it. Contrast to the renowned Harvard professor Steven Pinker who told the New Republic in 2014:

“Knowing how our students are selected, I should not have been surprised when I discovered how they treat their educational windfall once they get here. A few weeks into every semester, I face a lecture hall that is half-empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video-recorded, and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam. I don’t take it personally; it’s common knowledge that Harvard students stay away from lectures in droves, burning a fifty-dollar bill from their parents’ wallets every time they do. Obviously they’re not slackers; the reason is that they are crazy-busy. Since they’re not punching a clock at Safeway or picking up kids at day-care, what could they be doing that is more important than learning in class? The answer is that they are consumed by the same kinds of extracurricular activities that got them here in the first place.”

Not that UChicago kids aren’t busy or don’t skip class now and then, but do we really think a UChicago instructor is going to have the same complaint? Our friends have elaborated (and I’ve said this before) that the difference between UChicago and other places is that at UChicago when you walk through Reynolds or similar, you hear undergrads discussing something they learned in their courses. Other elite schools: they are discussing their weekend plans. This is a generalization but it speaks to the different culture at UChicago.

So it’s not that the kids are - or were - mini grad students, it’s that their love of learning might surpass many at other top schools who might be there for other reasons. Profs were college students themselves once upon a time, and they appreciate noticing that same spark of interest in the current college generation.

88

@JHS , I wonder if the meritocracy you describe at Yale operates in quite the way of that at Chicago. For example, the “achievements and personalities” part of it: would these not be in arenas in which a childhood and youth of leisure, travel and cultivation would have bestowed confidence and special skills that no merely bookish youth - or perhaps only a very exceptional one - from a working-class milieu would be able to muster? The public library is a great equalizer. So are public schools. Summer camps, trips to Europe and sailing lessons - less so. Am I wrong in thinking that the skills picked up in these richer (figuratively) environments will take you further socially at Yale than at Chicago? Correlatively, the bookish poor kid without those skills is going to have a better social life in the Chicago meritocracy. Comparatively speaking, of course. The statistics cited above support that proposition, as does the stereotypical wisdom about the two places.

89

@marlowe1 People were valued for different things, and not necessarily for pure intellectualism. They were valued for talent as artists, musicians, actors, and the like. They were valued if they were sports stars. They were valued if they became leaders of established organizations, like the newspaper, the glee club, the dramat, the social service volunteer umbrella – something that usually reflected hard work, patience, and inner drive. They were valued if they were entertaining. They were valued if they emerged as leaders of some movement or other that was effective at changing people’s minds about this or that.

So not pure intellectualism at all, but also not anything that gave a great advantage to coming from Andover or to having wealthy parents. People were admired for intellectualism, too – some who were preppies (there are lots of intellectual preppies), and many who weren’t. I don’t have time to give all the examples I’d like to. I just have to testify: There really was little or no social stratification. No one cared where you had come from, or what your parents did. They cared what you had to offer. There was fairly broad acceptance for different kinds of people, as long as they weren’t deliberately annoying. That’s not to say that no one ever felt lonely. I’d venture to guess that everyone at some point felt lonely.

I suppose I ought to admit that there were very few people there who really had poor social skills. They may not have had polished, upper-class social skills, but if they didn’t they tended to have energy and charisma, and that went a long way. Intellectual charisma was fine. One of the most admired people I knew there was someone who in later years would probably have gotten some kind of mild spectrum diagnosis. She was a Chinese woman from Los Angeles by way of Montreal, a pure public-school type, who worked summers and vacations as a secretary. She had no sense of humor, and was really awkward socially, but she was brilliantly, luminously smart, and always kind. People adored her. They still do. She’s absolutely someone who, if she were at Chicago, @marlowe1 would point to her and say, “Someone like that would never be valued at Yale.” But she was.

90

Chicago has changed so much over the last 10 years. Couldn’t you argue the 20 year old 2002-06 cohort’s data is junk. Class of 2022 will have little in common with class of 2002-06.

It’s a much wealthier school today (not saying that’s a bad thing). And it’s attracting far more well-rounded and outgoing Ivy League caliber kids (not saying that’s a bad thing).

91

@JHS

“Along the lake” as in Streeterville and Gold Coast and commuting to class? Or are there lux rentals in east hyde park? Are there really very many that do this?

92

Is Regents Park still a lux rental? That would be one, perhaps. TBH my experience was grad school but we liked knowing kids in RP because when study group met there we could lounge around much more comfortably, had access to a full kitchen, and break to watch “Simpsons” on a big screen TV - which was a big deal in those days. One time our host had stomach flu and retired to his room to sleep and puke while the rest of us finished the project on his computer. Couldn’t do that at the Reg.

