I must admit I’m fascinated by the one that’s most venemous - she must search for threads with any mention of the term “Chicago” just so she can get in a jab about the school and students. Her daughter is on the wait list. I’m crossing my fingers that if UChicago takes only one child off the wait list, it’s this child because it would be very interesting to see how that plays out. Will this mom suddenly feel the love? Will she continue to drip poison every time the college is mentioned? Something in between? How will the daughter handle this particular minefield? Inquiring minds want to know.
I hope her kid is accepted and enrolls and I hope the mom continues to critique the school harshly. She wouldn’t be the “negative” voice on the forum - who wants the rah-rah echo chamber that defines so many other school threads?
This is totally anecdotal and by no means scientific: I have heard more than one case that U of C takes not the highest stat in the class but the smartest albeit eccentric/quirky one. I can see from the parent’s perspective this rejection particularly stings because they feel U of C accept a kid with worse stat but their own kid has to suffer the humiliation of losing to an “inferior” kid. However, from the cases I know about the rejected students do not feel bitter because they recognize the admitted classmates are equally smart as (if not superior to) them but the admitted students just have worse stat.
I think by now all the parents for kids at the college admission game should ( I repeat SHOULD) realize just because their kids having higher stat in no way implies that they have better chance of admission than their classmates with slightly worse stat. AO is looking for future potential of the admission candidates and NOT just the test scores and GPA. For Nondorf and his team, my guess will be they are looking for an intellectual and bright kid who is willing to put in the hard work to understand much deeper about the subject matter. The journey may be tortuous on the way but in the end the U of C college students would feel more empowered and enlightened than going to many other schools they could have gone to.
P.S. I know some current college students may strongly object to the above statement. But sometimes you have to wait 10 to 20 years after graduation before you can look back and assess the impact of an U of C education on you. Please listen to David Brooks opening comments in the recent IOP lecture.
All that obnoxious criticism of the U of C on that other thread seemed to me to constitute a sort of backhanded recognition of the place’s surging popularity. The commenters couldn’t decide whether what they didn’t like about the school was that it was so hard and full of grinds or that it was really just a place like most others - “Duke with bad weather”.
Anti-intellectualism is never very far below the surface in American society (and is not exclusive to the poor and uneducated). Once upon a time Chicago was only known to really serious students. Now it’s known to a wide range of the middle and upper-middle class. What they think they know about it is that it’s a school with pretensions to “intellectualism”, or perhaps pseudo-intellectualism, as many of them would see it. Hence the desire to take down that pretension by denying that the popularity is really genuine (as opposed to being an artifact of gaming the admissions system or all those glossy mailings) or by dismissing its students as grinders who really aren’t as smart and certainly not as classy as they think they are. Drill down a bit and you find that these detractors are either incapable of understanding or are highly threatened by any notion of serious study as a source of pleasure and excitement. It’s not a bad thing that Chicago is seen in a negative way by so many and evokes that particular hostility. I would contend that schools are like people - their qualities are known as much from those who dislike them as from those who love them. Granted that love of an institution - whatever it might be of a person - ought not to be unconditional or free from well-informed criticism.