UChicago 2017-2018 Admission's Statistic Hints

@DeepBlue86 Those numbers don’t seem very high in relation to size of the entire group of admittees. I never claimed there were none.

@CU123 I’m sure these star applicants would consider multiple factors when finalizing their decisions. Prestige may be one of the factors, but certainly not the only factor. Why would they be applying to UChicago that requires them to commit, unless there’s some significant inducement that only UChicago offers?

I agree with @ThankYouForYourHelp.
My point (up thread) was not that it was impossible to get into more than one of these schools, but that it’s EXTREMELY unlikely (yes, even among the “top” students) and that the idea of “shopping” among offers is not something that is happening when strategies are being formulated. The decision to apply to any of them SCEA is the equivalent of an ED decision. It just is. I can tell you firsthand that that is exactly how the conversation is framed at the “lettered” boarding schools, with students who are more than viable candidates at HYPS.

@booklady123 Boarding schools are different. They’re in the business of sending as many as their students to the top 20 colleges, so they don’t want their students to compete with one another at any particular college. They’ll tell student A that he’s best fit at college 1, student B is best fit at college 2, etc.

@booklady123 Boarding schools are different. They’re in the business of sending as many as their students to the top 20 colleges, so they don’t want their students to compete with one another at any particular college. They’ll tell student A that he’s best fit at college 1, student B is best fit at college 2, etc.

@1NJParent: Of course, and they are pretty honest about that (well, my kid’s school is). But that’s not really relevant here. The fact is that RD admittance is a longshot for most unhooked candidates, regardless of being “academic elite.” Their best shot is their November 1st choice, whether it’s SCEA or ED.

@booklady123 If SCEA and ED are equivalent, would doesn’t UChicago adopt SCEA? We all know the answer why it doesn’t: the yield would plummet. But why so obsessed with the yield at the expense of not getting the best students?

Each cross-admit pair is around 10% of total admits to both places, which is significant. As to whether they’re hooked, undoubtedly some of them are, but what difference does that make? Someone said that there weren’t meaningful numbers of cross-admits, and there clearly are.

By the way, cross-admits aren’t likely to be in the biggest hooked group (recruited athletes), because those usually commit somewhere and aren’t formally admitted anywhere else. Also, recall that if legacies (another big group of hooked candidates) are cross-admitted, they’re probably superstars, since the hook only works in one place and they got into two. The number of development cases is very small, so doesn’t really matter. The other big hook is URMs - but my anecdotal impression is that the ones who are cross-admitted tend to be very strong, academically or otherwise.

Anyway, I’m not sure what that has to do with my fundamental point, which is that many of the strongest candidates - academically or otherwise - are justified in believing they might get multiple bids from tippy-tops, and therefore will be deterred from applying to a school that many consider an HYPSM peer but which isn’t their clear first choice and is basically telling them that if they aren’t willing to apply ED they probably shouldn’t bother. Not sure why that point is controversial.

As I’ve said elsewhere, in my neighborhood, UChicago’ market niche is very strong academic candidates who compare well to the HYPSM pool overall but don’t jump to the top of the pile (in part because they tend to be unhooked, but also because they’re really smart but generally not off-the-charts geniuses). They apply ED to UChicago, get in and go, creating a very strong intellectual climate, albeit a more homogeneous, narrowly-banded one than HYPS. I get it that others’ mileage may vary.

So in the end, IMHO, HYPS tends to get the strongest of the hooked applicants, which is quite different then the strongest academic applicants, that I can definitely agree with.

@booklady123 If SCEA and ED are equivalent, would doesn’t UChicago adopt SCEA? We all know the answer why it doesn’t: the yield would plummet.”

This is an absolute LIE. When UChicago was only EA, its yield was only 6% lower. That is not “plummeting” by any definition of the word.

"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, "

Well, you fail to account that while the number of 96%ers may double or triple if all applicants are figured in, the sub 96% will increase at a much much higher rate.

@1NJParent The yield was fairly close to Princetons/Yale’s before UChicago added ED. So I guess if that is plummeting…

@1NJParent: “If SCEA and ED are equivalent, would doesn’t UChicago adopt SCEA? We all know the answer why it doesn’t: the yield would plummet.”

The strategy may or may not be equivalent for the school (am making no claims toward that end), I am saying to you the strategy is the equivalent for the applicant. What I am saying is that students are not choosing to apply SCEA to HYPS for the sole reason that it gives them “freedom to consider other offers” as was mentioned long ago in this thread. I think no matter which school they choose to apply to on November 1, it is their first choice. It would be insane for them to do anything differently other than apply to their first choice school. An assertion was made in this thread a while back that students were choosing SCEA because it gave them more freedom in the application process. That’s absurd.

The thing is, @CU123, being an off-the-charts genius isn’t traditionally considered a hook, but it is, because you can’t teach talent. As we know, there are about 100k top-one-percenters, who are the cream, but five thousand or so of those are the film on the top of the cream, the right hand tail of the distribution. Those kids are choosing HYPSM and Caltech in overwhelming numbers relative to any other schools, and the rest are scattered here and there, many at state schools because circumstances steered them that way. I’ll acknowledge that I can’t prove it, but I firmly believe it.

