UChicago 2017-2018 Admission's Statistic Hints

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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“What the heck is an ‘ivy’”? --You’re going all faux-naïve, literal and scholarly on me, @JHS. You could say it’s all in the eyes of the beholder except just about all us beholders know this creature when we see it. On cc we don’t even need names - first letters suffice.

It’s your habit of mind to be always seeking continuities and similarities between schools. Well and good, I see these as well. However, what’s important to me are the singularities. Noticing and evaluating differences is important for more than choosing a college. You could say about any particular person, well, he or she’s a lot like every other person out there; has a head, arms, legs; eats and drinks; lives in a dwelling; uses his mind to process his sensations; gets angry, makes love, and so on. With all these likenesses what does it matter whom I choose to love or befriend? Anyone will do. --Except only someone with a mental disorder would think like that. Attention to details and differences is the essence of being alive, and making choices among attentively observed things is how we define ourselves. As with spouses and religions and single malts, so it is with colleges - choosing one over others brings meaning, flattening them all into an indifferent melange hollows us out. Some would call this very human tendency just an instance of “the narcissism of small differences”, but that’s a reductive and petty psychologism. Was it John Marshall who said, about Dartmouth I believe, “she’s a little college but there are those who love her”? Marshall had in mind the unique qualities of a particular school and he spoke with emotion. I trust counsel was not moved to correct him on that occasion: “Your Honor, there are actually many schools in the world, and Dartmouth isn’t really that different from all the others.”

One of the reasons I enjoy this board is the vicarious participation it allows in the drama of choice taking place here. These young people seem to believe there are differences among schools and that these differences have something to do with who they are as individuals. I find that rather inspiring, and it makes me nostalgic. I believe you do too, and your command of the details is far greater than mine and far more helpful to them than I could ever be. However, we each have our work to do here.

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Tonight @JHS wins the internet.

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This sure makes for a more interesting discussion than Oxbridge and the rest…

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“Common sense will tell you that this means they’ll see a broader and deeper pool of talent than UChicago”

Your common sense does not in fact make sense, if you look at the universe of applicants as a whole, not just your own personal backyard

“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”

Like I said, the macro numbers do not bear out your claim. There are at least 100x more volume of students who dont apply to HYPS and who are better than the average HYPS applicant. UChicago wants those - it does not have to compete with HYPS for those because they do not apply to HYPS by definition. If UChicago wants them to commit by ED or by Essay, that is neither here nor there. It does not magically make them worse applicants just because. Your fascination about UChicago’s need to compete head to head and steal applicants to HYPS because in your limited personal experience make you believe they are better notwithstanding.

To put it simply, UChicago can form a class and build an application pool that is better than HYPS without having to steal 1 HYPS applicant. There are just that many great students who do not apply to those four schools.

You are assuming that a form of disclosed commitment to UChicago is a sign that the applicant is less desirable. That is is malarky.

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If the majority of accepted students come from ED/EDII/EA as was the case last year and the overall slots are decreased this year - yield will indeed increase.

Deferred EA switch to EDII looks to be again much bettter than staying in the RD pool per Nondorf’s comment.

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I would be interested in what others on this board think about the proposition that there is something vitally (not merely marginally) different between the college experience at Chicago and that at Chicago’s peers - those colleges I called “ivies” above but am willing to re-name, courtesy of @JHS 's critique, as merely the lettered schools, HYPS. Connected to this question is another one - whether a Chicago student is different from students at other places.

That was certainly once the case. One could hardly imagine the iconic status of Aristotle Schwarz - a disheveled fellow devoted to the great books and making his home in the stacks - at a school other than Chicago. That caricature was seen as such but it did correspond to some essential truth about the place, which I would describe as this: that one came to Chicago for one principal and intense purpose - to discover the meaning of things through an encounter with the great writers and thinkers. Allan Bloom briefly describes this ethos in “The Closing of the American Mind”. Chicago was not a place to make connections and acquire adornments, to be polished and shaped for the great world through extracurriculars, sports and fraternities. It was not a place you saw as a conveyor belt into professions, boardrooms and clubs. There was a horror of all those milieus and perhaps the very notion of worldly success. Hence the tropes of the “maggoty minded monk” and egghead. Chicago kids were unworldly and proud of it. The day of figuring out how to live in the world would come, but the project at present was figuring out meanings. Chicago’s traditions of general education (later called the core) and its take-no-prisoners approach to learning itself were the essence of the place and were embraced as such - at least by all who came with foreknowledge. Chicago in those days was known to a select few and many of those few were repelled rather than attracted: the repelled ones went to the lettered schools.

