UChicago 2017-2018 Admission's Statistic Hints

It’s just not intellectually honest to argue that ED doesn’t significantly reduce the quality of the applicant pool on average, compared to HYPS’s SCEA/REA pools or MIT/Caltech’s unrestricted EA pools. The most talented applicants will surely value the option to attend or not if admitted. The optionality is highly valuable because it allows the applicant to compare different offers and to examine the schools (and/or departments) in greater details, rather than to face the obligation to attend. It’s just basic economics.

You’re getting closer to it, @marlowe1. My point is that those 100,000 or so academically elite applicants aren’t identical - they have a range of talents and defining characteristics - and the more of them you can target, the more likely it is that you’ll land anyone with any specific talent or defining characteristic.

If they were identical, and more than 1,650 of them were willing to commit to enrolling if admitted to UChicago, then I agree - UChicago can admit only those who will commit, and know that their class will be as good as any they could select from the pool, and that all the ones they’ve admitted have chosen UChicago and really want to be there.

If, however, the students in the pool aren’t identical - and of course they aren’t - by requiring the students it admits to commit to UChicago before being admitted, UChicago is ruling out a large proportion of the academically elite pool and thereby reducing the likelihood of landing any student with any characteristic that the whole group doesn’t share.

If, say, 5,000 of the 100,000 are willing to commit to UChicago if admitted, UChicago restricts its offers to that group, and there are a range of talents/characteristics held by 5% or fewer of the 100,000, then the odds are that UChicago won’t land anyone with those talents/characteristics. That makes for a less diverse and potentially less talented class (if, as may well be, some of the most talented kids, or kids at the high end of the academically elite spectrum, are unwilling to commit to UChicago).

Maybe UChicago doesn’t care; perhaps, as far as it’s concerned, if more than enough academically elite kids are willing to commit to UChicago, whichever ones it gets will do, because being academically elite and willing to commit to UChicago are the highest values. It’s undeniable, though, that imposing a requirement to commit restricts the range of talented students they can target.

I think the notion that the HYPS SCEA process allows top students to continue to “weigh offers” from other schools during RD is preposterous.

The odds of unhooked candidates, even the most qualified ones, being admitted to HYPS during RD is astronomically low. NO student can bank on admission to any of these schools in RD. It’s a literal roll of the dice, regardless of qualifications.

While HYPS do not have binding EA programs, they ARE still restrictive. Students are removing themselves from ED contention at all other schools in order to apply SCEA at HYPS - which means they are asking students to commit in practice if not on paper. They have already made their ED choice before November 1, even if they aren’t required to send in a deposit until May.

No student, no matter how qualified, would risk applying SCEA to these schools if they were not comfortable with it being their one and only. Moreover, I would argue that if HYPS all changed to binding early decision programs tomorrow, the same pool would still apply to each.

Weeellll, @booklady123, I would quibble with that, because it seems to me that if an unhooked candidate applies SCEA to one of HYPS and is admitted, one could reasonably infer that their odds are a lot better than “astronomically low” of being admitted to one of the others RD. Number one, a large chunk of those who apply RD are no-hopers, eliminated on first reading, so the odds aren’t nearly as daunting as they look; number two, if you back out the hooked candidates who are admitted in the SCEA round and the slots held for them, an unhooked candidate who’s admitted SCEA is clearly the class of the field and would have stood a very good chance of being admitted if they’d applied RD (in fact, the schools often say that the standards are the same in both rounds, but only they really know if that’s true).

An unhooked kid who applies SCEA to HYPS is either unrealistic or so good that they feel capable of disregarding the clear admissions boost they’d get from applying ED somewhere else. If they truly are that good, they may well be able to weigh offers from more than one of HYPS. @LoveTheBard’s daughter appears to be one such example (although I don’t know if she was hooked).

