<p>The U of C traditionally has had a much lower yield than the Ivy League schools. The usual explanation has been the poor quality of the outside-the-classroom experience at Chicago.
True enough.
But another factor is the high number of hooked applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown. The enrollment rate of these populations is quite high. High enrollment rates for the legacies, URMs, athletes, politicians’ kids, celebrities kids, etc. At the five schools mentioned, they ring the bell on some non-academic dimension that get them admitted. At the U of C (along with Johns Hopkins, Wash U, etc,) some applicants just aren’t very smart, and get admitted nonetheless. These form the 25th percentile folks on the numbers. Just dumb, as opposed to dumb and having mommy and daddy and some pretty good squash conditioning.</p>
<p>I just love pronouncements like this. I’m genuinely curious: what qualifies you to be an expert on this, danas? Are you a faculty member? (I haven’t taken the time to look at your previous posts.)</p>
<p>The students are much less interested in learning for learning’s sake? But much smarter than they used to be? I don’t buy it; it’s clearly based on your personal, entirely subjective impression, whoever you are. You couldn’t possibly know enough students over a long enough period to make such a judgment accurately. The average SAT scores of the entering class weren’t so different 35 years ago than they are now. (I still have a college guide from when I was a high school senior!) And there have always been professional types. After all, economics has long been the most popular major, and I don’t think they’ve ever all become academics!</p>
<p>And my son has found a remarkable number of kids interested in learning for learning’s sake. Quirky ones like he is, too!</p>
<p>PS: Yes, my son has told me he’s met some students he thinks really aren’t very bright, and he wonders how they got in. But, not many. And, who knows how accurate his perception is? I’ve met people who really didn’t come across as particularly smart or articulate when you met them, but turned out to be brilliant writers, or really good at some particular subject, or have other talents that just didn’t come across.</p>
<p>And if he is right, well, I assure you I met people when I was in college at Yale that I still think are some of the truly stupidest people I’ve ever met in my life. It happens everywhere.</p>
<p>It was my understanding that danas worked at the U of C in a non-faculty capacity, though I may be mistaken.</p>
<p>But I think it’s a bit pretentious to suggest that people at the 25th percentile or less at U of C, or Wash U, or JHU, or other selective schools are “dumb.” You know, someone’s got to be at the 25th percentile or less. I hear that at some schools, they’ve got a full one-quarter of the class falling in that range. I guess at the better schools, only one-tenth fall into the bottom 25th percentile. Maybe that’s the next metric to fold into USNWR.</p>
<p>I was a TA at Chicago. The undrgrads scared the hell out of the grad students. Chicago students that I had contact with, both in courses and laboratories, were extremely bright and very interested in learning for the sake of learning. This was in the 1980s.</p>
<p>OK, I’ve gone back and read enough of his or her posts (his, I’m guessing) to realize that he lives and works at the U of C. But at least from what I read, didn’t say he’s on the faculty.</p>
<p>I’m still skeptical, though. And I’m as uncomfortable as Pizzagirl is with making the kind of snap judgments that someone is dumb that I was happy to make when I was in college, and that my son sometimes makes. Although I think he’s much less judgmental than I was when I was that age. (Looking back, I shudder sometimes at the intellectual arrogance – and obnoxiousness – I sometimes displayed back then. Way worse than I do now.) </p>
<p>PS to Danas re one of his old posts: you don’t have to be home schooled to be incredibly well-read by the time you graduate from high school. And, yes, my son read Dos Passos in high school (as did I, for that matter – so it can’t be <em>that</em> unusual.) (Although Dos Passos wasn’t one of my son’s favorite authors in high school – I think Proust, Nabokov and Borges probably took that honor. Dickens? Overrated, sorry. My opinion, not my son’s. Too many cardboard characters, especially female characters.) </p>
<p>Now, I’ll admit that not too many kids read James T. Farrell anymore. I read the Studs Lonigan trilogy at a young age, and loved it, but it had long since fallen out of popularity even back then. I only read it because I found my father’s copy. And I still prefer Nelson Algren!</p>
<p>Fair enough DonnaL.
This is completely subjective on my part.
I TA’d in the 1990’s and it was pretty clear to me that the undergraduates were generally very likable but not particularly bright. Certainly not as smart as students in graduate school. None of the professors in my PhD program wanted to teach undergraduates, and they were not shy about telling us graduate students that. Even the professors who had a reputation of being student friendly wished they didn’t have to teach undergraduates. I personally liked many of these students. They tended to come from places like Gary and Racine, or the Southwest side (white working class) of Chicago. The raw material was there, but I’m guessing these are the people who have been cut out of the new admissions regime. Certainly by the numbers, they are not the folks who are being admitted today.