I will leave it to others to comment on whether any of that ethos remains at present-day Chicago. It had its faults, often discussed on this board. Yet on imperfect evidence and even acknowledging significant changes, I believe it lingers and distinguishes Chicago from its peers. I believe there’s a perennial appreciation of it, but that appreciation may be growing in a world that’s becoming more serious-minded - a little-acknowledged cause of Chicago’s increased popularity. I speculate that kids come to Chicago now as they did in the past because they see themselves as a certain type of person - as educational idealists who hunger for an intense education in the company of other kids with that same hunger. I believe this makes Chicago a different kind of place. Am I right or wrong about these things?

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Of course Chicago had – and still has – its own unique ethos and personality, as does Dartmouth, as does, well, every other college, including the dreaded single-initial ones. (And, by the way, it’s profoundly ignorant to suggest that those four colleges offer the same experience. In fact, while sharing a fundamental similarity with each other and with Chicago, they have completely different feels. Chicago and Yale are far more similar than Stanford and Yale.) It’s also the case, at every single one of those colleges, that 5,000 - 7,000 undergraduates generally selected for intellectual ability and diversity in other respects produce classes that are actually quite diverse, with subcultures that differ radically from that college’s image.

There are plenty of “Aristotle Schwartz” types at HYPS. The Yale I attended had its share of ambitious glad-handers, but the atmosphere was rigorously intellectual. People were always excited about ideas. Lunch table conversation was usually about that morning’s lectures in popular classes (which were often attended by many more people than were registered for them). People formed study groups to read things outside the curriculum together. It was a very intense intellectual experience – not at all unlike what my kids described at Chicago, which is a big part of why I like Chicago so much. But it’s hardly just Yale. My cousins more or less my age who went to Harvard include an archaeologist, a professor of Old and Middle English, a LAC political science professor, a fourth grade public school teacher (who lived and worked in Japan as a journalist for 15 years), a synagogue hazzan, and a psychiatrist specializing in gender dysphoria (a lifelong issue for him as well). Another Harvard friend has spent most of his career editing and publishing medieval English legal documents and case reports. None of these people went to college to make connections or to get jobs through their extra-curriculars; several of them may just as well have lived in the stacks. And Stanford – one of my daughter’s high school friends, who went to Stanford, was the only person his year admitted to the University of Chicago English Department’s PhD program directly out of college, based on original research he had done on 17th Century American authors.

Meanwhile, even in the pre-Nondorf era, Chicago produced the occasional Tucker Max.

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^^ If the college experience and the students at UChicago are just like those at the “lettered”, then it’s merely a matter of applying to the most prestigious one you think you can get into. UChicago, then, would become your target only if the “lettered” is slightly out of reach.

Is that the case for one young scion, whose family can point to Duke, Stanford and (I guess?) Harvard as their alma maters? Just one data point, to be sure, but kind of a big one.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21165982/#Comment_21165982

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I would love to see any sort of evidence for that statement, @FStratford. What’s worse for your argument, though, is that UChicago apparently doesn’t believe it either.

According to UChicago’s profile of its class of 2021, the middle 50% of the current freshman class had SATs between 1460 and 1550, which is the 99th percentile of SAT test-takers. The middle 50% had ACT Composites from 32-35, the 97th-99th percentiles of ACT test-takers. Obviously, the top 25% have test scores at or above those levels. About 2 million people take the ACT every year, and about 1.7 million take the SAT.

What this means, of course, is that 75% of UChicago’s class is being chosen from a pool of 60,000 ACT takers (3% of 2 million) and 34,000 SAT takers (2% of 1.7 million), or 94,000 students. By the way, that’s assuming zero overlap between ACT and SAT takers, and we know there are plenty of people who take both. I’d guess the size of the pool is more like 85,000 - 90,000.

