UChicago 2017-2018 Admission's Statistic Hints

You may wait a long time, because I doubt UChicago will ever disclose the information you’d need to make that assessment, and I suspect what they disclose won’t permit apples-to-apples comparisons with other schools.

I think if there were full transparency, you’d see that around two-thirds of the class was admitted ED. I don’t think they’ll disclose how many were ED1, how many were ED2, and how many switched to ED2 after being deferred EA.

I’m also confident they’ll never disclose how many were waitlisted and then admitted after have been told “you’ll get an admit if we get a commit”, otherwise known as “ED3”, something that has happened in a number of UChicago cases I’ve heard of over the past few years, and which, if used enough, artificially inflates yield further.

I also doubt they’ll disclose what would logically be the result of all this - an RD admit rate comparable to Harvard’s - because that would make it clear that applying RD was probably a waste of time, and that if you really wanted UChicago you’d apply ED.

And, finally, I’m not sure any admit rate or yield figures they’re likely to disclose will help you draw the conclusions you’re looking for.

To provide a simplified example, let’s assume UChicago is aiming for a class of 1,650, got 13,000 early apps and admitted 1,200 ED or EA (denying 800 and deferring the remaining 11,000), of whom 95% of those admitted (1,140) accept their offers. They then admit 900 out of a deferred/RD pool of 29,000 (about a 3% RD admit rate), but 300 of those are admit-if-you-commits off the waitlist, which have a 100% yield. Of the other 600 RD admits, 210 show up (a 35% yield), rounding out the class of 1,650.

In my example, UChicago would have a total admit rate of 6.8% (2,100/31,000) and a yield of 78.6% (1,650/2,100),. Those results are right up there with HYP, but UChicago would have got there in a very different way, locking down 85-90% of the class through ED1-3 and losing close to two-thirds of those for whom it’s in a jump ball. Contrast this with HYP, who have similar overall admit rates and yields but use SCEA rather than ED and fill maybe half their classes that way.

I don’t think my example is a million miles from the truth, and, consequently, I don’t think UChicago will disclose the information that would enable it to be validated.

Your example is close to mine upthread.

And of course they won’t disclose it because they want ED applicants to apply that route for more reasons than it’ll help their chances. Also, they probably figure that the clever applicants and their families are smart enough to figure this out (after all, didn’t we both post what is likely to be the scenario? What secret information do we have that no one else does?).

Clearly they give an advantage to the ED candidate, all else equal. Their ED admit rate is probably very close to Harvards’ SCEA, by the way (haven’t looked recently). And keep in mind that Harvard admits “non-binding” on paper only. In reality their SCEA yield has to be near 100% which, conveniently, they choose not to disclose. As mentioned earlier, if there is a whiff that you are shopping, you won’t get an admit (unless you are a highly unusual candidate, in which case you are admittedr just like the UChicago EA’s).

If UChicago wants to be compared to HYPS, why doesn’t it offer SCEA/REA, instead of the gimmick of ED+EA? Or offer unrestricted EA only so comparisons can be made with MIT/Caltech? Or ED only to compare with the rest of the Ives?

Last month, Harvard admitted 964 (14.5%) out of 6,630 SCEA applicants for the class of 2022 (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/12/13/early-admissions-2022/). I’m going to guess they’ll land 90-95% of them, because they’ll lose a few to each of Y, P, S and some others. They’ll probably lose very few for financial reasons, given the generosity of the aid they offer, but there may be some kids in the donut hole who turn them down for a full ride from a state flagship or somewhere else.

Accordingly, if Harvard’s targeting a class of 1,670, then even if 95% of the SCEA admits (who, after all, aren’t bound to enroll) accept their offers, they’ll account for just under 55% of the class - a long way from the likely 85-90% UChicago is locking in with various forms of ED.

I’m not sure how Harvard would know you were shopping so that they could defer you, tbh. In fact, I think the experience is closer to the opposite: they defer the excellent-but-not-totally-stellar legacies that they’re confident are going to accept an RD offer, and show the love by admitting SCEA applicants that they really want but aren’t sure will enroll even though they’ve revealed a preference by applying early.

I think we all know the answer to @1NJParent’s question: showing high headline selectivity and yield numbers drives UChicago’s USNWR ranking, which drives reputation and more apps, which achieves the goal of getting more people to bracket UChicago with HYPS. UChicago’s strategy is working, at least on those who don’t try to look under the admissions hood and guess what’s really going on there, which is most of the world.