The undergraduates I work with today tend to come from the Northeast and are from wealthy families, and are much more career oriented than before.</p>
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<p>A grad student teaches the course on Middlemarch that my son is taking right now. He told me that the first couple of sessions, she seemed rather frightened of the class. But she’s more confident now, apparently.</p>
<p>A U of C faculty, who has been with the university for over 30 years both as a grad student and as a faculty, told me first hand that over last 20 years or so, the quality of the student did indeed go up significantly as the acceptance rate steadily fell. This had an effect of changing faculty perception of the students. Before, they did not consider the students as a whole not worthy of their attention and faculty attitudes at times were downright hostile to the undergrad students. These days, the faculty considers the undergrad students as their intellectual peers (young and inexperienced but worth the time and effort since they will mature into their peers later on), and this made a huge difference in the way they treat the students. The whole virtuous cycle is now established, and it made the faculty-student relationship very rewarding to both parties.</p>
<p>As I mentioned previously, my son tells me that best part of U Chicago for him is the intense one on one discussion he is having with his favorite faculty members during late night, wee hours of early morning, and dinner. He tells me he is immensely enjoying the intense learning experience just by talking with them. I am obviously grateful that such well established professors are spending time with a mere freshman to such an extent. Whatever it is, it’s working.</p>
<p>Yup, by the numbers, undergrads at the U of C test way better than 5 and 10 years ago.</p>
<p>Interesting, Danas. My son has met a <em>lot</em> of kids from working-class families, or at least families that aren’t remotely wealthy. And he’s been very happy with the geographical diversity, especially the chance to make friends with so many kids from the Midwest, and the fact that there <em>aren’t</em> an overwhelming number of Northeasterners. I have no idea what field of study the undergraduates you work with tend to be in, but my son and most of his friends seem to be humanities majors, history majors, some in political science, etc. Not economics, not math, not the physical sciences.</p>
<p>And he’s found the faculty to be very friendly – not anything like high school, where he always made friends with teachers, but he certainly doesn’t get the impression that they don’t enjoy teaching undergraduates. Obviously, he likes the very small classes the best for that, and he has a couple this term that have a dozen or fewer students.</p>
<p>I’m very happy for your son, DonnaL. I’m sure what you are reporting is correct.</p>
<p>6 years ago, in 2003, when the acceptance rate was 44%, the middle 50% SAT range was 1300-1490. Would you really say that the numbers are “way” better than that now?</p>
<p>And 38 years ago, the average SAT score was a 1370. (Obviously, that’s before the re-centering; I don’t know what the equivalent would be now.)</p>
<p>No matter how we parse the numbers, undergraduates are much smarter than they were ten years ago. An admissions officer friend of mine says they are are still admitting people they wished they didn’t have to, and we are not talking about the hooked. A small percentage at the U of C are the Eastern elites on that score.</p>
<p>“Admitting people they wished they didn’t have to”? Can you explain this further? Who’s putting pressure on whom to do what?</p>
<p>I can’t answer that question. That is what the admissions officer said to me. Of course, any school that rejects more than it admits ought to be regarded as selective.
Just as an anecdote, I work with one Val from Minnesota who seems remarkably dense to me.
An upper income district to boot. But not so smart. I am ready to believe that I work in such an uncommon environment that either she or I don’t get it. But I seriously doubt the problem is with me.</p>
<p>Of course, it’s possible for smart people to appear dumb. Some acquaintances spent time working with Elizabeth Drew, who used to cover politics for The New Yorker. They said that in person she came across as really thick and slow. You had to read her writing to realize how intelligent she was. Part of that was a journalistic act – like Colombo, playing dumb so people would explain things. But part of it was a legitimate personality feature: She needed time and the discipline of writing to process things, and she wasn’t quick and facile on her feet. But that’s a long way from being dumb.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think a big asterisk has to be put on all of these statements, with a note to the effect that we are exaggerating small differences to identify their relative change over time. I knew or have since met several Chicago undergraduates from 10-12 years ago. They are very smart, very intellectual people. It is true that, with one exception, they were not the glossy, do-everything “leaders” one expects to find at Harvard. (The one exception is a woman from southern Minnesota whose older, much quirkier brother had preceded her at Chicago. I think she stood out at the time in a way she would not now.) There’s little question that the current set of undergraduates at Chicago resembles the undergraduates at HYP more than would have been true a decade ago, but that’s the case at other colleges as well, including Stanford, Brown, Duke, Northwestern, and WashU. The ones at Chicago are still there – and not at another college – primarily because of their learning-for-learning’s-sake inclinations.</p>
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<p>Argh… I wish that you had not included this statement. It comes across as “today’s undergrads at Chicago resemble those at other colleges in being more pre-professional; the ones at Chicago are still there because of their learning for learning’s sake attitude.”
It seems to imply that the latter kind of students cannot be found elsewhere.
As the parent of a student who has always seen learning as its own reward, I sometimes wish he was more career-oriented. Students like him can be found at lots of other schools.</p>
<p>uff, marite, my posts are way too long already, and I am almost knee-jerk in insisting that students at places like Harvard and Yale (and others) are full of love of learning, etc. Of course I didn’t mean that such students couldn’t be found elsewhere – even at Duke! And of course I am sure there are some students at Chicago who really wish they were at Duke. What I meant was that, when people who have a choice among competitive colleges choose Chicago, it’s often because they have that value set, which means that it’s overrepresented there compared to, say, Duke, some of whose students are choosing to go there because of its basketball teams and fraternities.</p>
<p>And anyway, if we are talking about HYP, I still haven’t seen any indication that Chicago wins more than a trivial number of head-to-head admissions battles. A kid could be the most Chicago-type kid in the world, but if Harvard accepted him he’s almost certainly at Harvard, or maybe Yale. Not Chicago.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that of my two kids, the one I saw as the most likely Chicago “type” did not apply there. The one who did apply there (and most likely would have gotten off the waitlist) was less “life of the mind” type. The Chicago location, and more specifically the university’s location, was a big reason he decided not to stay on the waitlist.
S2 has a friend who went to Duke. Of all his friends–all nerds–, he was the life and soul of any party, such as they were. The one most like him? he went to Chicago. :)</p>
<p>Grad students (incl. TAs) frequently think undergrads are sub-par. My supposedly tolerant Div School grad student daughter thinks the Vandy undergrads are a bunch of ding-bats. Her bff was an Indiana U music grad student TA and felt the same way about the Indiana music undergrads. I think it goes with the territory.
When I was a law student at Chicago in the 70s I was terrified by the undergrads. They were so friggin’ smart (and odd)!! I doubt that they all got dumb by the 90s.</p>