@exlibris97 I was there at the same time, and I have to disagree with some of what you said. Yes, the College had some pluses back then, but honestly, it was kind of a miserable life. Very few 18 years olds were ready to live lives as though they were graduate students, even if they thought they would be when they applied. I entered the College with almost 800 other students in my class, and graduated with 500. The rest transferred away, flunked out, or got depressed and simply dropped out - including several of my best friends.
I don’t worry that the College has “lost” much of anything worth keeping. From what I can see, it is an infinitely better place to be now. The education is still stellar, but life there is no longer soul-crushing. The students are better adjusted, and are getting great outcomes.
I think there is a tremendous psychological incentive to romanticize the past. In this case, it isn’t warranted, IMO.
Even if it were still “soul-crushing”, we would have supported our daughter’s decision to attend. BTW, D tells me that about 1/3 of her house consists of “ghosts” - kids you just don’t see. So it’s quite possible that the average student is better adjusted simply because the student body is significantly larger and more diverse, and that the crushed souls are still tucked away in their rooms sweating over a particularly challenging course load. At one point these characters took up a good chunk of the undergraduate student body - now it’s more like a third.
@ThankYouforHelp Could you explain what “psychological incentive” I might have to romanticize Chicago? Then as now, it has flaws. I was just pointing out that it was a unique place in the 70s and 80s, just as it is today.
And having gone on to graduate school, I can attest that the College wasn’t like graduate school, then or now. We weren’t treated as graduate students and many students were well adjusted.
@JBStillFlying Like the term “ghosts”. From my recollection, even back in the “bad old days,” Chicago wasn’t impossibly difficult. You could still pull a B without killing yourself. And I also recall having a lot of fun and enjoying the City. And as the drinking age was “18” back then, I also have fond memories “elevator” parties at Woodward Court. Then again, I may be experiencing “false memories” as @ThankYouforHelp has suggested. Guess it is my “psychological need” to cover up some deep trauma from the days before Chicago became cool.
The style of the place once favored a theatrical sort of weltschmerz - or just call it world-class kvetching. Being merely cheerful and gracefully on top of things was frowned on and considered ivy-league or Big-Tennish. Being weighed down by the eternal tears of the human condition was the chic thing at the U of C. Accounts of the hardships of the place which characterize it as mere misery may be missing the point. Those who were attracted by these rigors saw them as “soul-making” rather than “soul-crushing” and, yes, got satisfaction out of that.
Serious study is hard. That’s a perennial truth. There’s also a perennial desire by American intellectuals in the making to escape middle-brow consumerist U.S. life. Of course there were always those among us who were not drinking that particular U of C brand of Kool-Aid. These dissidents seem to have grown in number over time and to have reached a critical mass some time in the eighties or nineties. However, as the exchange above between two alumni of that era seems to show, the debate was still going strong then - and no doubt still continues among the kids on today’s campus. Old tropes never completely die.
In many ways I do enjoy the 1980’s way of U of C. Oh, I don’t miss the crime in HP or older campus buildings. It was the self selected intellectual pursuit that was endearing to me.
Back then you did not go to U of C for prestige. My mom and dad had never heard of U of C and thought I went to a city community school. After one year at GSB I stopped explaining the difference between U of C and UIC to relatives. If you didn’t know us, I did not and still do not care to explain the difference.
Basically then you went to U of C in the discipline that was world famous among the people who knew. We joked about “blackened shoal” and openly disparaged case method. We knew our professors were in the forth front of the research and many had made systemic breakthroughs in their specialties. .
When I was in undergrad years, my main stream Ivy Keynesian professors harshly criticized the U of C Econ professors as lunatic ideologues and fire breathing purists. But when I finally sat in their classes, I found my U of C professors reasonable, persuasive and open to opposite opinion. They were not saints of course but they firmly believed in what they were teaching. That is what sold me to be a lifetime member of U of C fan club. The school believes in its methodology and is willing to pursue it regardless of sniping and snickering from the academic establishment.
Once again Marlowe sends us scurrying to the German - English or Latin - English or French - English dictionary. Today’s research involves “weltschmerz”. Thank you Marlowe.
And 85bears–I live in the “Mid-South”. Not too long ago a friend (who happens to be a podiatrist) asked me where my son goes to college. I said, “University of Chicago”. Her response was, “Oh! He goes to Art School!”.
So I guess UChicago still has a ways to go in the name recognition department.