Some of the rest of us might conclude, though, that limiting the overwhelming majority of their class to people who are willing to commit to UChicago means that UChicago is turning away or declining to compete for many of the most talented applicants, particularly lower-income ones. It certainly shows that they’re not really competing head-to-head with HYPS for most students, even though they look similarly selective and have a similar yield.

I’ll give my testimony. I never set foot on the Chicago campus (and barely ever set foot in the city of Chicago) until my child enrolled there, but from the time I started paying attention, everything told me the University of Chicago was one of the great universities of the world, a name that had all sorts of prestige associated with it.

I graduated from high school in 1974 in the near Midwest. I came from a family where higher education was highly valued, and prestige mattered. In my mother’s family, which was my key clan, essentially everyone smart at some point went to Harvard, including my grandmother (Radcliffe '19), all of her brothers and one brother-in-law, and both of my parents. The first time I visited Harvard, I had lunch with four cousins who were undergraduates there (and who generally despised one another); three different cousins were in college there during my college years, and I had an uncle on the Medical School faculty.

Anyway, I was a really good student, the top boy at a regionally respected private school, which at that time essentially entitled me to go to college wherever I wanted. My appropriate education was a topic of conversation in my extended family. My parents consulted with my most academic cousin (Harvard AB, Princeton PhD, then an Assistant Professor at Princeton), whose interests were close to mine. They drew up a list of colleges they deemed adequate for my talents. It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and Chicago. (Berkeley and Stanford would have been on the list, too, on academic merit, except that, as my father put it, “There’s nothing in California that you can’t get at Harvard or Yale. That I’m willing to pay for.”)

So, yeah. Forty-five years ago, my hyper-prestige-conscious family, who really wanted me to go to Harvard, told me that Chicago was one of four (or six) acceptable alternatives. Chicago was Milton Friedman, and it was also Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom. I didn’t seriously consider going there, because (a) Yale was effectively the center of the world in the subjects that interested me most, (b) my best friend also wanted to go to Yale, and © when students talked about it, they all sounded like masochists, which wasn’t attractive. But the message I got was that Chicago was in the limited club of world-class universities.

When I got to college at Yale, that view was reinforced on a regular basis. There were any number of young faculty who had gotten their PhDs at Chicago – Tom Pangle is one whom I still remember as really exciting – and graduate students who had been undergraduates there. Chicago professors who came through to give talks were stars. People talked about the University of Chicago all the time – including when Gen. Pinochet turned to a group of Chicago-educated economists to turn Chile’s economy around, and they largely succeeded. There was no question that, from the vantage point of Yale, Chicago was a peer institution.

That view was solidly reinforced at Stanford, where I went to law school. It was clear that Chicago’s law school and its economics department were one of the most important intellectual nodes in the country. I had brilliant classmates who had been Chicago undergraduates, and other friends who went on to teach there. I had a prestigious clerkship after law school, and one of my co-clerks came from Chicago’s law school. Engineers at Stanford may not have known much about Chicago, but for anyone in the professions, humanities, social sciences, Chicago was one of the very few places that mattered.

Where I live, 700+ miles from Chicago, I have 4-5 friends in my generation who got their bachelors degrees from Chicago, and another friend’s best friend from high school is a well-known professor there. At the well-known, highly academic private school my kids attended for 11 years, when they were in high school, the University of Chicago was the #3 destination for graduates of that school, behind only Penn (which is local) and Harvard. Including my daughter, six kids with whom she had been classmates in middle school were undergraduates at Chicago. When my daughter was deciding where to go to college in 2005, the prestige of Chicago figured significantly in her decision, although less so than its intellectualism. She got that not just from her parents, her school, her friends, but also from our neighbor, a biophysicist, who told her, “When you apply to graduate school, the University of Chicago name really matters.”

In my wife’s field, probably the most important research in the last 50 years was done at the University of Chicago. My daughter spent four+ years working at one of the snootiest, brand-name foundations in New York, a place with multiple ex-Ivy League university presidents on the board, where every staff member had a “prestige” alma mater. So did she. It was clear to her, not that she got her job there because of her Chicago AB, but that she would never have been interviewed if that hadn’t marked her as part of the club.

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"ED bumps yield by ~10%, so if UChicago has yield that is 10% higher than the bottom HYPS, then I would argue that UChicago yield is already in HYPS territory. ED depresses acceptance rate so if UChicago, despite ED, matches acceptance rate of the bottom HYPS I would argue that UChicago acceptance rate is already in HYPS territory.

