U. of Chicago: Is University Strength Declining?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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Put another way, Harvard wants to be Harvard - if it made college tuition free, it would lose its standing.

There was once a school that experimented with off-beat admissions strategies and made unexpected, risky, maverick-like decisions. It then lost wealth and standing, and was/still is used as a cautionary tale by america’s tippy top schools. What’s the name of this once juggernaut-like school? The University of Chicago.

Here’s former Harvard Admissions Dean Wilbur Bender using Chicago as an example of what NOT to do:

http://www.dartblog.com/data/2005/10/003988.php

Maybe Chicago’s decline was a reason for Harvard’s current policies. No tippy top school wants to end up like the University of Chicago!

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From the standpoint of most participants in the Parents Forum of College Confidential, the central function of a university is educating undergraduates and giving them a credential others will respect. From the university’s standpoint, its central function is to be a community of scholars that produces and disseminates valuable research and scholarship. Educating undergraduates is one way, among others, to finance that. People are willing to pay to have their children educated by top scholars, and bachelors degree alumni are usually more numerous and more generous than graduate alumni. Often richer, too, since they mostly haven’t been seduced into a life of semi-poverty by the siren song of academia.

It’s possible to have a viable institution without undergraduates. UCSF, Einstein, All Souls College (Oxford).

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As well as that other institution established by John D. Rockefeller in addition to UChicago: Rockefeller University.

I’d add “and deepening and strengthening its reach into influential areas of societies and countries around the world, in furtherance of this function”. This latter clause furnishes the explanation for many of the students admitted by the tippy-tops, including the developmental admits.

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“Under Georgetown’s version, you can apply anywhere else you want early, as long as you aren’t committed to enroll if accepted. You could apply to Stanford EA if Stanford would let you; you just can’t simultaneously apply to Penn ED. If you cared to, you could apply early to Georgetown and 10-15 other great schools (including Chicago, although its EA program seems moribund, with an admission rate somewhere below 2%).”

@JHS - what 10-15 other great schools other than state flagships? Stanford is SCEA and Georgetown/BC know that. They also know that UChicago’s EA program is currently “moribund”. That effectively rules both out. What other peer schools are unrestricted EA and therefore OK under this plan?

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“As for the Harvard endowment, etc.: Why in the world would they blow the whole thing on undergraduates? Many of them have families who can easily pay or finance full tuition, and many of them are planning to cash in on the prestige of their degrees immediately upon graduation, by taking highly compensated, socially reprehensible jobs. Unallocated endowment income is much better spent on graduate students pursuing knowledge in fields that would be completely unsustainable with university support.”

@JHS. Bingo. Why would they? It would be fiscally irresponsible to do so. No argument from me there. I’m not the one saying that these schools are doing anything out of a sense of “fairness” or based on “moral grounds.” :smiley:

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@DeepBlue86 at #355: Not sure that Harvard got itself recognized as the top university in the world by waving its hands and claiming “it can’t be done.”. If they wanted to prioritize the undergraduates by offering free tuition or near-free, they’d find the funds. Believe me. But that was never my point in the first place. My original point was that a college that breaks from the cartel of fellow-colluders does not do so out of “fairness” to some demographic or income group or other. And if it rejoins, it’s not out of team loyalty or “all for one/one for all”. Both actions are fundamentally motivated by self-interest and whether the individual institution benefits from the action. As it should be.

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Fairness and morality considerations dictate not overspending endowment on undergraduates. At the universities that could potentially afford to provide free undergraduate education to the current number of students they enroll, generally they don’t provide free undergraduate education to students who can afford to pay a lot, because it would not be fair or moral to do that.

What’s more, in case you haven’t noticed, those same universities generally don’t engage in the extremely common practice of competitive “merit” awards to entice enrollment by wealthier undergraduates. That’s something Chicago did for a long time in a modest way, but has significantly expanded under the Nondorf admissions regime. It’s not that they think “merit” scholarships don’t work. Everyone knows they work. It’s not that merit scholarships don’t make sense, because any sophomore taking micro should be able to tell you why they make all kinds of sense. It’s that they think merit scholarships are unfair and immoral.

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@JHS
Merit scholarships are immoral? I don’t understand how accepting wealthy kids whose families give tons of money to the school (an extremely common practice in Harvard for example) or legacies (who also give money) can be considered more moral, when those kids do not have (not even close) the academic requirements to get into those schools. I know many cases. THAT is immoral.

