Chicago and Caltech have the highest average SAT scores in the country… there are many reasons for that but being in the same league as Caltech… in terms of SATS is telling.
times are changing… and I suspect U of Chicago is going to get a lot stronger in terms of cross admits with the other schools esp with Yale and Princeton.
It’s not @Cue7 who holds up Harvard and Stanford as idols. I think he’s solidly in the camp of those who want Chicago to be different, not their pale imitation. What he has done over the years is to critique and to deflate triumphalist claims by Chicago boosters, to point out legitimate problems that confront Chicago, and to challenge assertions that peer colleges (especially Penn, with which he is also very familiar) are somehow clearly inferior in every respect.
@DeepBlue86 : I think UChicago has been a top destination for students at leading prep schools for a long time. The difference in recent years is that it’s no longer a secret club for students at leading prep schools. Students at regular public schools outside Chicagoland have heard of it, too.
At the nationally well-known private day school my kids attended for many years, as of 2003 Chicago was ranked third as a destination for its graduates over the previous decade, behind only Penn (which generally got 10-15% of the graduating class, including many legacies and many facbrats, or both) and Harvard. My daughter’s fourth-grade classroom there had 24 kids (it was a 4-5, 12 of each), and six of them wound up going to college at the University of Chicago. It might even have been seven, but one woman chose Vassar at the last minute. (I don’t know where everyone else went, but three went to Yale, two to Stanford, at least four to Penn, and at least one each to Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Swarthmore, and Oberlin. It was a good class.) My kids’ classmates at Chicago, going back more than a decade, now, included other kids from academically-oriented private schools here, and similar kids from schools in New York, Washington, and Boston, plus lots of kids from brand-name boarding schools.
@sbballer - SAT averages are a complete red herring. Wash U and Vanderbilt have higher SAT averages than Stanford, Dartmouth, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, etc. etc. Wash U and Vanderbilt are probably NOT winning many cross-admits with these other schools. No one really talks about Wash U and Vandy having “meteoric rises” either (although there is some perceived momentum at Vandy - not just partly due to moving from #24 to #15 in USNWR).
Many schools (Chicago included) can engineer high SAT averages because there are a lot of high scorers squeezed out of HYPS et. al., and because schools can throw merit aid at high scorers. Chicago, Vandy, and Wash U are known for using merit aid for this reason - and guess what? They are all in the top ten for SAT averages.
Moral of the story: don’t rely on SAT averages to serve as a proxy for school standing.
Also, @marlowe1 - thank you for such a thoughtful and gently probing post! While I don’t remember if you’re a Chicago alum or not, your discourse brings back vividly one of my fondest Chicago memories: noting that I was often the dumbest person in the room, but appreciating all the intellect around me. I hope someday my writing, references, and strength of expression can match half of your own.
Re your question about what I “want” Chicago to be… I’ve given this a lot of thought, and what I want aligns with what the admin (and probably most alums and many students) want. Here it is:
For the University of Chicago to have a Chicago-style education/approach AND a Harvard-like brand/impact.
Let me provide context. Like many in my cohort in the 90s, I was a Harvard-reject. Harvard was my dream school. I knew about Chicago in HS, and I liked its academic strength, but I went mainly because it was the “best” school that accepted me. Chicago provided an excellent education, and I appreciated it, but, as @ThankYouforHelp notes, other parts of it sucked. I had definite Harvard envy, but I do not think I was alone in that. The school itself had considerable envy, and I think still does (whether or not students/faculty acknowledge it, I think most admin conversations about institutional direction use Harvard as a key comparator). I marveled at Harvard’s success as an institution, and I still do. At the same time, I reveled in my Chicago education - I think it’s the very best around.
That context reveals my tension with my alma mater.
The admin, I think, is trying to keep Chicago education while creating a more Harvard-like brand. I contest, though, how they go about this sometimes, because it reflects my own personal tension, and my own beliefs in institutional direction to reach the goal. So, I contested the construction of the new North dorm because I wanted more Harvard or Yale like (e.g. a stately or gothic style building that could serve as a college house) residences. I disputed the ED switch because it looks cowardly, is applicant un-friendly, and has demonstrable disadvantages to the applicant pool. At the same time, I want more power, privilege, and wealth to take root at Chicago. I decry frats while also hoping that preppy/wealthy kids find a place at Chicago for the long-term benefit (read; donations) of the school. I shrug at UChicago quirk because I want it replaced with UChicago power - graduating soon-to-be titans of industry who have fond memories of their alma mater. Institutionally, that’s a good thing. If we had less quirk and more Olympian rowers, I’d love that - as long as they exhibited seriousness and dedication to the education. And I think you can have that, and I wish Chicago would explore that.