If both happen, then UChicago has arrived."

I don’t understand this (but this topic comes up constantly) or I think the definition of “arrival” is misleading, just as low ED admit rates and high yields are misleading when a high proportion of the class is admitted ED. Quality, selectivity, prestige and building a class cannot be a numbers game and statistics alone. Amongst 50 or 100 very good schools, there must be other factors we can point to to differentiate them more meaningfully.

Let’s not use Chicago and look instead at another ED school in an experiment. Such a school under the above definition can claim to have “arrived” next year by admitting its entire class ED - with an admit rate of 5% and of course a yield of 100%.

What schools would operate in or near the 5% rate if they admitted their entire class size as ED? Pomona 4.8% (class size 435 out of 9046), JHU 5.1% (1349 enrollment / 26578), Northwestern is 5.1% (1912 enrollment / 37259), Vanderbilt 5.1% (1607 / 31462). All these have arrived as great schools, but have they arrived at the HYPSM level? It would be folly to think they could arrive at the HYPSM level by changing their admission strategy and getting to a <5% admit rate and a 100% yield, targets which they all could theoretically achieve.

Here are the comparable numbers for MIT - 1102 / 20247 apps (5.4%), and Penn - 2457 / 40413 (6.1%), which means Vanderbilt, Northwestern, JHU could outyield, out-admit MIT and Penn under an ED-only strategy, but what will they have proved?

If Chicago is a great school, and it is, there must be better numbers to point to. Admissions numbers cannot be used to prove parity among schools because they are so easily manipulated. I hope this is a useful counterexample to illustrate my point.

PS - Chicago’s enrollment for 2021 was 1740 / 27694 apps (6.3%). This would be a higher ratio than JHU even if the number of apps had been 34000. For those who cheer for Chicago on stats based on ED, how would you rank Chicago relative to JHU or Northwestern?

No one questions that UChicago is a great school. What’s questionable is its current admission practice and its resulting statistics (or the lack thereof). How meaningful are the numbers under this practice (and therefore its ranking)?

@bronze2 Penn is ED only too, right?

@newHSmom yes, Penn is an ED school. Dean Furda there has also done an amazing job boosting the number of applications it receives, from 22,000 or so apps in 2009 (for the class of 2013) when he took charge of admissions to 40,000+ lately.

@JHS Univ. Of Chicago has always been known in the academy, in the graduate professional fields, and in communities who encourage research and learning or who have a high level of intellectual engagement. Unfortunately, historically speaking, a good part of the country hasn’t lived that way. The internet made us all a little less parochial.

Right. But if you are in a community where conventional, Establishment academic prestige actually matters, then you are in a community where the University of Chicago has a lot of prestige. If you aren’t in such a community, who cares? You should go to the University of Alabama – their football team is the best!

“I’m not sure how Harvard would know you were shopping so that they could defer you, tbh. In fact, I think the experience is closer to the opposite: they defer the excellent-but-not-totally-stellar legacies that they’re confident are going to accept an RD offer, and show the love by admitting SCEA applicants that they really want but aren’t sure will enroll even though they’ve revealed a preference by applying early.”

Can’t speak to legacies at H other than my niece who was just admitted SCEA with a good but clearly less - than - stellar ACT. She’s hooked, however, so a special case. We do know from personal experience that unhooked legacies with stellar stats at UChicago could be deferred from EA last year but accepted ED (not sure about RD).

No doubt that SCEA has its “show the love” component, similar to Uchicago’s EA. But for the stellar-but-unhooked, concerns about commitment do actually result in deferrals, if conversations between APs and GCs are to be believed. And yes, all these schools defer the less-than-totally-stellar of all stripes and even those who appear stellar so it’s a mystery as to what happened. Such is the nature of uber-selective admissions.

My point is that H’s profile of admitted SCEAs won’t look that different from uchicago’s ED and EA admits. 2/3 will be 100% on board with attending, and 1/3 will require some extra love. They are less aggressive with their early pool as a percentage of overall enrollees, to be sure. But that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.