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@JHS I assume that you are calling it unfair and immoral for Harvard to use merit awards because such a tactic would bring to Harvard even more rich but very qualified smart kids who would otherwise go to other elite colleges. Those colleges have some chance of snagging those kids away from Harvard by throwing these merit awards in their direction. Harvard doesn’t need more of these kids, a school like Chicago does. For Harvard it would be like running up the score in a ball game: Harvard could do it, but what’s the point? So if Chicago fights back with merit awards and snags a few of those rich kids, this is considered immoral as against the morality demonstrated by Harvard? Wouldn’t it be the reverse: Chicago is assisting Harvard on its moral mission to spread the riches! All this I say with irony inasmuch as I don’t think much of the motivation that would lead a rich kid to come to Chicago rather than Harvard for an additional $5,000 or so. But here’s another possibility: not all the kids who get these merit awards are actually all that rich. Is it possible that the reason Harvard doesn’t offer merit awards is that it can actually exploit the Harvard brand to get most talented kids of modest income without using the lure of merit awards? If that’s what is happening, the first words that come to my mind to describe Harvard’s policy are not “fair” or “moral”.

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@JHS when your admit rate is 4%, and you could easily – should you choose - fill your undergraduate class with 100% full-pay families, declaring merit aid to be immoral and unfair is a rather meaningless gesture. Kind of like declaring that you “just can’t care about money” when you have lived a life of affluence. :))

BTW, UChicago is becoming more “fair” and “moral”. For instance, this current incoming class will, for the first time in several years, not receive a supplement to their National Merit scholarship package. The irony is that any NMF’s who filed the FAFSA may well have received that and more via “need-based” institutional grants. I’ve also heard that some of the Ivy’s which “officially” do NOT provide merit scholarships for athletes, seem to be able to find money nonetheless when they really need to under the guise of “need based” aid. So for all that talk about being “Fair and Moral”, they still dole it out to the groups they want to reach.

One thing we can both agree on is that Harvard’s budget for PR is money well spent!

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Harvard says “it can’t be done” all the time, @JBStillFlying, as you know. They’ve got finite resources, and although they might be able to find the money for a great many things, such as making any department the unquestionable best in the world, erecting any kind of building or facility, or making tuition free for every undergraduate, doing so might not be worth the cost. They could scale back or shut down departments or programs, close facilities, forgo projects or fire lots of staff. They could borrow more money than might be considered prudent. They could spend down the endowment. They could obtain the hundreds of millions of dollars that they need to renovate the houses by allowing the houses to be renamed after whoever shows up with the biggest check. They could franchise out the Harvard name. They don’t - and say “it can’t be done” - because it’s not in their best interest to do these things, and it’s not in their best interest because it would be wrong. We all try to do right things, and avoid doing wrong things, because we see it as being in our interest.

Harvard and its peer schools have arrived at an equilibrium where the sticker price for tuition, room and board is discounted by around half on average. Many students pay full freight so that many more can pay much less. The full payers subsidize the low payers, as well as the operations of the university. Without the revenues from the full payers, the money would have to be found elsewhere, which would mean that the operations would have to be cut back, or the university would need to borrow imprudently or (also imprudently) spend down the endowment, distributions from which, as noted previously, can cover a third of the operating budget at these schools. This is the regime that the universities budget for.

If you squeeze one side of the balloon, you’re going to push it out on the other side. When you say “they’d find the funds”, to make undergraduate tuition free, maybe you think they could just pull a bit from here, a bit from there, and nobody would notice. But the departments that had their funding cut back, and the staff that were fired, and the PhD candidates who couldn’t be funded would notice. And so, in a regime where the world broadly accepts that Harvard and its peers can charge $65k for room and board to enough full payers to result in the average undergraduate paying half that, with a large subsidy being provided to operations, that’s what Harvard is going to do. The undergraduates might love the elimination of tuition; many others at Harvard would be screaming their heads off.

@Cariño, the “academic requirements” to get into Harvard (which are set by Harvard in their sole discretion) can be summed up as “this kid can graduate from Harvard”. Clear that bar, and Harvard looks at everything else in your portfolio, including whether you’re an athletic recruit, a virtuoso contrabassoonist, an underrepresented group, a potential Nobel prizewinner, a celebrity’s kid and any number of other things, including whether or not you’re a legacy or development case (and, by the way, they reject the vast majority of those legacy applicants and the ones they admit, as a group, have academic stats comparable to or better than the admitted students as a whole). There are many threads dealing with this topic.

@marlowe1 - those “most talented kids of modest income” are being lured to Harvard by need-based awards that often make Harvard the best and cheapest alternative available. And yes, @JBStillFlying: the Ivies aren’t allowed to provide athletic scholarships and don’t provide merit money, but they will meet demonstrated need.

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@JHS Going back to your post at #361, I question that the University of Chicago sees its undergraduate program as merely a source of funding for its true work of research and scholarship. No doubt there are and always will be profs and administrators who see it that way. In my day, however, most of the top profs taught in the College with real enthusiasm. Undergraduates with their fresh enthusiasms and unformed minds stimulate the professors and the whole community. This was and no doubt still is especially true at a school like Chicago, in which the undergraduates are focussed so seriously on their studies. Chicago undergrads must be much more rewarding to teach than their counterparts at schools where extraneous factors and extracurricular enthusiasms result in empty classrooms (vide Steven Pinker on Harvard).

