U Chicago potentially will be the #1 most difficult school for admission this year

@JBStillFlying I’m not talking about my child. He got into one of his top two choices and it was obvious he wouldn’t do ED2.

@yucca10 sorry - should have been more generic. Never meant to imply it was your child! Not my child either LOL. Someone else’s child!

Nondorf confirmed, to the Wash Post*, that Chicago received about 15,000 early apps (a 10% increase from last year). Last year, then, the school received around 13500 early apps, and around 19k RD apps - for a total of around 33k apps. The College accepted around 2300 students. (7.2% accept rate overall.)

Last year, Stanford, on the other hand, received around 47k apps, and accepted around 2k students. (~4.4% accept rate overall.)

For Chicago to become the #1 most selective school in the country, as @BrianBoiler says could “potentially” happen, there would need to be a 80% spike in RD applications, and a total application volume of around 45k-50k apps (around a 40% overall increase from last year).

Does anyone actually think Chicago’s total app volume will increase by 40% in one year?

I see no potential for Chicago to be the most selective in the country this year.

If Chicago received 10% more applications this year, around 36k total, with the entire class accepted through ED, around 1800, they still would not achieve the “honor” of being the most selective. Highest yield maybe…

If early apps are 15,000 and they keep the same number of regular apps at 19,000 that’s 34,000 apps. They will admit at least 100 fewer students this time so 2200 / 34,000 = 6.5% admit rate. Not the lowest, but yet another jump from the prior year . . . Yield will be 1700/2200 = 77%

Edit to add: those are conservative estimates. Admit rate could be lower and yield higher.

At some point trying to lower the acceptance rate becomes futile as more and more applicants start considering applying a waste of time and money. That point may be set at a different level for each college, but surely nobody wants to reach there. Didn’t Stanford announce that they would no longer publicize their acceptance rate?

I don’t know if I claimed that? I have claimed the UChicago could very well be the first University to have a full cost of admission break the $100k/year threshold. Especially after the Empower Initiative came to be.

I personally feel that average admit rates are quite useless as a measure because they don’t really add any explanatory power for the applicant in terms of better estimating their chances. Your admit rate is different if you are a recruited athlete, if you are a URM, a first gen applicant, an unhooked candidate, if you apply ED, if you are applying from sparse country, if you are underrepresented in a major where you can show genuine interest, a legacy, a rich applicant etc etc. Each of these admit rates feeds into the average admit rate.

So what does knowing that Stanford has an admit rate of 4% vs WashU of 15% really tell you? Pretty much nothing because schools almost never break down admit rates for different cohorts at such a granular level

“So what does knowing that Stanford has an admit rate of 4% vs WashU of 15% really tell you? Pretty much nothing because schools almost never break down admit rates for different cohorts at such a granular level”

It might not tell you much if you are applying as a recruited athlete or a development admit, but if you are an unhooked applicant with top notch qualifications, it tells you that you have a much better chance of getting into WashU than Stanford. My own opinion is that the true admission rate for unhooked kids at tippy top schools like Stanford and Harvard has gotten so ridiculously low that applying is an exercise in futility unless you have some enormous spike.

@TheBigChef I feel that WashU’s 15% accept rate hides what the real rate is for an unhooked applicant. It could be quite low, very likely in the 2% to 4% range if applying in the RD round. Would that be that much different from Stanford’s low rate for an unhooked applicant in its RD round? The difference seems to be minimal.

My point is that we all know the Ivy Plus schools are tough to get into for most unhooked applicants, but even when you go to the next range of schools, the average admit rate might look like it is 20% or so, but the “real admit rate” for an unhooked candidate applying in RD round might be dismally low also. These schools may just look somewhat easier to get into on paper because their average admit rates hide gargantuan differences in admit rates for different applicant pools.

surelyhuman - no question that Wash U’s true admit rate for unhooked applicants is substantially lower than 15%, bujt I doubt it goes anywhere near as low as the true admit rate for unhooked Stanford applicants, which is perilously close to 0%. I also think that the “next range of schools” (such as Wash U, Tufts, Georgetown, CMU, Michigan OOS, UVA OOS, Wesleyan etc …) should be treated as reach schools for unhooked kids no matter what kind of stats they have. However, at my kid’s HS at least, there is a real difference between these two classes of schools. High stat kids still get into the next range of schools, but the door has largely been closed on Ivy plus except for a Cornell acceptance here and there, and Brown, Penn, or Dartmouth once in a while. Once you start talking about Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard, forget about it.