This tension, then, should hopefully make more sense of my posts. This tension - I think - also makes the most sense of admin decisions over the past decade. I think we (the admin and I) actually want to get to the same place. We just dispute how to get there.
(I also worry if it’s too little too late - after the institutional harm inflicted on the place three generations ago by wayward admin decisions.)
do you also think Caltech is engineering high SAT scores?
I don’t think so.
U of Chicago is getting more selective and admitting stronger students now… which I doubt they would have been able to engineer 10 years ago even if they wanted to.
Your silly point about Caltech aside (of course the technical schools have high SAT-scoring classes - it’s germane to their admissions process, so they have high SAT scorers. They need students with lots of intellectual horsepower, and care less about other hooks. The admissions model for liberal arts Us is different - it’s why Stanford has a lower SAT average than Vandy).
Before getting to my main point - what do you think about Vandy and Wash U having higher SAT averages than Stanford and Columbia? Is it just that Vandy and Wash U are more popular now than S and CU?
Oh, and Caltech, MIT (and the ivies etc.) don’t have merit aid - for pete’s sake! So it’s much harder to engineer high SATs if you don’t have money to throw around.
Main point: I don’t contest that the College has improved. BUT, I think the root of the hype can be traced back to USNWR and Nondorf application-inflation/optics.
Look, Wash U’s average SATs have improved to top 8 in the nation, it’s more selective now than it was 10 years ago, and it’s got a great campus plan that’s improving the educational mission. It’s dropped from a high of #9 in USNWR to #19, though. So, how much have people been talking about Wash U’s “rise” recently?
I don’t doubt Chicago’s college improvement. There’s been real change, for the good. But the rampant cheerleading stems from USNWR and Nondorf’s admissions games. Another admissions dean probably could’ve gotten us a top 5 SAT average, and a very selective college, but if we were #17 in USNWR, no one would talk about a meteoric rise - just like no one is talking about Wash U’s meteoric rise. Chicago’s USNWR’s rise, and Nondorf inflating the numbers to make our selectivity look more like Princeton and less like Cornell, though, gloss it up.
(To wit - we are certainly more selective than we were in the past, but shaving the final few percentage points off the admit rate is a Nondorf move. We’d be just as good if we had a 15% accept rate/50% yield, but the optics wouldn’t look as good, and we wouldn’t be talking about a “meteoric rise.” Nondorf’s games allow us to get to 8% accept/70% yield, but shaving those percentage points is just that - games.)
It seems a bit hard to beat up those who are crowing about the U. of C.'s new-found pre-eminence in such things as SAT scores and selectivity. Those very stats were used in prior years by ivy-league triumphalists to make the case that Chicago was hopelessly second-rate. Some here may be familiar with a previously very popular college discussion board run by Princeton Review. Omnipresent on that board was a Harvard alumnus who was forever denigrating Chicago for its low stats. He went so far as to say that the real reason Chicago would never rise is that its students, despite their intellectual pretensions, were simply not smart enough - as demonstrated by the stats. Someone else chimed in on one occasion to say, “I noticed as I walked around the campus that the students just didn’t LOOK as smart as Harvard students.” Now that the stats have moved up and Chicago students apparently LOOK a bit smarter I don’t mind seeing Chicago proponents dish out the new stats to their old foes.
It also seems overdone to attribute the College’s quite obvious increase in popularity to gaming by an all-powerful wizard called Nondorf. That has the feel of conspiracy and paranoia written all over it. To take one instance: there may be very good reasons for the institution of ED which have nothing to do with gamesmanship and/or snagging rich kids and everything to do with preservation of the principle of self-selection. That’s an old debate, which we can have without alleging bad faith.