@kaukauna I think U of C is famous enough now. Yes, your aunt or granduncle or neighbors in your subdivision may still confuse it with Art Institute or UIC. Yet when in the last 3 years the Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover have UChicago matriculations in similar number to HYPM and NYU & Georgetown, you know U of C reputation has soared among high school students.
@exlibris97 I’m sorry if I offended you - I did not mean to do so.
I guess what I was getting at is that many older U of C alums look back at their time at the College with a sort of “we got through all that back then, it was hard so it must have been good for us etc.” Kind of like how Marines talk about bonding in the rigors of boot camp.
And sure, it was great academically, no doubt about it. I had a friend visit me who was attending Georgetown at the time, and he was in awe at how much more intellectual (and difficult) the U of C was. Georgetown didn’t even compare.
Maybe life was better for you at Woodward Court. I was stuck out at the Shoreland, and it was an alienating experience.
I guess I’m just saying that we don’t need to fear the changes that have happened in the 15-20 years. I welcome them. My friends who dropped out of the college with depression in the 1980s certainly would have welcomed them. The biggest change, perhaps, is building nice large dorms close to campus, so that everyone can have more of the Woodward Court campus-centered experience rather than the Shoreland “what am I even doing here” experience. But so many other changes have come about that are so positive for the lives of the students, it’s almost impossible to count them all.
I guess I just don’t understand all the handwringing. And I’m not talking about you personally. Many alumni posters on here have expressed concerns that something is “being lost.” I just don’t see it. I just see something really good getting even better.
@ThankYouforHelp I’m certainly not advocating a return to the past. I think the expansion of the College is a good thing, and certainly the university is looking better now. The only issue I’ve had is the race for applications. A lot has been written about this, and Chicago’s alleged competition with Columbia for who has more applicants. I preferred the days when Chicago held such metrics in contempt, but then again I had Ted O’Neill as an adviser before he went into admissions and so am particularly partial to his way of thinking.
It is unfortunate that college admissions have become so competitive but the Ivy league was the first to understand d the marketing aspect of attracting the very best cohort. So now we are here.
Chicago students and fans are always whining and moaning about how few people out in the real world recognize the high quality of the University of Chicago, etc. Personally, I think that’s sort of misplaced, and that the People Who Matter recognize the high quality of the University of Chicago plenty. However, all of Chicago’s efforts to attract more applications do double duty as a marketing effort to promote awareness of the College’s quality. It’s directed at people who are paying attention, and it’s successful even if people don’t apply, as long as it gets them to notice that Chicago provides a first-rate education and is a very desirable college destination.
That’s an almost unqualified good thing. It wouldn’t be good if what they were marketing wasn’t what was best about the University of Chicago, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Just finish reading a lot of diss on U of C. Somehow I find it very funny. U of C is a totally acquired taste. Either you like it or you hate it. I don’t expect everyone to like it.
U of C is a “Duke with cold weather…” and “…with no Coach K”. That is amusing because I think The College at U of C is almost the polar opposite of Duke undergrad. And personally I would take Gene Fama over Coach K any day. Heck, I would take even Myron Scholes over Coach K for Scholes seminal paper’s impact over the derivative world. But that is my preference. Everyone’s utility curve is drawn differently.
However, on a deeper note I find myself stumped about this question: what is the difference between Duke and U of C? As the title of this thread states, U of C is more than just The College. Yes, The College is very different from Duke undergrad. But what about grad schools? What about professional schools? How different is, say, Duke Law vs UChicago Law? What about Fuqua vs Booth? Duke Medical vs Pritzker? I have no answer. Yet in the meantime I see everywhere on CC people are comparing schools as if they know every single department strength and weakness and somehow they have an aggregate measure to distill their knowledge down to a rating/ranking. From that they assert University X is a peer institution of University Y. That is laughably simplistic.
As a result, that leads to my biggest rants about ranking. Simply put: ranking is subjective/stupid and comparing schools according to ranking is an exercise in futility. In undergrad it may be true that some schools may be full of HYPS rejects (my lower Ivy alma mater is an example). But in grad and professional schools those are totally different matters.
In the 1980’s you really had to be a total moron (or prestige chaser) to apply to both HBS and GSB. You could graduate from HBS without knowing anything about price theory whereas in GSB you might graduate without using case method once. The two premier B-schools teaching philosophies were so different that it would be pointless to compare them. It was a total apple/ orange thing. While HBS might be ranked higher than GSB in the 1980’s, you would not find the GSB full of HBS rejects. Those people picking GSB had a totally different educational objective in mind than those applying for HBS. And you expect HBS and GSB faculty and students would have a very high opinion of each other? Ranking becomes or always has been a beauty contest or worse an Olympic ice skating competition. It is totally subjective and really doesn’t mean much.