To add some anecdotal color to @DeepBlue86 's excellent analysis:

Other elite colleges have any number of people who don’t “belong” there, because the admissions department is free to admit people for whom that college is not their first choice, but many of those applicants wind up not being accepted by their first choice. There’s a frequent CC poster, gibby, who had one child who desperately wanted to go to Harvard, and another who desperately wanted to go to Yale. He had one kid at each university, but in both cases it was the “wrong” one. (I’ll let you guess which one had a great college experience and was grateful for the switch, and which one didn’t and wasn’t.) One friend of my kids’ was set on going to Princeton, where she was a multi-generation and multi-sibling legacy; oops, Harvard. Back in the day, one of my friends had a huge crush on a woman at Dartmouth – an arty-hippy, super-academic Orthodox Jew who didn’t drink or ski.

Those counter-type people increase the diversity of the student body and the depth of the college experience for everyone. Most wind up loving the college they go to, and finding that they can pursue their interests in a very satisfactory manner there. But few, if any, of them would be willing to commit to an against-the-grain college as their first choice.

If 75% (or more) of Chicago’s class comes from people willing to commit to Chicago as their first choice, that’s got to make for a student body that’s less diverse in terms of interests and personalities. Maybe that’s OK with some of the Chicago partisans, though, who seem to cherish the notion of Chicago students as some special race of dwarves or vampires that never see the sun (except maybe now through the dome of the Mansueto reading room)

@DeepBlue86 I don’t think you ever got around to answering my questions, which leads me to think that your numbers-driven analysis doesn’t really capture what really matters to me - recruiting Chicago-type students and maintaining a Chicago-style education. If we must speak the language of Wall Street, then I would agree that Chicago does indeed have a brand - and a valuable one - very different from the brands of the lettered schools. That brand doesn’t have mass appeal. It is targeted to a certain subset of really smart kids. I emphatically believe that the brand is worth maintaining and that the educational experience it is based on is precious. That’s something that perhaps only a student or alumnus of the place can truly appreciate. Frankly, there’s no reason why you, whose heart belongs to Harvard, should appreciate it.

@FStratford is on to something when he points out just how many highly qualified kids are out there and findable under almost any regime. Not all of them live on the coasts, where the seductive appeal of the lettered schools is greatest. An admissions policy that suits Chicago doesn’t need to roll up mountainous surpluses of the well-qualified. It only needs enough of them, and then it needs, not only through early admission but through proper analysis of every individual application, to recruit specifically for Chicago. That doesn’t mean that every kid accepted will be cut from the same cloth - there will be athletes, young tycoons, introspective dreamers, fiery radicals and many another type. As Aristotle would put it, those qualities are “accidental”. Underlying will be “substance” - commitment to Chicago educational values. Each otherwise diverse type will not be diverse at all in having an appreciation of and susceptibility to a Chicago-style education. The thing about losing ED is that even if it opens the applicant pool up (in theory a good thing for the reasons you and @1NJParent give) the admissions people thereby lose the very valuable tool of being able to discern with certainty that everything a kid says about being especially devoted to Chicago’s idea of “the life of the mind”, etc isn’t just words and moonshine.

I want to call out some statements I think are misleading @FStratford made.

The bottom 25% of each Harvard class by standardized test scores certainly includes a bunch of athletes and some legacies. But it’s unlikely to include most legacies. Yale has said for years that the average test scores and GPAs for its legacy admits are higher than the equivalent numbers for the class as a whole, and I sincerely doubt Harvard is any different. Certainly at the anecdotal level that I have seen, that’s the case. My last relative to attend Harvard was a second-generation legacy (through her mother and grandfather), but she was also the top student in her class at Harvard-Westlake, and she was also accepted at Stanford, Yale, MIT, and Princeton, at none of which she had any hook. (She’s anything but an investment banker; she’ll be joining a university faculty in linguistics later this year, with a very math-oriented approach to linguistics.) It has often been reported on CC that Harvard has internal numbers showing that without any special consideration it winds up admitting Yale and Princeton legacies at about the same rate it admits Harvard legacies through its legacy process. That strongly suggests that legacies aren’t overrepresented in the bottom quarter of the class by test scores.