93

We stayed in Regents Park for a few years after GSB. It might be luxurious in those days if you compare RP to graduate student housing. By today standard it may be underwhelming, especially if you look at the latest condo tower designed by Jeanie Gang:

http://studiogang.com/project/solstice-on-the-park

94

@writermom2018 , the point the statistics make is that as of the early 2000’s the poor and the rich at Chicago were - uniquely among the elite schools (and almost all others) - essentially undifferentiated in a measure regarded as a proxy for social well-being. If you believe as I do that that’s a highly desirable characteristic of the college experience then you have to ask what produced that result and you would support the admissions and other policies that caused the result. It would appear to me from your tangential asides that you don’t place much value on what we have been describing here as Chicago-style egalitarianism. Is that right?

As for your confidence that future measurements will produce different results because the College is so vastly changed, well, we will see. I doubt it. Reasons given above.

@JHS , those are vivid and attractive descriptions of social life at Yale, and you do indeed give one instance of a Chicago-like student who flourished during your time. If, however, one were to drill down socio-economically across the board of all the leaders, achievers and highly socialized kids, wouldn’t you very likely find that the kids from the upper strata disproportionately dominate (that is, in a higher degree than their very high numbers would justify)? Isn’t that a problem if you’re an egalitarian? Yale’s egalitarian culture could be more theoretical than real. That’s what these stats from the early 2000’s suggest to me.

95

no that is not right…I didn’t offer an opinion. I do not know if it makes Chicago a better or worse place or has no impact.

it’s a very safe assumption the college is far wealthier than it was in 2000-06. Chicago is hip…clever rich kids want to go there. while 2002-06 data may be fun for older alums to chat about, I just don’t think it’s applicable to rising freshman or prospies…like at all…night and day.

96

@writermom2018 : My understanding is that there is luxury housing in the northeast corner of Hyde Park, along the lake, where a meaningful portion of the rentals are undergraduates. I don’t know if Regents Park is one of the places students live, but Regents Park is surrounded now by newer, bigger highrises. That’s not where my kids lived, or who they hung out with, but they told me it existed, and I believe them.

By the way, I think it’s a very safe assumption the college is less wealthy today than it was in 2000-06. Chicago has significantly stepped up its efforts to recruit low-income students, both in terms of time and personnel devoted to it and very much in terms of available dollars. In 2005, Chicago was not remotely competitive with the Ivies or Stanford in terms of financial aid for good students from poor and working-class families. Now it is. That has to make a difference. Furthermore, Chicago’s “hipness” today reflects its mass-market appeal, not its appeal in the bastions of privilege. Chicago was always “hip” at Andover and Exeter and the like. That’s why my daughter’s actually very impressive 4th grade classroom partially reconstituted itself there. (On the other hand, I know two really, really wealthy kids who went there recently, and might not have chosen Chicago 15 years ago. But they were deeply intellectual kids who were not especially social and who rarely if ever showed the trappings of wealth. One is the grandchild of a long-time Princeton trustee, the other the child of parents with four Penn degrees between them.)

@marlowe1 What I was trying to say, honestly, was that the “kids from the upper strata” did not disproportionately dominate. In fact, it was probably the other way around, although because almost no one ever flashed wealth, you had to know people pretty well to know what “stratum” they came from. No one talked about it much, either. So it’s hard to tell in retrospect. Then, as now, I’m certain the median Yale student family by income was comfortably within the top quartile nationally, and maybe even in the top 10%, but that didn’t mean that the median kid felt wealthy at all. One of my frequent roommates came from a family with money, but he didn’t have any of it yet. He, like most of the rest of us, worked a part-time job to be able to afford beer and pizza. Another roommate came from real poverty, but he had essentially been kidnapped off the streets in Anacostia in 8th grade and sent to Groton. He was the one whose friends had parents you read about in the newspaper and hopped over to Switzerland for Christmas.

I’m trying to think of how to approach your question . . . OK, to take one example: Journalism was a big deal then – everybody wanted to be Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein – and my class was particularly rich in ambitious, quality journalists, including (off the top of my head): Jonathan Kaufman (who was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News our year), Marie Colvin, Jackson Diehl, Barbara Demick, Ruth Marcus, Abbe Smith (whose career has been more as a lawyer than as a journalist), MG Lord, Richard Brookhiser. I’m not sure about Kaufman, but I know all of the others were public school kids from basically middle-class – or upper-middle – backgrounds (in Lord’s case I think Catholic school).

Being a Whiffenpoof was about the coolest thing one could be. (The Whiffs were the elite male a cappella group consisting of seniors drawn from other singing groups.) I knew three of my year’s Whiffs pretty well. One was exactly who @marlowe1 would expect – the golden child of a well-known figure in New York publishing and social circles. He was the business manager. The other two, however were upper-middle-class kids from public schools, one from a not-that-fancy Chicago suburb, and the other from Western New York. The absolute star was an African-American kid on full scholarship.