OK for record: I DID apply both to GBS and HBS but was neither a moron nor a prestige chaser (well, no more than deciding to attend the best b-school in whatever city we ended up in ). My hubby was on the job market at the same time so we cast our nets wide so as to maximize the probability we’d both end up in or near the same city (I also had an app ready to go to MIT but didn’t need to send it). Also, our GSB class was filled with Kellogg rejects and those Kellogg kids were very rude to us at GSB but we cleaned up when it came to finance jobs so it was ok. In those days it was HBS, Wharton and Kellogg that ruled the roost. We were just happy to be ahead of Stanford in the rankings (which Dean Gould took as Gospel Truth in those days, I kid you not).
Also, the judged sports (figure skating, gymnastics, free-style ski jumping) always draw the biggest crowds and viewership. They might be subjective - even meaningless - but they are popular. And so are rankings.
^re: post #71, I won’t even dignify their remarks by responding to their comments about UChicago on that thread, although some comments about other colleges are funny. The weird thing is, we loved UChicago’s marketing materials, and we’re so glad they sent them.
People criticizing that the University of Chicago is gaming the rankings just makes me laugh, because it sounds like naiveté. Don’t many colleges do the same? (Seriously, people are saying that schools are deliberately lowering their acceptance rates to game the system when the acceptance rate, at least for usnews, is like 1.25% of the algorithm??)
Also, UChicago shows up pretty high in many rankings, not just one. If a college were to game a ranking, perhaps it would only be able to do so for one, and even gaming that ‘one’ ranking takes years of hard work, (read the Northeastern University article on how they gamed the usnews rankings) and after all of their years of hard work, NEU finally managed to show up on the usnews list, however, NEU’s ability to show up on another ranking is another story.
When an institution is consistently high or low in multiple rankings, then that’s telling, and UChicago consistently shows up on numerous rankings.
I’m not dissing schools that are ranked lower or not ranked at all, because everyone should have access to education, I’m just pointing out that it’s a joke when people say schools are gaming the rankings, as if there were only one list to game.
I worked for a big, prestige bank on Wall Street for seven months in 1976-77. (It began with a super-sweet paid internship arranged by my university, and continued with a regular old super-sweet paid summer job because I was being recruited.) Anyway, I didn’t meet a single person from the Chicago GSB, but I was exposed to a fairly broad sample of recent Wharton and HBS MBAs. It took no time at all to notice the difference. When a Harvard MBA faced a new problem, the first thing he (or she, but there was only one of those) did was to pull out an address book and try to figure out whom to call who might know something about it. The Wharton guys, by contrast, would whip out a pad of ledger paper and start drawing T-accounts that would build into an income statement and balance sheet. Their desks all had pencils, rulers, and calculators on them.
By the way, I would say that on average both methods were about equally successful. There were classes of problems where one was clearly better than the other, though. It was a good idea for the institution to have people from both schools sitting next to one another.
I wound up at some thread supposedly talking about which schools people didn’t like, and some of them were spewing out hate toward large segments of the population, passing off as ‘humorous.’ Funny thing is, some seemed more obsessed with UChicago than actual UChicago people. Some seemed so small minded, meeting a couple of students from a school, or reading a couple of threads on cc colored their entire view. Another funny thing is, someday, one of these ‘smart’ people from the university who actually put in the work will find a cure for cancer or something, or write a work of art, and they’ll all benefit from it. That’ll be humorous.
Obviously, UChicago doesn’t need defending because the reputation speaks for itself.
Anyway, some of you are thugs, and if you all went on that thread, we’ll all be kicked out, lol.
Those were mostly parents who have mentioned at different times that their child was rejected at UChicago. Let it go… it’s obvious what it is and not worth arguing about.
Dartmouth and Brown are up there with Princeton, around 70% undergrad. I believe Notre Dame and Cornell also have a fairly high proportion of undergrads among elite private universities.
). My hubby was on the job market at the same time so we cast our nets wide so as to maximize the probability we’d both end up in or near the same city (I also had an app ready to go to MIT but didn’t need to send it). Also, our GSB class was filled with Kellogg rejects and those Kellogg kids were very rude to us at GSB but we cleaned up when it came to finance jobs so it was ok. In those days it was HBS, Wharton and Kellogg that ruled the roost. We were just happy to be ahead of Stanford in the rankings (which Dean Gould took as Gospel Truth in those days, I kid you not).