Furthermore, if you compare the average stats of the freshman classes of HYPS to UChicago, you’ll find they’re quite similar - and each of them is getting 30,000 - 40,000+ applicants per year, most of whom presumably are from this high-stats cohort. In other words, all of these places - HYPS and UChicago - are getting many if not most of their apps and filling most of their classes from the same pool of fewer than 100,000 people. That enormous pool of fabulous kids who would prefer UChicago to all others and not apply to HYPS doesn’t exist - or, if it does, UChicago isn’t very interested in it, if their admissions practices are any guide.

https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2021
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Multiple_Choice_STEM_Ranks2016.pdf

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@JHS I admit to being profoundly ignorant in many ways but not in that particular way. Sure, the individual cultures of schools differ within the lettered group, sure the individual kids at all schools differ among themselves. That’s sort of Human Observation 101. I do believe - a belief you are disputing - that there are more than marginal differences between the Chicago culture and that of those schools, though the difference is, well, not exactly the same as between Chicago and each school considered singly. Surely that difference in each case has something to do with the dread word prestige, or as some on this board have called it, brand, which almost everyone except you claims to be inferior at Chicago. Some of it surely has to do with rich alumni and their positions of power and a whole plethora of connections to establishment institutions. Some of it has to do with amenities, EC’s, sports, fraternities and the stigma or lure of “where fun goes to die”. Quite a lot must have to do with the irreducible fact of the Core: the Core must act as a powerful turnoff for many bright kids just as it must attract many (but probably not so many) similarly bright kids. However, there will be characteristic differences of personality between those two groups of smart kids. Do I really have to go through the entire list of such things, so often written about on this board? You yourself mentioned Chicago’s once fabled harshness and lack of amenities as a turnoff for you personally. I like your stout defence of the place, and I understand why you want to blur these hateful distinctions. Indeed, I acknowledge that they have in fact blurred over the last half century. I also grant the general proposition that differences often seem greater to the pondering and perceiving mind than they really are on the ground. I have a friend who swears by Lagavulin but won’t touch Laphroaig despite the rather miniscule differences in peatiness and iodine content between those two single malts. Not saying that the differences between Chicago and Yale are miniscule, just that in the small subset of elite colleges which includes them (as in the subset of Islay single malts) differences don’t have to be large to be noticed and to lead to real preferences. These preferences in turn lead to clumping of the like-minded. Thus are cultures formed and fortified.

I reckon I could be profoundly ignorant about this as other matters. Anyhow, it would be nice to hear from some current or prospective students - or the parents thereof - as to whether they chose Chicago because they thought it was different from other schools, especially the lettered ones.

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So, I’m a parent of a entering first year this September. Early in the process, he did consider P and to a lesser extent H. We live 30 miles from P, so we have been to campus many times and my brother-in-law is a graduate of P. While, not the main reason, but a reason that my son says UChicago was considered of P and H, and also (w)illiams was the following statement, which I am trying to directly quote, but might not get the words exactly right:

“At P, H, and (w) the students were obviously very smart. The campus was great and the facilities were awesome. But, the students acted like they knew they were smart, almost in a smug sort of way. At Chicago, the students didn’t act as they were better then everyone else.”

He also stated he loved the guiding principles behind the Core. The overall impression that they are going to help him learn to think better, not so much “what to think.” He loved the uncommon essays! He felt that there is a changing of the guard in Higher Education and that UChicago was moving in a positive direction where some of the Old Schools were not.

The sample size was not scientific UChicago tour guide vs. the other tour guides, students on open panels in admissions events, etc. were really all we had to go on before he applied ED1 to UChicago. Additionally, on our visit for the prospective student event, we walked up to the Rockefeller Chapel and the first person to greet us was Jim Nordorf(sp?), he was very polite and genuine in greeting us individually. Every interaction with UChicago in the process (coaches, members of the team, etc.), the representatives just were polite, professional, and genuine.

Now for Athletic reasons, H & P were never an option and my son didn’t/wouldn’t pursue H or P, but he did rule out w because of the student culture and athletically w is a little better than UChicago in the DIII space.

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@BrianBoiler my DD experience was very close to what you describe in her visits (especially Princeton), and it has proven itself out during her first year with all the non pretentious students at UChicago.

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I’m a long time reader and first time poster. My son is a second year at UChicago, class of 2020. First, I’d like to thank all of the perennial posters on this board as you have all been extremely helpful, and entertaining, as we went through the college selection process.

My son chose UChicago for the following reasons: (1) a strong attraction to the theoretical focus. He is a math major and prioritized schools that had a strong theoretical math program and didn’t treat math primarily as a customer of science and engineering. (2) He didn’t want to attend a school where sports, partying or greek life was a big deal. (3) He romanticized an extremely difficult curriculum and (4) he loved the idea of “life of the mind” and spending free time discussing philosophy and others substantive topics with friends. He liked the idea of an environment where learning was more important than career preparation.

