Edit to add: if you have determined that rankings are just an efficient means of conveying information and use them to exploit that fact, that’s not exactly risk averse behavior either. But it is Maverick thinking.
Cue, what you’re calling - for polemical reasons - “risk averse” just sounds like good sense and good policy to me. I don’t see “risk” being held up by anyone here as an end in itself. I see independent thinking and analysis - what a noted Chicago prof of the past, David Riesman, called “inner-directedness” - as the true Chicago spirit. Incidentally, obsessions with rankings seems very unChicago to me and very much an exemplification of the “other-directedness” Riesman also describes, not in a good way. You allege that “it’s been shown that Chicago has become more rankings-conscious of late”. Who has shown this, and what part of the University is it that supposedly has developed that consciousness? Certainly many on this board manifest such an obsession, but can’t we agree that we alumni, parents and students on cc might fall a tad short of constituting an adequate sample?
@PurpleTitan : By “similar institutions” I meant Yale/Princeton/Stanford, not Northwestern or Penn. I’m agnostic on the actual impact of legacy preferences there, too.
There was a big academic article about 15 years ago, using data from the 80s and 90s, that showed a legacy preference roughly equal to 160 SAT points at “three elite universities,” one of which was presumably Princeton where the authors of the study were located, and one presumably Harvard, because I think both universities participated in the dataset that the authors analyzed. There have been some followups by the same principal author using more recent data, but a much broader group of colleges (and nothing within the past decade, I think), that show a persistent SAT effect of legacy preference, but not specifically at the Harvard/Princeton level.
My world is pretty full of Yale and Penn legacies, and my extended family is full of Harvard legacies (plus some friends). The only Yale and Harvard legacies I have seen admitted in the past decade or so have been fabulous candidates who tend to have lots of cross admissions. (Not all apply to multiple colleges if they have been admitted EA.) And tons of fabulous legacy candidates get rejected, notwithstanding their fabulousity, with many of them notwithstanding getting accepted at equivalent colleges (e.g. Princeton legacy rejected outright at Princeton EA and accepted RD at Harvard). At Penn, there’s still some sense of legacy preference, but for years any Christmas party around here is full of Penn alumni parents grousing that their high-achieving child was just deferred ED. So it’s not like there’s an unmitigated sense of entitlement.
Anyway, back to Chicago, which probably has some kind of legacy preference at this point. For years one of its big problems was alumni parents who told their children not to apply.
I respect colleges with unrestricted EA programs. It’s classy and completely applicant-friendly. I understand why lots of colleges use ED instead. For many colleges, especially LACs, which tend to have quite low yields on RD acceptances, even the best ones, ED is a practical necessity. And ED2 can be a boon to applicants. But the way Chicago abused its EA/ED/ED2 menu this year was really shameful. And there was no need for it. The prior year, Chicago had attracted more EA applications than any other college. Its EA admission rate was reasonable relative to its overall rate. It got a high-stats class with a yield around 70%, very much a big-boy figure. It had meaningful RD admissions. All the baiting-and-switching it did this year accomplished what? Lowering admission rate by 1%. And the cost was going from having the classiest, most applicant-friendly system to one that put enormous pressure on applicants to make an ED commitment. That’s not “inner-directed”; it’s fraudulent and abusive.
I really hope the admissions “market” puts a hurt on Chicago for that this year. I knew why sophisticated, well-informed candidates would apply EA or RD to Chicago in the past. I don’t know why anyone well-informed would apply EA or RD to Chicago now. It’s ED or nothing. That should cut the number of applications at least in half. We’ll see.
Pretty harsh words there, @JHS… I respect your thoughts and information on most subjects, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what in the present admissions configuration would justify words like “fraudulent” and “abusive”. I see only a policy difference here: you prefer that lots of choice among many schools be in play for kids with no clear preference (or else a clear preference for HYP, with Chicago as a backup), whereas the introduction of ED1 asks for commitment to Chicago at the outset and ED2 asks for it in the second round. The abuse you have in mind must lie in your belief that it’s all about lowering the admission rate by 1 per cent. But you must not really believe that such a trivial effect is the real goal here. Why ignore the more obvious explanation - that Chicago might think it really important to identify and recruit kids who demonstrably want to come to Chicago?