97

Not being entirely impervious to cogent evidence from an impeccable source, I’m willing - well, about three-quarters willing - to concede @JHS 's assertions with respect to the egalitarian spirit at Yale. Still have a tincture of skepticism with respect to how well it would all work for the really poor or working-class kid who didn’t bring something really special to the table. Of course Yale would be a sufficiently strong magnet to capture the extremely exiguous (a word that old Yalie, William F. Buckley, was fond of) portion of that demographic having Yale-like qualities of charisma, brilliance or adornment in one of many different arenas. I’ll also accept that there would be a place for the more serious poor student sans charisma. But surely such a student would be happier at a place like Chicago in which his or her kind, whatever the demographic, sets the tone - both because there would be more such kindred spirits gathered around, more interaction and cross-fertilization, and because that’s the quality above all others that is honored there.

Don’t forget the testimony of the statistics above. Many a brainy kid has come to Chicago without ever having known a place where his or her bookish enthusiasms were other than lonely eccentricities, feeling half freakish for having such enthusiasms. That’s a kid who will feel at home at Chicago. And although the poor kids who bring these enthusiasms to Chicago are exceptional in their own right, like the poor Yale kids, the thing that has made them exceptional - a thirst for knowledge - is a thing more easily fed in high school with the most basic of resources - access to a library and an inspired teacher or two. They are not the rare birds they would need to be to flourish at Yale. There they might find a sub-group of the like-minded and that sub-group will have its place in the culture, but that’s not quite the same as being for once a member of the dominant tribe. That young would-be intellectual on arriving at Chicago must feel the same way a young musician from the prairies feels arriving at Juilliard. I have heard one such musician say exactly that: she had always felt lonely and freakish until the day she arrived at a place where everyone knew she was perfectly normal. She was happy for the first time in her life. Something like that is true at Chicago: the statistics are telling us so.

While admitting the various brilliances of a place like Yale, I want the pursuit of knowledge to be the main event in at least one American institution of higher learning. If that’s what fires you up, young man or woman, especially if you are first-generation, go to Chicago!

98

Three things:

First, my best friend in law school a quarter century ago was a Yale grad and we often compared college experiences. He had warm feelings about Yale, but he also described it as a place where the scions of wealth grouped together, and no matter what you did, you never, ever, really would be accepted by them. To him, it was the opposite of egalitarian. Interesting that @JHS had such a different experience. Perhaps it was specific to which of the six residential colleges you were in?

Second, the hanfdful of rich kids I knew at U of C who lived off campus all lived in the Windermere and a couple other fancy old buildings across from the Museum of Science and Industry.

Third - the fact that being an undergrad at the U of C was like being a grad student elsewhere was the single thing I hated most about the U of C. I am so glad it has changed, and I am so tired of all the navel-gazing and fretting about whether that change is a good thing.

99

@ThankYouforHelp I’ll be happy to admit that my experience at Yale was 40 years ago, and maybe things have changed. For that matter, they’ve probably changed two or three times! When I toured Yale with my daughter 14 years ago, our tour guide was a Pakistani engineering student – i.e., about as far from me and my spouse as one could imagine, and almost 30 years younger. Halfway through the tour, my daughter asked, “Did you and Mom write his script? He says exactly the same things about Yale as the two of you do.” My friends’ kids who go there do to. But I haven’t asked specifically about this issue.

@marlowe1 But . . . lots of people say exactly that about how they felt when they got to Yale (or other, similar places). That’s how I felt when I got to Yale, notwithstanding that I had never agonized much over feeling freakish. I remember standing in a line of kids outside the office of the DUS of the French Department, waiting to be interviewed for permission to skip introductory language. Every one of us had taken AP French Lit the year before. We had memorized the same sonnets, and were saying them together. Everyone wanted to study French literature. Some were girls! Really good looking girls! I had literally never met a girl who was interested in Baudelaire or Rimbaud before. I had never really had a peer in a literature class before. I couldn’t believe how great life was.

(I developed a huge crush on the woman next to me in line, who by the way had gone to Andover. She had no romantic interest in me but we wound up in a nice professional friendship and took about half of our courses together junior and senior years. She was probably the best literature student I knew. After graduation, she got a fellowship at Cambridge, then started an English PhD at Yale, but after a few years followed me to law school. She’s a fairly prominent right-wing intellectual now.)

100

Anyway – To take it back to the topic of this thread, I still think @marlowe1 is vastly overreading some interesting and enigmatic data. Of course there were and remain real differences in culture and style between Chicago and its coastal peers, but in my mind the similarities vastly outweigh the differences. There’s room for 4 or 5, or 9 or 10, or even 19 or 20 really great undergraduate educational institutions. Chicago is among them, however many you admit, but it’s among them largely because it’s great in the same way they are, and vice versa.