@JHS ‘Bama also gives its NMFs a full ride and then some

@JHS That was a beautiful apologia pro vita sua. You have me totally convinced so far as it describes what you yourself actually think about the place. It made me wish I had come from such a community and thereafter made my life on those lines. I remain skeptical that it describes the way the generality of even very smart kids actually think when they go about choosing schools. Certainly a good many other posters on this board - most of them not kids - are quick to put it in other terms: i.e., Chicago is improving because it is getting to be more and more recognizably like a real ivy, etc. But when it comes to the crunch why choose an ersatz ivy - or even an ivy in the making - when you can get the actual article? Or, if you can’t get it, then you reluctantly take the step down to something as close as possible to that article. Prestige of a sort different in kind from Chicago’s prestige is driving those kids. I protest! I protest running after these students and playing catchup ball on a field that isn’t Chicago’s natural field. I protest the rankings madness that is supposed to help level the field. That’s not the spirit of the University of Chicago. That’s why I repetitively push back against such thinking and why I want to privilege the kids who are immune to its siren song. You argue that these blandishments and entitlements have already come to Chicago and are coming in ever more force and that the kind of kid who ought to come to Chicago comes for those reasons. That kid would be a kid like any other HYSP kid except for a few tweaks and differences of emphasis. That was your experience and that of your children. You are undoubtedly right with respect to the motivations of many very okay kids. However, as I read the statements of kids themselves on this board, I more often than not see the same spirit as brought me to the University of Chicago, which was of seeing it as a distinctly different sort of place than the other usual suspects. I want to foster that spirit and want to discourage, though not eliminate, the spirit of ivy wannabeness and sameness which is at the gates of this institution. Here I stand.

You guys are overcomplicating things with the need to know what breakout comes from which pool. UChicago’s rise/brand is solely dependent on its ability to get as much people really strongly interested in it, that they apply to it early and when accepted would not think twice about accepting it - just like HYPS now. It needs to be surrounded by the same volume and the same intensity of applicants that HYPS gets. (Parents dont count.)

You guys seem to think that there is one way to do that - and that is to steal all these good people from HYPS, and in order to do so Uchicago needs to be better than HYPS, or differentiated from HYPS or whatever. That is the HARD way to get there.

The way for UChicago to get there is to find these not from the population that are already engrossed with HYPS (although there will be some) but from the 99% of high school grads who NEVER apply to HYPS. That is the easier route. Get the brand/marketing going in the Midwest, where it can be king; in the South and in the West where it is less known. Cede the Northeast to HYPS, but get the dividends of rankings-sensitive applicants from that region.

That solves the volume.

Create a system where these voluminous applicants will reveal their intensity of association to Uchicago. They did this via ED and via the essays.

And voila you get the intensity part of the equation.

Does it matter that they got there via ED? To me, I dont care. And reall it does not matter. What matters if it gets to a point where it desired of volume of applicants and that the applicants that get accepted predictably enroll. And that these accepted enrollees will never look at HYPS as a better option for them.

The ideal situation is not to have overlap in its captive market with HYPS at all, so that there is no point in gauging applicant head to head preferences vs other schools. At that point UChicago would be better than HYPS be cause it would be MIT.

“Some of the rest of us might conclude, though, that limiting the overwhelming majority of their class to people who are willing to commit to UChicago means that UChicago is turning away or declining to compete for many of the most talented applicants, particularly lower-income ones.”

This is a false statement. It assumes that only HYPS applicant-types are talented. Like I say in a prior post 99% of highschoolers do not apply to HYPS and I can bet that 10% of those 99% are better than the average HYPS applicant whose ultimate defining factor is not their intelligence but the brandwhorenness of their parents.

@marlowe1 With all my respect, I cannot imagine a type of person that would not give you recognition as a UChicago graduate. You are talking about a university that holds 90 Nobel laureates. That is hilarious.
About @JHS testimony, it makes me remember my dad. He did his doctorate degree in finance/economics at UMichigan in the early 70’s. (Then he moved to Latin America, married my mom, and long story short, I now live in the US). When @JHS mentions Pinochet’s regime, which was atrocious in many ways (but incredibly efficient in the economic area, a fact that has made Chile one of the strongest economies in the continent), I remember my dad telling us that the best economists in the world were the famous “Chicago-boys,” as the economists graduated from UChicago were known in Latin America, 40-50 years ago!

My brother is in the oil business and he recently attended a conference with Pemex (the Mexican petroleum company), and many oil contractors from different countries. There he heard someone telling that the Mexican government just hired a group of the best economists in the world. Later, the person mentioned that all of them were from UChicago because “Only the best can handle the complexity of our economy.”
That is why I do not totally understand how there are people like marlove1 that suggest that UChicago is an unknown newcomer.

No, @FStratford, it’s a true statement that you’re misreading. The plain meaning of what I wrote is that there are many talented applicants and UChicago is choosing to focus only on that subset of them that will commit to UChicago. It follows from this that they’re choosing to ignore/not compete for many who might be more talented than the ones who choose UChicago.