His two top choices were UChicago and Caltech. I think MIT might have been a top choice, but he didn’t care for the focus there on engineering. I think he saw it as the opposite of UChicago and he found it very attractive that UChicago had refused to add classic engineering and business because they were too “professional”. He recognized that Harvard and Princeton both had excellent math programs, but did not think he would be comfortable with the culture as he perceived it at those schools. Yale, Columbia and Stanford were less attractive to him for various reasons.

He found the Chicago emphasis on theoretical knowledge and learning for the sake of learning unique and very attractive. Additionally, he studied the math curriculum of the top 25 schools and that played a key part in his decision. I really don’t think prestige was a primary factor. He had a strong idea of what he wanted, and perceived that UChicago and Caltech were the best matches.

I’ve read threads where it is stated that Chicago doesn’t compete with Caltech or MIT but I don’t agree with this. Math is the third most popular major at UChicago and math and science majors make up approximately 35% of declared majors. Add in economics at approximately 24%, of which MIT has an excellent program, and ~60% of UChicago’s declared majors are in areas that compete with MIT. Admittedly, this doesn’t equal 60% of students due to double majors, but it is significant. Similar to my son, I suspect that many who select UChicago, have relatively specific reasons related to their area of interest, for wanting to attend.

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I am an incoming freshman, and I’ll explain my journey to UChicago.

At first, I applied EA just because this was the best school offering a guaranteed scholarship for an award I won. After doing a bit of research, my interest started rising. I loved their unparalleled conviction to free speech compared to other elite private schools, the immense beauty of the college, the fact that it is located in a major city, the fact that Levitt (I love freaknomics) taught there, the apparent lack of arrogance, the opportunity to take classes at Booth as an undergraduate, the quirky sense of humor from the essay prompts, the focus on intellectual diversity and debate, the fact that the Core will force me to get a intense and deep education, and I could go on.

So I changed my application to ED1. As a junior, I was planning on HYPS (especially S because I live in Cali). Don’t get me wrong, those schools are great. But after my research, I just saw something special at UChicago that those schools didn’t offer. The prestige or brand name doesn’t really matter for me. Honestly I would have been estatic to attend a top 40 school, let alone UChicago. I know that I have the opportunity to achieve great success from a college like this while also being part of a community whose values match mine.

So yes, UChicago is special compared to other elite universities, at least for me.

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My daughter never even looked at HYPS, though she was certainly encouraged to. She chose UChicago because everything about the place just clicked for her when she visited. Now, she’s the daughter of two UChicago grad students so inherited traits and preferences do account for something. But she’s also very much her own person. She wanted scholarship money, so applied EA last year. When she was deferred, she got the hint and switched to EDII. Because UChicago met our need, everything turned out for the best.

Now that she’s there she is working very hard and NOT following in her parents’ footsteps. Hasn’t chosen a major yet - that’s actually one reason she liked the place, as she knew her areas of interest are all top-rated and that she had a bit of time to figure it all out.

I have to agree with posters who say the big difference they saw at UChicago was that the kids are genuine, love learning for the sake of learning, and didn’t act as if they were Smarty McSmartpants. Anecdotal but this is not only my impression but also that of academics we know who have taught undergrads at UChicago and elsewhere. This may well change going forward but our friends genuinely enjoyed teaching UChicago undergrads WAY more than other top schools. The kids were more genuinely interested in the subject, more engaged, etc. They tended not to leave the topic behind in the classroom - their education was more important to them than their weekend or specific career plans. From what others are saying on this board, it appears that this culture is still alive and well at UChicago - and that’s simply wonderful news. Obviously, UChicago kids get great jobs upon graduation. What’s refreshing is that they aren’t at UChicago JUST to get a great job. They are there to learn.

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“What this means, of course, is that 75% of UChicago’s class is being chosen from a pool of 60,000 ACT takers (3% of 2 million) and 34,000 SAT takers (2% of 1.7 million), or 94,000 students”

Using the same math you used on UChicago, 75% of Harvards class comes from approximately double the pool, say 198,000 (4% of 1.7 million, I’m assuming their ACT is comparably lower too.) Yes, Uchicago already has better SAT stats, especially if like your example you want to use the lower 25% mark.Reversing the number, that 75% of Harvard’s class accounts for 0.93% of their SAT scoring peers (or 1 in 107, see 100x is not so far fetched, but that is just the beginning!) If we include the lowest 25% that 1 in 107 ratio will definitely balloon up, since we know that the lowest 25% at Harvards are where the dumb jocks and legacies are.

Now since we all know that the applicant pool is worse than the accepted pool, why is it so unbelievable that “There are at least 100x more volume of students who don’t apply to HYPS and who are better than the average HYPS applicant.”?