UChicago has been playing the yield game long before it added ED. If an applicant appeared to have other better options, s/he would likely be deferred. Of course, UChicago is not the only college that plays the yield game.

I don’t care how much of a superstar a student is, no college counselor worth their salt is going to say to a student, “This school you’re considering has a binding admissions policy — don’t lock yourself in! Better to play it safe and apply SCEA to HYPS, so you can compare offers when the other school makes you an offer in RD.”

RD admits for unhooked candidates are slim, and are like winning the lottery. Even after a removing the no-hope pool. Look at second post in this thread! That’s how this whole conversation started, with Nondorf saying how tight those odds are. That includes the best and brightest. There just aren’t enough spots left.

HYPS and MIT/Caltech are the only schools that don’t track applicants’ demonstrated interest, don’t offer merit scholarship inducements, don’t play the yield game with ED, and don’t restrict applicants’ final college choice. If UChicago wants to be considered in the same league, it needs to do the same.

I don’t have a dog in this particular race, but I do have a few comments. I absolutely do consider UChicago at the level of HYPS with respect to “brand,” “prestige,” etc., and, perhaps equally or more importantly, level of intellectualism (for lack of a better word) and appreciation of “the life of the mind.”

Over the course of my D’s very successful sweep of the “lettered” schools last year that ultimately included an RD Chicago admission with merit and FA, as well as many full-tuition merit offers from arguably next tier schools (e.g., WUSTL, Vandy, USC, Grinnell), she met no shortage of cross-admits that had choices similar to hers. (In answer to @DeepBlue86’s question, she is what I might call “lightly hooked” (as a Latina) with an interesting story, a 1580 SAT/35 ACT and a 4.7 GPA. While not a hook per se, she was also coming out of TASP which probably worked well in her favor admissions-wise; the only other kid at her high school to get admitted to more than one HPS (not Y) and UChicago was unhooked, but was an exceedingly bright kid with published creative writing, etc. with perfect scores on standardized testing).

In the many months between her SCEA admission to Yale (where she did NOT end up going) and up until May 1st, she was in constant contact with no shortage of former TASPers and other scholarship finalists that she met along the way. Many of these students were grappling with similar choices as she, and they were able to compare notes and share experiences along the way. She and her cohort of cross-admits found no qualitative difference in the level of intellectualism (again, for lack of a better word) among students at UChicago and those at HYPS; she did feel that the students at the next tier schools, while bright and clearly accomplished, where perhaps a notch down on the intellectualism scale than those she met at UChicago and at the “lettered” schools.

There are no shortage of students for whom UChicago is a first choice. We know two that applied ED 1 last year; one got in, the other did not and ended up as a Davidson Belk Scholar (not a bad consolation prize). Most cross-admits, however, chose HYPS over UChicago. Granted, this is a small sample size and is anecdotal at best so one can’t draw too many conclusions, but I the data show that among lettered cross-admits, H and S generally get the nod. (Obviously those that would have selected UChicago as a cross-admit might well have done so de facto by applying EA or ED).

That said, I am not a big fan of ED programs as I believe that it advantages the schools more than the students. To be honest, I think that UChicago games the system a bit and that if it truly wants to swim with the big “lettered” fish, it should put its big boy pants on and go SCEA or REA. But, as with most things in life, YMMV.

I agree with @1NJParent: “HYPS and MIT/Caltech …don’t track applicants’ demonstrated interest, don’t offer merit scholarship inducements, don’t play the yield game with ED, and don’t restrict applicants’ final college choice. If UChicago wants to be considered in the same league, it needs to do the same.”

A Latina with high GPA, test scores and writing skills is not “lightly hooked.” That is about as solid and desirable as a hook gets. The only way the hook could possibly be stronger would be if she were first generation and homeless.

But let’s be intellectually honest here - minority/URM students with high scores/GPA/essays are just about the most highly sought after candidates out there. This is not a common case. White and Asian applicants - especially boys and especially those from families whose income is equal to or greater than average - will not receive remotely the same reception and they are acutely aware of this when they calculate their chances and form their admissions plan.

@booklady123 First of all, there is a world of difference between EA and SCEA/REA. UChicago used to do the former, HYPS do the latter (I’m not going to discuss MIT or Caltech as those are not necessarily competing for the same students owing to their STEM focus.) Now, they are upping the ante in the admissions game by adding ED1 and ED2.

Moreover, I vehemently disagree that "no college counselor worth their salt is going to say to a student, “This school you’re considering has a binding admissions policy — don’t lock yourself in! Better to play it safe and apply SCEA to HYPS, so you can compare offers when the other school makes you an offer in RD.”

That’s precisely what my daughter and the other “academic superstar” (if you will – not my terminology) at my D’s school high school did, and ended up being HYPS + UChicago cross-admits.

We discouraged our D with her GC’s blessing – and recommendation – from applying ED to ANY school. She applied SCEA to Yale and chose NOT to go there. SCEA is a whole different animal than ED (or even EA).