Think of it this way: let’s say there are 100,000 super-talented kids applying to schools like UChicago every year. They’ve got all kinds of abilities and talents, at various levels. Some are brilliant in one academic area, others in another. There are future Fields Medal winners, world-class musicians, future political leaders, etc., etc., as well as a whole lot of people who do a lot of things well.

If UChicago is saying - which they effectively are - “we’re going to make 2,000 offers, and maybe 300 of those are going to people who won’t commit in advance to attend”, they’re telling anyone in this group who doesn’t rank UChicago first that it’s probably not worth the trouble of applying.

HYPS will each get 30k-40k RD apps and hand out a thousand or so RD offers with no strings attached. They’re happy to compete for all of these kids, without imposing a loyalty test. Common sense will tell you that this means they’ll see a broader and deeper pool of talent than UChicago.

I swear, the adults on the Chicago board accord more importance to the fundamentally trivial Ivy League than even the most craven high school investment banking wannabes

What the heck is “an ivy,” much less “an ersatz ivy”? I know what the Ivy League is – a sports conference (and a bit more) with eight universities in the Northeast, seven of them notable pretty much for being the oldest universities in the country that are not owned by a state government and the eighth arguably the most important 19th century educational innovator on this continent. In some ways, they are similar – full research universities, mostly committed to liberal arts education at the undergraduate level, with 5,000-7,000 undergraduates (two of them more than that, one a lot more), secular, a commitment to high academic quality and to a rich range of nonacademic activities, including sports. Sports, however, are de-emphasized compared to many other American universities. While mainly serving an affluent student base, they are committed to some level of ethnic and income diversity in their undergraduate students. They have long traditions of alumni success and leadership, in commerce, academics, politics, and the arts. They are very selective in choosing among applicants at every level. They are wealthy, comparatively well-endowed.

Except for geography and the fact that seven of the eight were founded before independence, none of those features distinguishes them much from a number of other American universities, certainly including Chicago. The 19th Century was an incredibly rich time for the development of higher education, here and around the world. Following the examples of the Universities of Virginia, Michigan, and California (and aided mightily by Congress), an incredible network of high quality public universities were built around the nation. And following the example of Cornell, a whole generation of private, nonprofit, secular research universities offering undergraduate education was established. The older universities were totally remade in their image – the Harvard and Yale of today have a lot more to do with Cornell in the 1870s than with the Harvard or Yale of 1750.

The Association of American Universities was founded in 1900 – 50 years before the Ivy League – as the gold standard for quality American universities. It was convened by the presidents of five universities – Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins – and invitations were extended to eight others – Cornell, Clark, Michigan, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale. That was the real high-prestige club 100 years ago, and to a large extent it still is (minus Clark, which was expelled from the organization for failing to maintain standards 50 years ago). That’s six Ivies, three publics, and three other privates. including the University of Chicago as one of the five convenors. It was part of the club from the outset, and still is. (Brown didn’t make it in until a generation later. Dartmouth never has.)

Why, then, so much rage about “ivies”? Why would Chicago ever be described as “an ersatz ivy” or “an ivy in the making”? What about the kids who can’t get into Chicago, and who “reluctantly take a step down to something as close as possible” . . . maybe Dartmouth or Cornell? Maybe Rochester, which has tried to imitate Chicago as much as possible?

Chicago fits comfortably into a spectrum of ultra-high-quality private universities with lots of similarities and lots of differences, a spectrum that includes the eight Ivy League members but that also includes Stanford, Duke, Rice, Tufts, Hopkins, Northwestern, WashU, maybe some others. It’s stronger than many of those in many areas, and weaker than some in some areas. It has huge value overlaps with all of them, and some comparatively unimportant differences. It’s not some outlier, and it’s not the un-anything.

On the Harvard board, every time a kid comes along and announces that going to Harvard is his or her lifelong dream and Harvard is uniquely suited to his or her personality, the adults and Harvard students tell the kid to cool his or her jets and to stop being silly. Harvard isn’t that different from any number of other places. It’s time to recognize the same thing about Chicago. It’s wonderful, it has a wonderful culture, but a kid who thinks he can only be happy at Chicago is not a kid who thinks clearly or researches carefully. There are all kinds of reasons to make Chicago your first choice, but needing to go there isn’t one of them.

Nope. Not even close, and not even taking into account that “the average HYPS applicant” does not go to college at any of HYPS.