@Cue7 has given me what I asked for - a full statement of his idea of what the College could be. I appreciate his doing that as well as the unwarrantably generous words preceding it. His vision is not so far different in many ways from my own. Indeed, I think almost everyone on this board wants to see the intellectual side of the old Chicago continue with a few (or in some cases, many) improvements in less essential matters. However, any thought of modeling any aspect of Chicago on Harvard will forever stick in my craw. I wouldn’t even like it if the Chicago “brand” became pre-eminent in the way of Harvard’s. I certainly wouldn’t want to see the other aspects of Harvard campus culture - including the notorious failure of Harvard students to show up for class (vide Steven Pinker) - come to Chicago. Cue believes we can somehow have the best of both worlds - the highly intellectual culture of Chicago together with the wealth, glitz, sportiness and snobbery of Harvard. Sorry, but I don’t think so. We’re living in a fallen world where choices must be made and not everything is possible. Perhaps at Chicago the world divides between those who were rejected by Harvard and those who never wanted to go there in the first place. My fervent desire is that whatever proportion once existed between those groups will improve substantially in favor of the second one.
To be frank, I am only half in love with the amenities that have come to the campus and student life in recent years. For the time being a commitment to the old Chicago values still remains, packaged in a less anhedonic wrapper. However, the situation bears watching as time goes by. Traditions can erode. The pleasure principle in its full extension is not reconcilable with the sterner tests of mind and character that a traditional Chicago education entails. The question for all of us Chicago well-wishers here is where to find the balance.
Here is a Harvard alumnus who is exceptionally impressed with UChicago College’s rise. Except for Medical subjects , UChicago is an absolute peer and has done this with much less money. I am less impressed with the verbose carping about the University from its own alums and their bizarre dedication to past visions of a morose ascetic experience in a Sparta like-intellectual monastery. Wake up and smell the Humus. This no longer works in a global educational market place with this generation. Also, I hope that the new UChicago will instill much needed humor in its alums, which is quite needed as evident by some posters here.
Stanford’s lower SAT score has more to do with the fact Stanford has the most dominant and successful athletic program in the country with a student body less than a quarter of its athletic peers… and that’s been true the past 23 years.
point being… .Chicago may be gaming… as every school does.
HYP admits over half their admitting class EA to boost yield. Princeton is now going on a huge marketing push. Harvard has been using paid advertising on FB to boost it’s applicant numbers… counts incomplete apps in its numbers. Yale apparently doesn’t.
every school games big time… don’t kid yourself.
U of Chicago is doing it better now… and getting better students… the second highest SAT scores in the country after Caltech are proof positive… and Princeton is following Chicago’s lead to bring its app numbers up.
As usual, you’re right, @JHS - certainly the greatest rise in popularity for UChicago in recent years has been outside the prep schools, which knew about UChicago all along. Still, these days it feels like there’s an understanding that if you’re a high-stats prospective full payer at a school that has a good relationship with UChicago and you’re willing to commit ED, you’ve got - relatively speaking, of course, given the very low admit rate overall - a good shot, and students at the schools I know best seem to be responding accordingly.
@sbballer: I wonder where you’re getting your information, because I haven’t found a source for average SATs of most of the tippy-top schools and I’m not sure schools generally disclose this, even though you can occasionally find some score bands in a school’s CDS. As far as I can tell, the schools generally disclose middle 50% bands - and when you look at those, pretty much every school in this group starts at or near 1400 and ends at or near 1600 (or 2100-2400 on the previous three-section scale), from what I can tell - not enough dispersion/information there to draw meaningful inferences, in my opinion.
Regarding cross-admits, as I’ve said elsewhere, evidence would suggest that among comparable schools geographic pull is the dominant factor. The information disclosed by the various schools isn’t exactly comparable, so these are approximations, but at each of HYP, some 35%-40% of freshmen are from the Mid-Atlantic states and New England, around 10% are from the Midwest and around 15% are from western states. At UChicago, the largest cohort, 27%, is from the home region of the Midwest; 24% is from Mid-Atlantic/New England and 16% from western states. I can’t find such granular data for Stanford, but their CDS says that 58% of freshmen are from out of state (i.e., 42% are Californian).
So where you’re from seems to say a lot about where you choose to go, and I would infer that the best kids from the Northeast are more likely to choose HYP if cross-admitted to Stanford, just as the best Californians are more likely to choose Stanford over HYP, all things equal. If Stanford’s winning a few more cross-admits from Harvard these days, it’s probably because a few more kids from east of the Mississippi are choosing to cross the country than would have been the case in the past, and fewer Californians feel they should cross the country to attend Harvard if they can go to Stanford.