From what I have seen, in addition to athletes that bottom quarter has a bunch of people with similar types of talents: great musicians, actors, artists. There are others, too. One friend of my kids who was admitted SCEA to Harvard was someone I considered an automatic admit – really, really smart, driven, tough. She was a war refugee who came to the U.S. at 14 with no money and almost no English. When she applied to college, her CR SAT I was 600 (which had been a significant improvement from the 400 she had scored the year before). Her Math score was 800 every time, and she had 800s on all her SAT IIs and 5s on all APs. Notwithstanding her problems with English, she was #2 in her class in a very competitive academic magnet high school. That’s the kind of person who populates the bottom 25% at Harvard. There aren’t thousands of people like that out there who are not applying to Harvard.

Sorry, @marlowe1 - I meant to do a follow-up post to respond to your questions, but didn’t get around to it.

I would certainly give the “Chicago type” factor some weight, and I’m not suggesting eliminating the Core. As I’ve said before, UChicago is one of the world’s great universities, and there are undoubtedly some tippy-top candidates who prefer it to all others, some of whom are “Chicago types”.

I guess I’m with @JHS on this point, though - I think you can find Chicago types at all of HYPS (and many other schools) and it’s not obvious to me that UChicago is (particularly nowadays, after years of Nondorf) very different from those peers and others, or uniquely congenial to the Chicago type. Looked at up close, all these schools and their student bodies are unique; from a lot closer than ten thousand feet, they all look pretty similar.

My central point, though, is that in an effort to look as selective and preferred as the others, UChicago is clearly doing things that are making its student body narrower and less diverse. In some ways, the UChicago student body now looks more like HYPS’, with fewer of those Chicago types, but seems to be increasingly tilted toward a narrow slice of its peers’ (high-stats, unhooked, not sporty, full-pay). One can argue about whether that’s good or bad, but it’s certainly happening.

On a final note, I’m amused to hear that “[my] heart belongs to Harvard” - I can assure you that I’m deeply conflicted on that subject!

"One friend of my kids who was admitted SCEA to Harvard was someone I considered an automatic admit – really, really smart, driven, tough. She was a war refugee who came to the U.S. at 14 with no money and almost no English. When she applied to college, her CR SAT I was 600 (which had been a significant improvement from the 400 she had scored the year before). Her Math score was 800 every time, and she had 800s on all her SAT IIs and 5s on all APs. Notwithstanding her problems with English, she was #2 in her class in a very competitive academic magnet high school. That’s the kind of person who populates the bottom 25% at Harvard. There aren’t thousands of people like that out there who are not applying to Harvard. "

@JHS Yes, there are - they just live outside the NE coastal area. A 2013 study by researchers from Harvard and Stanford found “the vast majority of high-achieving, low-income students do not apply to any selective college. There are, in fact, only about 2 high-achieving, high-income students for every high-achieving, low-income student in the population. The problem is that most high achieving, low-income students do not apply to any selective college, so they are invisible to admissions staff.”

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2013a_hoxby.pdf

If you believe the prime desideratum and final cause of a college is diversity, you will want to cast the large net envisaged by @JHS and @DeepBlue86 . Of course it helps if it’s Harvard casting the net. Any net would do. I myself consider that sort of diversity desirable but only as a by-product of the primary mission of a college such as Chicago, which has never preened itself on producing titans of business and politics, with therefore a special obligation to balance the equation. In Aristotelian terms that effect is an accident, not the substance of the thing. The Stagyrite is never wrong.

“Even the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love”…[for UChicago, apparently]

The point I was making softly above, @marlowe1, is that “diversity” also means “potentially including the positive tail of the distribution”. The academic distribution of that super-elite group of 100,000 has a right tail which includes the best of the best, and if UChicago is only looking at the 5% of the entire pool who will commit to UChicago, it’s implicitly declining to compete for a lot of the academic superstars.