If the “sophisticated, well-informed” kids who would really rather go to Harvard or Yale decide to punish Chicago by not using it as a back-up, I can live with that. If they all pick up their marbles and go home, and the blessed statistics tank in consequence, perhaps someone will have a sufficiently long memory to observe that maybe statistics is not what it was all about. Perhaps there was a quaint idea of maintaining the identity of the University of Chicago.
@JHS In utter disagreement with you on all fronts. I am happy for all schools to go RD only. (See Europe for example) But once you open the flood gates with any type of early, all bets are off and each school may as well play this game any way it wants.
@JHS I find the self-righteousness and hubris of your last post (#402) appalling. Your claims create the impression that you are able to peer into the minds of the UChicago administration to be able to charge them with the worst motives in adopting a strategy that many schools have adopted before them.
This “ultra liberal leftist notion” that a private university has the obligation to flagellate itself before it can earn the medal of moral superiority is itself immoral and reprehensible. I also find it hypocritical that the same folks who give universities like HYP and others the total freedom to shape their classes the way they seem fit through various social engineering strategies without passing moral judgment on them, have no problem criticizing Chicago for determining what its class admission strategy should be.
You want Chicago to constantly check its “privilege” and bleed itself in terms or resources, talent and comparative advantage all in the name of social justice to earn your approval.
Well thank goodness, Nondorf and his ilk care little to listen to such “socialist prattle” and choose to focus instead on “what will be good for the long term sustainability” of the University. It is their fiduciary responsibility to do so.
all schools game… if you have EA… you game… did you think it was going to stop there?
U of Chicago admissions office as well as every school with some variant of early admission or early decision is well aware they are in a prisoner’s dilemma exercise.
given the set of circumstances… SAT score, Rankings, EA etc… it is entirely predictable that U of Chicago is following the path that is going to benefit them the most. to increase apps, yield and rankings.
every school that participates in some variation of EA is a willing participant in this slippery slope of gaming for yield and there is no moral high ground here.
Fraud and abuse? By changing an admissions plan? LOL. Them’s fightin’ words, but cooler heads will note that there is zero evidence of either. UChicago fully disclosed it’s admission plans in plenty of time and there are no regulations on how low an EA or RD admission percentage can be. Pushing the envelope is not “fraud” and “abuse” although to the conventionally wise it may appear so.
As for application numbers - well, they took a 3,000 applicant hit. If it dips farther and they remain with this overall strategy, that means they believe the benefits outweigh the costs. Inclined to agree with @Marlowe1 that there is a bit more going on here than chasing “favorable” numbers and stats.
The little birds that we know in HP are very excited about this incoming class and not a bit concerned with the hit in applications. The academic side of the college will know soon enough if this class is a good - or better - fit. Believe it or not, their input will drive future admission decisions more than things like yields, admit rates, or number of applications - or, for that matter, what “other nations” are thinking about all this.
@JHS: “At Penn, there’s still some sense of legacy preference, but for years any Christmas party around here is full of Penn alumni parents grousing that their high-achieving child was just deferred ED. So it’s not like there’s an unmitigated sense of entitlement.”
Well of course, considering that even among legacies, far more get admitted than rejected (which is also understandable, considering that even with average propagation at the replacement rate of around 2 and most marrying a non-alum, you’d have far more legacy children than you have alums).
Quite a first CC post there, @pupflier…
Apart from being one of the wisest senior commenters on CC, @JHS has sent children to UChicago…he knows the school better than the vast majority of people on this forum, and frequently speaks about it with great affection. I read his comments above as a lament that UChicago hasn’t in this instance lived up to the high regard in which he holds it.
Irrespective of whether you agree with the words he used, I think @JHS’ point should be acknowledged: if (as seems to be the case) UChicago admitted more than two-thirds of its class ED1 or ED2 in the admissions season just ended, EA and RD applicants had much less of a chance than they could reasonably have expected. Yes, no one’s owed a roadmap to admission, but it’s very unusual to see such an abrupt shift, and the applicants really had very little idea what their chances were under the various admissions options. This was, after all, the first time UChicago used ED.
We’ll see what happens this year, but unless an applicant loves UChicago so much that they’re willing to apply ED1/2, it’s hard to know what they should do. Many may conclude it’s not worth applying at all. Then again, some high-stats, unhooked candidates who are risk-averse but aren’t totally sold on UChicago may view applying as a possible insurance policy, as described below.