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@DeepBlue86 at #370: I agree with most of what you posted. Of course. Just have one question about that “demonstrated financial need”: how many of these elite private uni’s have shared their formula with you?

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@DeepBlue86 With all due respect, I can tell that many of the cases I know do not belong in that list of the extraordinarily talented or potential “Harvard material.” My kids have attended one of the best preparatory schools in the country and I perfectly know what I am talking about. I know the miraculous hooks that put you into those schools in a legitimate way, but the ones I am talking about are not any of them. Many of those kids would NEVER get into Harvard without those connections. And please don’t tell me that you don’t know about that. I won’t believe you. In Harvard money talks. Loud.

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@marlowe1 – I don’t doubt what you say is true about Chicago. What I was saying really applies to all elite research universities. Their undergraduate programs are revenue generators. Someone needs to educate undergraduates, but it doesn’t actually have to be done by top scholars, just as high school basketball players don’t need NBA-level coaches. Most undergraduates can’t tell the difference between a top 10 scholar and a top 200 scholar, and even if they can it’s nowhere near self-evident that the top 10 scholar will do a better job than the top 200 one. The educational success of good LACs proves that every day.

It’s silly of me to argue this, because as a practical matter undergraduate education is ensconced as a core mission everywhere. And will remain that way because (a) it IS a revenue generator, and (b) undergraduate alumni are an ENORMOUS source of revenue. One of the main drivers behind Chicago’s strategy in this century was a McKinsey study that said it would not be able to keep pace with its peers unless it produced more, happier, and more economically successful undergraduate alumni. (I have looked everywhere online for a copy of that study, which I read around 2005, and I think was published in 2000 or 2001, as part of the push to expand the college by about 33% and to pay more attention to student life.) But no private college exists to provide free education regardless of need, with the possible exception of a very unique junior college called Deep Springs.

@Carino : If you think “accepting wealthy kids whose families give tons of money” is “an extremely common practice at Harvard,” you are wrong. At most, it’s 3-4 kids a year, and the “tons of money” standard may literally be tons, over many years, with more to come. At that level, that’s a legitimate part of building and maintaining an institution, and an enormous benefit to current and future students. (Current students tend to fall all over themselves trying to network with anyone who is admitted that way.)

As for normal legacies, some of whom are from wealthy families and some not, I believe Harvard says – and I believe – that its legacies have higher stats than its non-legacies. It is completely unclear whether, at Harvard, there is actually a legacy preference vs. a mild legacy disadvantage. The percentage of legacies in a class is pretty strictly capped, so legacies are competing against one another for a finite number of slots. It has been over a decade since any of my Harvard friends had a legacy kid accepted there, and that kid was also accepted at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT with no legacy connection, so it’s hard to argue that she was unqualified.

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@JHS said: “It is completely unclear whether, at Harvard, there is actually a legacy preference vs. a mild legacy disadvantage.”

Nonsense. Harvard itself admits that it gives preference to legacies. Legacies are over three times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than non-legacies. And the reason they do it is because alums are more likely to donate to Harvard precisely because they know that Harvard has a legacy preference and it may benefit their children someday.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/5/28/staff-losing-legacy-admissions/

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One other point. Merit aid can serve an additional purpose - to assist the “donut hole” families. People from places like the San Francisco Bay Area where the cost of living is extremely high often have incomes that make them just barely ineligible for financial aid, but leave them unable to pay the full 70k tuition bill for elite colleges. A family of 4 that earns $150k in Nashville has far more disposable income than a family of 4 earning $150k in Palo Alto - but for financial aid purposes they are treated almost the same. That 10k or 20k merit award can make the difference on whether the family can afford to accept an admissions offer.

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^ Exactly!

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@DeepBlue86 I don’t doubt the quality of Harvard’s non-merit financial assistance. However, we were discussing Harvard’s reasons for not awarding merit scholarships, with the assertion having been made that this is especially moral of them inasmuch as those scholarships would only go to rich kids who don’t need them. The point of my sarcasm on this point is that some of those awards would undoubtedly have gone to less rich kids who could use that extra dough over and above their needs-based assistance. Harvard’s real reason for not giving merit awards to any kids, rich or modest in income, must surely be that it doesn’t have to. Good for Harvard, but don’t expect kudos for the morality of this from my corner.

@JHS I still want to squabble with you when you specify ONLY economic reasons for undergraduate education being a core mission at Chicago and doubtless many other institutions. A university has many factions and personalities, and I don’t doubt that there are faculty and administrators who think in those terms. However, the very fact that LAC’s exist and function so admirably shows that the education of undergraduates can be a goal in its own right. Why can’t it be the case that within a research university like Chicago there can exist a college which also has that goal? This is not inconsistent with the economic functions of such a college as you describe them, but it resists reducing the undergraduate mission to those purely instrumental purposes. It is always wise to resist reductionism!

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@ThankYouforHelp
That article put an end to the discussion. :slight_smile: