@JBStillFlying - None. Why? What I do know is that the Ivies objectively offer the most generous need-based aid, you can’t lose it if you’re off the team because it isn’t an athletic scholarship, and when you get an estimated offer you can shop it to any Ivy institution, to keep them honest: http://www.ivyleaguesports.com/information/psa/index
@Cariño - No, I was just watching a movie. With all due respect, you might not be the only one commenting who has kids who attended one of the top prep schools in the country.
What seems clear to me is that attending that kind of prep school makes it much more likely that you’ll attend a top-20 university, but the high concentration of connected legacies makes it hard to crack the tippy-tops. Understandably, this can make one feel like it’s all about money and connectedness, when the vast majority of those admitted don’t come from that kind of background.
@ThankYouforHelp - it might be the case that legacies, children of at least one Harvard-educated parent, are much more likely to be high-SES and come from a family that values education, ergo more likely to have had the access to the kinds of opportunities (e.g., enrichment and test prep) that make for a more compelling application and therefore much more likely to be admitted than the average applicant.
@marlowe1 I’m actually conflicted about merit aid - not opposed in principle but don’t love the idea of a finite amount of it being diverted to those who need it less.
@JBStillFlying: “what 10-15 other great schools other than state flagships?”
The Catholics (ND, Georgetown, and BC) + MIT + Caltech + a ton of publics to your heart’s desire (Cal, UVa, UMich, UCLA, UNC, UW-Madison).
@JHS: “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.”
Uh, the Ivies are prohibited from offering merit scholarships per athletic league rules. You could say they mutually disarmed. That leaves Stanford, Georgetown, Tufts, and MIT who don’t, and MIT evidently has some alums who are willing to pay to bring very promising kids to their school (not publicized much because MIT evidently wants to be seen as an Ivy). Oh, and Northwestern does give non-need scholarships, though they tend to be piddly small, so it’s more of an honor than anything else. Oh, and Caltech may have ended their 2 merit scholarships a year. And CMU and Brandeis may not give non-need scholarships. Not sure.
I’m pretty certain every other private research U in the US offers at least a few big non-need merit scholarships.
@marlowe1: “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.”
Agreed. It’s price discrimination. Evidently, some people attach a moral value to price discrimination, though I think it’s odd. I certainly don’t salute airlines for charging some people more for a seat and some people less.
Oh, ok, @PurpleTitan, Thanks - so we can include ND in the group. So this version of early action is a bit better than SCEA in that you can apply early to another elite Catholic school. Well, that is actually a bit less grabby than HYPS with their snooty SCEA.
(Not really considering MIT/CalTech to be peer schools but maybe I’m missing something?).
@DeepBlue86 - Agreed! It’s a nice system. BTW, UChicago is also pretty generous!
“Not really considering MIT/CalTech to be peer schools but maybe I’m missing something?).”
I don’t see how they are not peers.
@PurpleTitan: if you look at how the admission plans work and which schools use them, you can actually figure out “peers” from the colleges viewpoint. HYPS all use SCEA. ND/BC/Geo. use restricted EA. Caltech/MIT use unrestricted EA. NU/Penn/Columbia use ED. And as stated before, UChicago is a bit of a maverick using this criteria.
Not a maverick, by that logic. Just a second-tier-Ivy equivalent. Unless you want to group it with NYU and some of the LACs that have ED2. Here’s that list: http://g.co/doodle/azxdgm
American University
Bates College
Bennington College
Bowdoin College
Brandeis University
Bryant University
Bryn Mawr College
Bucknell University
Carleton College
Claremont McKenna Colleges
Colby College
Colgate University
College of the Atlantic
College of Wooster
Colorado College
Connecticut College
Davidson College
Denison College
Dickinson College
Emory University
Franklin & Marshall College
George Washington University
Gettysburg College
Grinnell College
Hamilton College
Hampshire College
Harvey Mudd College
Juniata College
Kenyon College
Lehigh University
Macalester College
Middlebury College
New York University
Oberlin College
Occidental College
Pomona College
Reed College
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rhodes College
Saint Olaf College
Sarah Lawrence College
Scripps College
Sewanee: The University of the South
Skidmore College
Smith College
Swarthmore College
Tufts University
University of Chicago
University of Richmond
University of Rochester
Vanderbilt University
Vassar College
Washington and Lee University
Wesleyan University
Whitman College
Agree with @exacademic - if you group schools based on how their admissions plans work, Chicago is in the “second tier-Ivy equivalent.”
So, per @JBStillFlying logic, Chicago’s peers are places like Vandy, Bucknell, NYU, and Bryant.
I don’t mean to denigrate these schools, but I don’t think that’s the group Chicago wants to be in here.
@JBStillFlying, well, by your logic, MIT and Caltech were actually the only elite private peers that UChicago had until a year ago.
But yes, now, by your definition, the U of C is a peer of Bennington, Bryant, and Bucknell.
You keep forgetting that regular EA is still very much alive at UChicago They offer everything. Columbia and Penn do not have EA. This obsession with admission plans is quite bizarre.
legacy students have higher rates of admission than non legacy students
considering that legacy students make up a much smaller part of the admission pool… arguments otherwise are an example of base rate neglect.
these boards are filled with personal observation… N of 1 conjectures… which are often dead wrong.
I haven’t heard anyone dispute that legacies have a higher admission rate than non-legacies (although how much of an advantage varies by school, and generally isn’t publicly disclosed). The question is whether on average legacies’ academic qualifications are higher than the average of the general pool, or whether they’re more likely to have other attributes that the school wants (which might include a propensity for meaningful donations or involvement). If either or both of these are true, one would expect the legacy pool to have a higher admit rate than the non-legacy pool.
@Chrchill - not sure EA at UChicago is going to be around very long, or used much, if UChicago continues with ED1/2. An applicant who applies SCEA to one of HYPS can’t use it, and anyone who really wants UChicago will apply ED1 or switch to ED2.
@Chrchill - Chicago is keeping EA around for show - the numbers you’ve presented in the past back this up.
In fact, Chicago is almost keeping RD around for show…
I am not impressed by arguments against ED based on its use by lesser schools such that, apparently, Chicago ought to be embarrassed to be found in their company. That’s not an argument but a slur. Chicago is in many respects a very unusual school, one that has always been willing to re-think the way it does things. If the Admissions people had concluded that ED was the best way of identifying and recruiting talented Chicago-loving kids but shouldn’t be adopted because critics would say that it was “losing face” in the war with peer schools - that to me would be very unChicago-like.
- Regular EA is not "very much alive" at Chicago. They never announced numbers, but assuming EA + EDI applications were roughly the same as the year before, you can more or less figure out that the EA admission rate was somewhere slightly north of 1% and well below 2%. On CC, the only people who reported being accepted EA were URMs, and no one reported having been admitted RD after being deferred EA (and not accepting the invitation to convert the application to ED2). In theory, Chicago still offers EA, but the practice last year made it clear that it was not a realistic option for most applicants.
- @exacademic is right that offering ED2 puts Chicago into a category with a lot of colleges that I usually think of as being a couple tiers below it. But offering EA/ED1/ED2 permits an even tighter association, since only a handful of institutions do that. Tulane started offering both EA and ED when its survival was in doubt following Katrina, and its yield on accepted students dropped into the low teens. It was a creative, desperate move for a desperate institution. And it never expanded into ED2. What's Chicago's excuse?
Some research identified about 20 other colleges that offer EA plus ED1-2. Most of them are LACs, including some fine ones like Colorado College, Kalamazoo, Sewanee, Hampshire, Wooster, Bennington. The universities that offer it are University of Denver, University of Miami, Case Western, and SMU. And Chicago.
- The "article" linked by @ThankYouforHelp was a nearly fact-free editorial, and had nothing in it to suggest the extent, if any, of any legacy preference, except to say that the legacy admission rate is three times the average. It has been reported on CC many times by people familiar with Harvard admissions that, as a control group of sorts for its legacy admissions, Harvard periodically calculates the rate at which it has accepted Yale and Princeton legacies who are not also Harvard legacies, and who of course receive no preference or extra look. Guess what? They are accepted at a rate not meaningfully lower than the rate for Harvard legacies.
Harvard doesn’t want to publicize this, because the whole point of pretending to have a legacy preference is to encourage alumni giving. Objectively, the legacy preference there and at similar institutions is largely an illusion. Its practical impact is tiny.
- Of course merit scholarships address "donut-hole" families. But Harvard does a pretty great job addressing the needs of those families with need-based aid, unlike most other institutions. That doesn't mean Harvard will outbid a university offering significant merit aid to a particular student. But its financial aid policies often result in better terms for a student whose family earns $150,000/year compared to merit packages elsewhere.
@JHS: “Objectively, the legacy preference there and at similar institutions is largely an illusion. Its practical impact is tiny.”
I guess it depends on what you consider “similar institutions”. Northwestern, yes, doesn’t value legacy much (and says so in their Common Dataset). UPenn, on the other hand, is straightforward when they state that legacies get a bump in ED (but not in RD).
@PurpleTitan, @exacademic et al: UChicago doesn’t play the “who’s your peer” game by conforming its admissions plans to others. As I said - Maverick. Does anyone really believe that UChicago used to think its closest peers were MIT and Cal-Tech? (both with EA/RD).
University of Chicago has set the trend in the past when it came to EA. Now it’s using various early admission strategies to properly segment it’s applicant pool. It’s an aggressive strategy and will propel yield beyond what is perceived by most to be close peers: Columbia and Penn (who were reporting 70% yields just with ED).
Wouldn’t discount EA as an option for UChicago going forward. It’s quite the strategy to find qualified hooked candidates who really want to prioritize UChicago. If earlier surmised numbers are accurate, approximately 18% of the admitted class were in this pool. Another several hundred in RD. if 40% or so of total admits were hooked candidates admitted under a non-binding plan, then that’s potentially a very efficient way to increase diversity and allow for targeted recruitment.
We only met a small, local sample of admitted kids this spring but they certainly did conform to the notion that hooked kids (demographic, special talent, special characteristic, etc.) chose EA/RD and unhooked chose EDI/EDII. Don’t want to extrapolate too much, however. Whether this is what UChicago is doing - and whether it’s successful - will be determined over time, when other schools choose or do NOT choose to follow suit.
@JHS, expect that EA admit rate to go higher, as more kids figure out they need to apply ED in order to be seriously considered.
@JBStillFlying and others,
I think we’re confusing the term “maverick” with “risk-averse.” Chicago is now one of the most risk-averse players at the top. Having EA/ED/ED2/RD is a bigtime risk averse move - you can get lots of apps (because you still have EA and RD), but you can also protect yield (with ED and ED2).
Further, it’s been shown that Chicago has become more rankings-conscious of late (certainly in comparison to the 90s or early 00s), and it’s ALSO is much more interested in conveying the message of power/standing to incoming students (it hypes its pre-professional linkages with b school, law school, etc. much more now).
These are all risk averse moves, not maverick moves.
its not “risk averse” if you are using your admissions plans to capture surplus more efficiently. It’s just smart , outside the box thinking. i.e.: Maverick. Why would University of Chicago risk being perceived as a lower tier school? That’s hardly risk-averse behavior. Most to reach the number three spot via their current strategies would want to preserve that spot not climb higher.