While the horse race aspect of college admissions is no doubt silly and meaningless, it is still fun. So with that in mind: Let’s be honest, U Chicago selectivity is not in the same league as HPYSM. If it were, then it wouldn’t have needed to switch from EA to ED. End of story. As for comparisons of SATs, there is a simple enough reason for U Chicago’s higher range: other than MIT (which has similar total scores but weighted toward math), HPYS are all Division 1 for sports. Recruited Division 1 athletes pull down the average SAT, but have no influence on selectivity broadly other than a reduction in the number of available spots for non-athletes.

@lostaccount :about this, “But wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way to do so without attraction the 15000 (at least) applications for whom Chicago would make no sense at all?”

I think that should be the point of a targeted marketing spent on flyers, postcards and what not. The message should be" “We know your GPA and SATs are good enough, do you enjoy these things that we have lots and lost of? Oh, and these are our quirks, and they are sorta, non-negotiable-ish…”

It would be nice not to have a high acceptance rate… and yet have the highest yield, especially in RD. That would mean the College is attracting and accepting applicants who would thrive at the school.

@FStratford UChicago can’t have high yield rates unless it has multiple rounds of ED. I was speaking with fellow alumni who are now parents of teenagers 2 weeks ago in New York and they claimed the quality of students being accepted to UChicago, Duke and Penn has gone done dramatically – students who normally are reaches at places like Rice and Cornell are gaining entry (a significant number through the waitlist). Of course, my sample is limited to just NYC private schools. On the other hand, in this past application cycle Washington, D.C. area schools like Georgetown (and Johns Hopkins) are getting a lot of interest possibly due to Amazon and the potential for major tech hubs springing up all along the east coast (especially in D.C. and NY).

UChicago is a great school, but I simply don’t see it attracting the caliber of students users on this forum so dearly want it to attract. Comparing it to Stanford (which in most people’s opinions would be blasphemy) is inherently flawed because the attraction of Stanford is tech, weather and athletics – these are all major weaknesses for UChicago. This is only going to be exacerbated by the fact that over the next few decades SF Bay and NYC will have a duopoly over tech talent. Schools like NYU and Cornell in the NYC area and in the D.C. area Georgetown and JHU (already big competitors) could potentially become UChicago’s main competitors. Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Penn (Wharton and CAS)? Forget about it.

@EliteCulture331 - you say the quality of students accepted to UPenn has “gone down dramatically,” but then, later in the thread, you group Penn with Princeton, Columbia, and Yale.

I don’t get it.

@Cue7 I’m referring to the long term in the 2nd paragraph – a decade or so into the future. I have no clue why Penn CAS would suddenly see a drop in a quality – Trump? Losing a larger number of cross admit battles to Columbia or some other Ivy?

Also the conversation was really about UChicago, but they additionally mentioned Duke and UPenn. I’m not sure if they meant to say that Duke and UPenn admissions was suffering to the same extent. My theory is that UChicago is accepting more students from higher brand schools acknowledging that they may take a hit when it comes to student quality. Additionally, Chicago is not New York or the Northeastern megalopolis. Location, Location, Location as they say.

@EliteCulture331 - so you’re saying that right now, the quality of admitted students to penn has gone down dramatically, but in ten years, they will be grouped with princeton, etc.? I don’t get that. What would change in 10 years?

@EliteCulture331 It’s really weird that you base your assessment on what a few people tell you at a cocktail party. All the stats show exactly the opposite. The average SAT/ACT scores today is top five in the nation, maybe top 2.

In fact your whole post is based on conjecture and opinion. You start your post with a declarative statement as if it is fact. Then you don’t back it up at all. There are many elite universities with multiple ED rounds that aren’t within 20 points of yield of Chicago.

I think what UChicago does have that the Universities you mention do not have is share of voice in the public right now. It will be interesting what their next move is, but in the last 4 years they grabbed the front of the PR with the “Letter on Open Discourse” and then last year by going test optional. Scoff if you want, but I don’t see much coming from Ye Olde Gaurde at all.

Now the funny thing about it is I really don’t think the administration has a scoreboard running saying “hey we just passed Cornell, we just passed Dartmouth, we just passed Hopkins.” I really believe they are making their shifts to attract the best UChicago students that they can get.

Well I would imagine that Philly will benefit from New York’s ascendancy to Silicon Valley 2.0. Wharton’s popularity is due in part to its proximity to New York, no?