Had not heard Breck is closing. My older S was a four year Breck resident and Scavver. What a bummer, even though the place was charmingly decrepit.
Here is the link
http://chicagomaroon.com/2015/04/21/nine-houses-to-be-retired-after-opening-of-campus-north/
If you want to learn more than you ever thought possible about the history of undergraduate housing at Chicago, and to get a pretty clear indication of the mindset of its leaders, take a look at Dean Boyer’s paper from 2008: https://college.uchicago.edu/sites/college.uchicago.edu/files/attachments/Boyer_OccasionalPapers_V18.pdf
Feel free to sigh or snicker, as appropriate to your circumstances, when he brags about the college getting almost 13,000 applications and lowering its admission rate to 28%, and when he calls for a commitment to provide on- or near-campus university housing for 70% of undergraduates by the 2013-2014 academic year. (As of next fall, after North opens, achieving that level will still require building at least one more large dorm that has not yet even been proposed.)
Also, relevant to some of the things discussed in this thread, note that he describes the College eight years ago as having "approximately five thousand full-time undergraduate students, and he says the following:
I don’t understand how UChicago hopes to stop upperclassmen from moving off campus. As long as housing is so expensive and Hyde Park is so cheap, people will move off campus. It makes little sense for people to stay on housing - If you move off you get to live in an apartment that’s much nicer than any dorm, has lots of space, and probably has better access to downtown for much less. Plus, you never have to eat Aramark’s food.
Really, UChicago should start lobbying hard for the CTA Gold Line along the Metra Electric tracks. That might boost housing prices enough to bridge the gap between housing and living off campus.
Back in the 70s and 80s, the entering class numbered around 750. The College was a far more intimate place then. That was also before The College staring chasing application numbers. When my brother attended in the late 70s, The College consciously only sought applications from those who wanted the distinctive “Chicago” experience. Marketing was considered beneath them. All changed with the new President.
All that changed multiple presidents ago. Various decisions to expand the college were made long before the current administration began, and entering class sizes were already around 1,400 when he took office.
The 70s and 80s were far from normative. The university contracted its entering class sharply in 1969, and due to some severe budgetary problems – which were exacerbated by the small size of the college – it was unable to expand again for 15-20 years. That was a real low point for the College, when the University gave serious thought to dropping it altogether.
@JHS, really^^?
I attended in later 70s. During my 10 years on campus (College and beyond), never heard a word about dropping the College once. The UG population was about 2500 and we thought it was the perfect size. There were about 10,000 grad/prof students on campus so hard to believe that the College’s finances would have been that big a deal to the University, esp when tuition was $3,000/year when I started.
Now I find out it was ‘a real low point.’ Guess it wasn’t that obvious and glad I didn’t know that when I was there.
Read the Boyer history and the McKinsey study from the early oughts. Their view, at least, is that the sharp contraction of the College in the early 50s and again around 1970 threatened the viablity, not just of the College, but of the whole University. At the very least, it bore a lot of responsibility for the University’s failure to keep pace with its academic peers in the post-war period. Other elite private universities’ undergraduate colleges were their economic bedrock, operating at a profit and generating the bulk of their fundraising. That wasn’t happening at Chicago.
Certainly at least from the time Hannah Gray was appointed President, and probably before that, the commitment was being made to fix the college, not to kill it. But I think there was a consensus that it needed serious fixing, and the repair program is still going on today.
That’s interesting that the option of dropping the college altogether was at least discussed. It would have been an approach without a lot of examples out there and maybe that’s one reason things didn’t go in that direction.
While there are special purpose graduate only institutions, such as UC San Francisco and other freestanding medical/life sciences schools, and the same thing in law (a good number of which seem to be marginal law schools), I can’t readily think of a leading US school that has a comprehensive set of professional schools and PhD programs but no undergraduate program.
I think it would be difficult to maintain Ph.D. programs in most non-stem fields without TA positions.