Yep!! Which is why I mentioned the importance of personal fit and unique ambitions.
That was my point in putting forth that alternative survey!
I think there is some truth to this, and those students are the ones that are least happy on campus.
There are some very good reasons to choose UChicago over other top schools. As has been said earlier, it is a peer of Columbia, and like Columbia it is a university in a large city with an academically intense Core. That gives it a distinctly different feel than Harvard or Yale, which can be as easy as a student wants to make it. Columbia was the top choice for my D at the beginning of senior year until she learned about its political leanings, and realized she much preferred UChicago’s commitment to freedom of expression. I would think that UChicago’s combination appeals to many students.
My feeling is that Nondorf’s value to UChicago has run its course. He certainly deserved credit for raising the profile, but IMO UChicago was served better when it proudly allowed only EA and RD, and still achieved over 60% yield. At least back then, the EA applicants were ones that had it as their first choice, rather than the best college they thought they could get into.
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So, if anybody makes a ranking of universities based on how much parents of its students care about rankings, is UChicago going to be ranked above its peers?
I wonder. Nondorf oversees both the entrance to and the exit from the College. Are the trustees not happy with the usual metrics (admit rate, yield, first year retention, time to graduation, exit plans - and, of course, revenue)? My impression is that these all seem to improve a bit every year. As long as faculty are still happy with the quality of student and the numbers keep increasing - the College is currently up to nearly 7,600, well over that 7,000 limit that Boyer shared a few years ago - Nondorf’s value might have some mileage left before crossing that finish line.
On a meta analysis level, Chicago is clearly one of the world’s truly great universities. There will be variability in any particular ranking/survey, however. I think the recent U.K. visa list of universities is a big step toward providing a meta view on which are the “best”.
You completely missed my joke.
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“Best” by what metric? For example, UCSD, Washington, and NYU appear on the UK list. But many typically more selective colleges like Brown and all LACs do not. So are you defining “best” as best in research, best PhD program in particular subjects, most well known outside of US? For which undergrad students are the colleges on the UK list “best”, if any?
If the goal was to make a list of “high potential individuals” based on only the name of their undergraduate degree, does the selection of colleges on the UK list make sense? Or perhaps more importantly does the idea of making a list of “high potential individuals” based on only the name of their undergraduate degree make sense? There are good reasons why the US and nearly every other country does not have such a system.
The UK list was a meta analysis of several global rankings, probably to account for some variability among individual surveys. The places you mention (Brown, etc) are not highly ranked on several surveys, in comparison to the ones on the meta UK list. Can you argue that these are not the most high-power universities in the world? The assumption then is that the best students gravitate towards the most prestigious universities in the world, no?
Yes, I got your joke. I was making a side point, though, that any individual ranking/survey is prone to error. So, a meta analysis approach of several rankings/surveys is probably better…
Not necessarily, and that’s where the UK plan to provide special benefits to graduates from a certain set of universities is flawed. Not that these aren’t top class schools - they certainly are. But I know plenty of kids who turned down some of these schools for financial reasons or personal reasons (like wanting to be near a sick parent). These latter group of equally well accomplished kids have gone to state schools and done wonderfully in their careers.
So the UK government’s prioritization of schools over individuals is flawed in my opinion.
I completely agree with you. Personally, I’m of the belief that the best kids (ie summa cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa/etc) at any institution are comparable to each other…
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And some of the places on the UK lists are not ranked well on several other surveys. For example, Washington is on the UK list, but Washington is not among the top 50 within US on USNWR. Different lists rank based on different criteria, so they get different results. The UK list seems more correlated with faculty research (without control for size), while USNWR seems more correlated with endowment per student (with control for size).
Absolutely. The list is not ranking on “high-power.”
The list is also not ranking on “most prestigious,” and a large portion of the best students are not focused on prestige as defined by position on website ranking lists. Ignoring that, do you think the average undergrad students at the not quite as selective colleges from the UK “high potential individual” ranking that I listed (UCSD, Washington, and NYU) are better than the average undergrad students at more selective colleges like Brown or very low acceptance rate LACs?
Maybe meta analysis is better, but most of the rankings use the same set of criteria.
My son was planning to apply to UChicago, but when he saw the essay prompt rolled his eyes and removed it from his list. So I think they picked the prompt correctly and filtered out all kids that don’t care about this pretentious stuff.
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Your son probably made the correct choice. The Uncommon Essay is only the first of many time-intensive writing assignments during the first two or so years at UChicago, so if someone doesn’t care for the expected length or the weird prompt or the inability to copy and paste from other college essays, they and the College may not be a good match.
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I am sure he made the right choice. As he said, four years among a crowd pretentious people is not fun. I agreed wholeheartedly.
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Or perhaps a better explanation is that the UK is relying on global ranking systems to award its HPI visas, since they are seeking individuals from all over the world. USNWR limits its rankings to US institutions.
UW is a powerhouse in CS, especially in AI (probably among the top 5 schools in the US in that area), so I think UK is targeting talents in certain specialties that it thinks may benefit its economy in the future (it doesn’t care about importing more English majors, for example).
It must have adjusted for size, or Caltech probably wouldn’t be on its list.
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The rankings are often completely different, regardless of US vs world. For example, looking at just the 3 world rankings linked in the UK post above, Washington’s rankings were as follows. 19th vs 85th is a significant difference.
Shanghai World Rankings – 19th
THE World Rankings – 29th
QS World University Rankings – 85th
USNWR often has even greater differences due to completely different formulas for “best” college, rather than one limiting to just US and the other looking all over the world. Examples of the highest weighted components of USNWR vs Shanghai are below. There is no overlap, and I don’t find it surprising that Washington does much better in one of theses formulas than the other.
USNWR Rankings Formula: National
- 20% – 5 = “Distinguished” / 1 = “Marginal” Survey
- 17.5% – Undergraduate Graduation Rate
- 10% – Spending Per Student
- 8% – Undergraduate Class Size
- 7% – Average Faculty Salary
- …
Shanghai Rankings Formula: World
- 22% – Historical Nobel Prizes Received by Faculty
- 22% – Faculty Papers Published in Nature & Science
- 22% – Faculty Science and Social Science Citation Index
- 22% – Faculty Highly Cited Researchers
- …
The UK list is simply a composite of multiple rankings, none of which emphasize a CS specialty or other more employable fields. It doesn’t matter whether Washington is a powerhouse in CS or not. What matters is how Washington does in the considered rankings, which emphasize faculty research, without controlling for size. Washington often does well in this type of measure.
Caltech has a high enough research output that they rank well, without controlling for size. For example, Caltech is 9th in the overall Shanghai rankings, but Shanghai also provides a per capita ranking that controls for size. In this per capita ranking, Caltech jumps from 9th to an extremely distant 1st. No other university in the world is anywhere close to Caltech in this ranking metric, when controlled for size.