<p>among the top ten schools, Caltech, MIT, and U Chnicago have unrestricted EA (no SCEA, no ED). we all know that schools with ED have much higher yield, and I assume SCEA also helps increase yield. So Chicago’s yield should be compared with MIT and CalTech. (Harvard and Princeton have only RD, but since they are in a league of their own, let’s consider them to be outliers).</p>
<p>I don’t have the most recent stats, but a couple of years ago, MIT’s yield was something like mid 60’s, and CalTech was high 30’s (like 37%?). MIT is MIT with international renown and prestige factor. If U Chicago can emerge as a liberal art version of MIT in a few years, yield of 50-55% is not such an outrageous long term goal, and that will be about the same yield (or close) as middle and lower Ivies with ED (Penn, Dart, Cornell, Brown, Columbia etc). If Chicago can achieve that without ED, that’s quite an accomplishment.</p>
<p>It would be great if Chicago could get its yield up to 50-55%, but I don’t see this happening until it improves its financial aid. At the moment, Chicago is using the College as a funding source for paying its professors extremely high amounts of money (unmatched by all but Columbia and Harvard last year), and this of course serves the dual purpose of keeping Chicago high in the rankings and getting the best of the best professors. This high pay can only be continued if it has the extra $50 million/year that is the difference between Chicago’s annual FA and say, Princeton’s. So until Chicago’s endowment starts really inflating, don’t look for its financial aid or yield to increase significantly (beyond, say, 45% for the latter).</p>
<p>That being said, with higher prestige comes a richer crowd of students. At the moment, Chicago’s students need significantly more financial aid than those at the Ivies. (I got this from Chicago’s annual endowment report.) As a result, it makes it look like Chicago has really bad aid since it can only distribute its aid so much among the students. If Chicago can get a richer student body (which I don’t think is desirable at all, actually, although it needs to be considered as a possible reality), its financial aid should get “better” even if it doesn’t increase the amount of annual aid it hands out.</p>
<p>Hey, phuriku, that’s a really interesting take I’ve never seen before. I couldn’t find it in the endowment report. Can you elaborate a little more, and/or provide a link or cite?</p>
<p>JHS: After skimming the endowment report, I couldn’t find it. I thought it was the endowment report, but it may have been somewhere else. In any case, I am sure that I saw it on an official UChicago financial aid report (or a periodic university update from Zimmer?), so I’ll dig around around this weekend.</p>