Sources of info here:
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/class_profile_2020_8-29.pdf
https://admission.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/map-full2020.pdf
https://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/pdf/stanford_cds_2016.pdf
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2020
cue posted the SAT averages above.
No surprise Caltech is the top dog here… and has been for as long as I can remember.
Chicago at 2 I bet is a rather recent development.
@sbballer - every school games admissions, but some are bigger players than others. I’d call Chicago’s EA/ED/EDII/RD system the biggest gaming of the system, and that’s saying something - especially for a school that, eight years ago, really didn’t game the system at all.
UChicago is indeed doing better now - but isn’t some of that bump artificial? Nondorf’s gaming has allowed Chicago to gloss up its numbers artificially. Maybe without him, we’d have 25k apps instead of 30k, and a top 4 SAT average instead of top 2, but it wouldn’t look so… seedy.
@marlowe1 - I’ll respond more later, but I’m not attributing the College’s rise to Nondorf’s scheming. All the other (real) changes contributed to the College’s rise, and with any other admissions dean, I’m confident Chicago could’ve gotten to 25k apps and top 5 SAT averages. Nondorf has given extra gloss and used gaming to artificially inflate the rise - so, instead of having a 12% accept rate (which we could get without the excessive gaming, ED/EDII nonsense), we have a 8% accept rate.
@Chrchill - I’ve stated my goal - to have Chicago offer a Chicago-style education/approach with Harvard-like brand/impact. What you’re seeing on this thread is a fairly Chicago-style debate. If you don’t like it, you may not actually like the discourse that probably still reverberates through the halls there.
(And, while Chicago has a certain type of self-deprecating humor [and improv is big in some circles], you do know that it’s probably the most serious university in the country, right? If you want more humor, go back to the Hasty Pudding Club.)
ok… perhaps slightly more seedy than admitting half your class EA:)
all schools game the admissions process…
Chicago is doing it better than others now and has a stronger student body for it.
Watch other schools follow suit. it’s not seedy… it’s called game theory:)
@sbballer - really? I’d MUCH prefer EA to ED.
Read this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/the-early-decision-racket/302280/
Schools that use ED heavily are the worst offenders. Schools that have TWO rounds of ED? Well, that just sounds downright misguided…
how about NO EA or ED? when schools started EA to boost yield… did you think it was going to stop there?
all schools game. Chicago is taking it to the next level and getting a better student body as a result
it’s called game theory.
@cue7 How did you know I was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club … (which happens to be a political power house).
How much of a better student body, @sbballer - and at what cost? You’ve seen other threads where people make fun of Chicago for their excessive marketing.
Is all the gaming that takes us from maybe a Top 5 SAT average to a Top 2 worth it?
Having NO EA or ED would be ideal, but you know which system was close to that, amidst all the game theory? Chicago’s open EA and RD policy. And you know what? The last year Chicago did that, it was still plenty selective and plenty good.
ED by definition boosts yield more than EA (so ranks higher in the “gamesmanship” category). Every year plenty of kids are admitted SCEA to one of HYPS, change their mind and go somewhere else after getting in RD. More importantly, the greater a school’s use of ED, the more it disadvantages students applying for fin aid, because if they apply ED they can’t compare offers and their chances are much lower if they don’t apply ED. That’s why ED is worse than EA, and two rounds of ED is worse still, and three rounds (the third round being the one where waitlisted students get offers if they first agree to accept those offers when made) is “game, set and match”, particularly when you admit more than two-thirds of your class in one of these ED rounds (which we may or may not be able to confirm when/if UChicago releases its admit stats this fall, as promised).
Yes, every school games the process to a greater or lesser degree. But this represents a clear escalation, to the advantage of UChicago and full-paying applicants.
Well said, @DeepBlue86 !
EA and ED are all designed to boost yield…
Chicago is taking it to the next level… which is predictable… and watch other schools follow suit. it’s already happening. it’s game theory.
You make “taking it to the next level” sound like it’s a good thing, @sbballer … and it’s absolutely not.
Also, until some other top school has EA/ED/EDII/RD, would you agree that Chicago is the worst offender?