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" If the college experience and the students at UChicago are just like those at the “lettered”, then it’s merely a matter of applying to the most prestigious one you think you can get into. UChicago, then, would become your target only if the “lettered” is slightly out of reach."

Only if you are brand ho, would you go for the brand.

If you are a, “rational applicant”, you go for UChicago because same benefits (undifferentiated product assumption) at the highest chance of success (higher acceptance rate vs HYPS).

btw, I dont believe that the 5 schools (CHYPS) are undifferentiated, but I am just going with the assumption.

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@FStratford - sameness in college experience and type of classmate does not imply an undifferentiated product as varying assessments of prestige can obviously still exist. In that case, for the simple reason that you get a better outcome for the time invested in the institution, you go for the most prestigious. Unless, of course, you are risk averse and willing to settle for a bit less right away in order to avoid uncertainty. BTW none of that is “irrational”, with all due respect to Thaler. Never underestimate the signaling value of a price (in this case the admit rate).

Your scenario is different, in that the two colleges are absolutely equivalent (experience, classmates, outcomes, etc) but have different brand identities and therefore different admit rates. It’s easy to understand why one might be ‘irrational’ to choose the name brand over the equivalent “store brand”; however, in a world of assymetric information, “rational” agents can certainly do so. I agree that with perfect information your conclusion is correct, but then there most likely wouldn’t be different rates of admission in that case :slight_smile:

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@FStratford: if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that (i) because there are 107 people in SAT range for every one in the top 75% of Harvard’s enrolled freshman class, and (ii) that ratio increases if you add in the bottom quarter and (iii) the applicant pool is worse than the accepted pool, that (iv) your earlier claim that “there are at least 100x more volume of students who dont apply to HYPS and who are better than the average HYPS applicant” is believable.

That doesn’t follow, as I hope you can now see. Showing that there are significantly more than 107 students theoretically in SAT range for Harvard for every student actually enrolled at Harvard proves nothing about who applied to Harvard, who didn’t and how those groups compare to each other. To get anywhere near your “100x” claim, you’d have to prove somehow that a very large number of the students in Harvard’s theoretical SAT range who didn’t apply to Harvard were actually “better” than those who applied, got in and enrolled. Even if you had the information to investigate that, and had some reasonable definition of “better”, I’m very confident you’d be proved wrong.

But what you actually said, though, is that there are at least 100x more students who don’t apply to HYPS and are better than the average HYPS applicant, and that statement is absurd on its face. Here’s why:

Last year, each of HYPS had between approximately 31,000 and 44,000 applicants, and among them the four schools had close to 150,000 total applications. Let’s assume that a large number of students apply to more than one, and ballpark the number of unique applicants at 75,000. For your statement to be true, there would have to be 7.5 million students (100*75,000), who were “better” on average than the 75,000 HYPS applicants. 7.5 million, as discussed upthread, is approximately twice the total number of students who take the SAT or ACT each year. Surely you understand now that your assertion makes no sense.

That aside, though, my earlier points stand: HYPS and UChicago are filling the vast majority of their classes from the same pool of about 100,000 academically elite applicants (and that’s certainly borne out by what I see in my corner of the private school world). UChicago is apparently requiring the vast majority of the students it admits to commit to enrolling before it will admit them. Most of the students in that academically elite group of 100,000 aren’t willing to make that commitment. Accordingly, UChicago is restricting itself to a narrow subset of that group, even if all the ones willing to choose UChicago have similarly high stats.

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@DeepBlue86 Your thesis is that the greater the number of applicants within a certain range of SAT, GPA and like measurements, the higher the quality that will ultimately be accepted and attend the institution. Thus, if Chicago’s admissions policies have the effect of limiting that first number, this necessarily results in a decline of quality of the latter number. You therefore believe that’s the wrong move. Do I have that right? – If so, my thought on this would be what you might expect from my previous postings: I see the limiting mechanisms as refining the pool of potential applicants to screen for those who aren’t the Chicago type. That’s a good thing in my book as long as that gross reduction or screening of numbers doesn’t depress the objectively high qualifications of the kids actually recruited. There seems to be no indication this has happened, but it bears watching.

I doubt that my privileging of the “Chicago type” cuts much mustard with you. Would you give that factor any weight at all? That would seem inconsistent with your general line of thinking, but it matters to many of us who don’t see Chicago as simply a school no different from other schools (vide prior discussion). If the Core were eliminated, Chicago would no doubt attract even large numbers of quality applicants. Should the Core therefore be eliminated?