If UChicago continues with this menu of admissions options in the coming year, I’ll guess that they’ll admit a similarly large percentage ED1/2 as this year, they’ll hand out enough RD admits to prevent apps from collapsing, and they’ll waitlist loads of people, cherrypicking high-stats-but-unhooked candidates (or others with particular characteristics that they want) off the waitlist if they’re willing to commit (i.e., for them, it’s “ED3”). UChicago will get the class it wants and have a very high yield (although selectivity may take a knock if the total number of apps craters).
If UChicago goes this route, though, I can’t help but feel that first-gens or applicants who are less sophisticated about the process won’t have any idea how to play the game here - unless UChicago reaches out early on to the specific ones that they want and helps them see what they need to do. Maybe all the marketing will help them target those candidates with some precision.
@pupflier is subtantively correct. Admissions this day is mostly social engineering and fundraising. Legacy at Harvard is dead except for mega donors. Every kind of ethnic, racial and sexual diversity rules. First generation likewise is now dominant. Until we have a totally blind merits system with only RD, this discussion merely reflects
the individual social policy preferences of each writer. That’s all fine. But please eschew the moral superiority pretensions of your positions.
@Chrchill Bingo!! Well said.
College administration wants to increase access to any of the “seven protected groups” as defined by Jonathan Haidt, and expressly favors them over others in college admissions: One Good Moral College brownie point.
College administration shuts down debate or refuses to punish “pseudo liberal anarchists” who shut down debate or de-platform speakers - One more Good Moral college brownie point… Some viewpoints are too painful to even hear.
College bleeds itself financially to provide free education to “dis-enfranchised” groups as seen by “left leaning groups” - More moral college brownie points, even if some of these students show up on campus and berate, insult and shame the administration in the name of “not doing enough for Social justice causes”
College supports speech codes and bends over backwards to accommodate students against so called “systemic discrimination” - Many, Many Moral college brownie points.
But God forbid, a college eschews any of these policies or even practices them with less than evangelistic fervor, or tries to rollback some of these trends a little bit to get sanity back on campus - Bad, despicable, immoral College!
Basically “left leaning College Administration” Good
“Moderate” or “Right leaning College Administration” Bad
Neither one is more righteous than the other, but that doesn’t stop folks some from labeling one moral and one immoral and patting themselves on the back for being “more righteous and moral” than their less evolved brethren.
Hoo boy. As if this thread wasn’t ridiculous enough, now people are injecting politics into it. 8->
“So, if you really like engineering, it’s top 5 for college. If you really want to major in English, and wouldn’t mind have a top 5 computer science program at your school, well, MIT aint the place, and that’s why Stanford is a juggernaut.”
This is why I think Stanford has the edge, maybe even a clear #1. Harvard doesn’t have as strong an engineering program as Stanford or a lot of other schools, at undergrad and grad. In terms of research and breadth of a strong curriculum, I’d put Berkeley, maybe Michigan as well. What schools have top-ten programs in say electrical engineering, economics, English, political science, undergrad and grad? Maybe those three, and UCB doesn’t have a med school.
It always gets there in the end, @ThankYouforHelp. It’s Godwin’s Law of College Confidential: as the length of a thread increases, the probability of race being brought into it approaches one. We all know the code words.
Sorry. @DeepBlue86 You are the one turning this into a racial discussion. Stick to the arguments at hand. Nobody here is talking about race. The point is that college admissions is now all about social engineering in Favor of numerous economic, social and ethnic factors. it is also about donations and athletes. This is not a value statement or a criticism. It is simply an objective statement of fact. Once admissions is no longer a blind merit based process, all schools have an agenda and game the system in the way they see fit. So don’t single out UCHicago about its admissions scheme. It is not morally inferior to the others as the critics here would have it.
“Nobody here is talking about race”?!
@Chrchill: you literally just said “Every kind of ethnic, RACIAL and sexual diversity rules.” (caps mine).
Yes but it is not value judgment that it is wrong or right. It is simply a fact. If you want to engage, stick to the point I am making instead of cheaply assigning nefarious motives.
OK, so you acknowledge you brought race into it. Phew, thought I’d forgotten how to read.
The thing is, @Chrchill, when the mentions of “social engineering” and how schools don’t have a “blind merits system” for admissions start creeping in, we know what’s meant, and what’s coming, because it’s all so depressingly familiar from any number of other threads on this forum. This point in a thread is also when I do the flounce and bow out.
And for the record: my preferred system is Oxbridge. What matters is your grades, high school rigor as and A levels plus entrance essay and interview.
That’s it. Not athletics, EC or anything else.