Unless you believe that in the minds of the academic superstars the desire to go to UChicago (and maximize their chances of doing so by committing to enroll) outweighs their hope to have multiple choices among the top schools (which hope may be justified by their talent), the academic superstars are very likely to be underrepresented at UChicago relative to its peers that don’t require a similar commitment. For UChicago, allocating most of its admits to people who will commit to attend (the nice characterization is “reserving most of its spots for people who truly love UChicago and want to be there”) trumps casting the widest net to get the best of the academic best.

@DeepBlue86 you should really look at the SCEA students accepted to Harvard thread here on CC to get a feel for what type of students that Harvard is looking for in the SCEA round. Remember a couple of things, Harvard doesn’t have much more to go on (essays is what we don’t see) then what is posted (stats and EC’s).

@CU123 Academic superstar applicants are unlikely to post their stats here on CC. They’re too busy and too modest to do that.

I don’t deny that a few of them might apply ED to UChicago because their love for UChicago or receiving some sort of merit scholarships that only UChicago offers, but most of them will unlikely to commit themselves to UChicago without testing the waters of HYPS or MIT/Caltech. UChicago is going to lose all these potential applicants.

From my anecdotal experience, the admit rates for all of these schools have dropped so low that the idea of someone applying SCEA and then “choosing” where they want to go is an illusion. I currently know about a dozen students at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT and UChicago, and not a single one them were admitted to multiple ones of these schools. Nearly all of them were admitted EA, and then shut out of the rest of these five schools in the RD round (I don’t know anyone at Princeton but I suspect the same is true there). I know we all read about that guy in the newspaper who got into multiple elite schools, but I really don’t think it happens nearly as often as some might think. That’s what admission rates under 10 percent on huge pools of qualified application is going to do.

For me, this at least calls into question the underlying premise made by @DeepBlue86 - even if it is accurate, the effect is likely to be minimal on the overall quality of the class.

I mean those academic superstars can just apply RD. Even though the acceptance rate is so low, I’m sure especially with the junk applications being removed and the fact they are supposed superstars, they should get in.

@1NJParent actually what happens is that “academic superstars” (which is misnamed since we know perfect stat kids are regularly denied, “high school superstar” may be better,) look hard at the universities for fit (majors, profs, location, etc.) because they know they will have a good shot at getting into there first choice and they apply early. Those that are simply chasing prestige are the ones that have the most trouble getting into HYPS. Not saying that the “superstars” won’t choose Harvard or Stanford but they will take a close look at several schools. Even with that it seems rare that an applicant gets in multiple HYPS without a hook.

@ThankYouforHelp experience is the same as mine for those I personally know.

@CU123 I’m talking about true academic star applicants, not just ones with perfect test scores/gpa, etc. which are meaningless at this level. Those applicants are accepted at multiple of these schools and are not by chance. UChicago is not competitive with these applicants, and is in fact conceding them to HYPS and MIT/Caltech with its admission practices.

@1NJParent I’ll just have to disagree since I’ve talked with students who where accepted to HYPSM and elected UChicago and to a person they had very specific reasons they chose UChicago. You are selling these brilliant students as prestige chasers, as star applicants they are much more than that, they really do look at the universities strengths and weaknesses, not just the letters HYPSM.

If you go to page 20 of this report to the Stanford Faculty Senate from the dean of undergraduate admissions (from 2014, so close to today’s conditions), you’ll see that there are meaningful numbers of students who are admitted to multiple members of HYPSM every year. Stanford takes this very seriously and monitors their win/loss percentage closely: https://stanford.app.box.com/s/y4abufqg66nte7uax6eq

@DeepBlue86 yes the chart shows sub 200 numbers and I’ll bet the farm the majority have hooks (these are hooked applicants, not necessarily superstars). BTW all schools do this.