Never thought I’d be in a position to defend MIT’s admission practice, but I’ll try, even though it’s a little off topic.
If you take out athletic recruits, most sought-after URMs, and true academic superstars (IMO, IPhO gold metalists, etc.), MIT’s EA admit rate is no higher than RD admit rate (MIT’s EA admit rate is 6.9% this year, 7.8% last year, BTW). MIT defers almost all other applicants so that 1) it doesn’t disadvantage RD applicants, and 2) it can properly evaluate each applicant without the time constraint placed by EA notification deadline.
Is MIT worried that you’re too brilliant for MIT? Gimme a break.
Thats great, but how about universities that just do rolling admissions, isn’t that even fairer? Contrary to popular opinion every school does what’s best for the school. MIT’s admission policy works for MIT, maybe that’s because they are primarily an engineering university.
@CU123 There’s a proliferation of rankings because they sell, as simple as that. Yes, there’s demand for them, but that doesn’t mean they have been helpful. I’m sure there’re reasonable people on both sides of this argument. But this is again off topic for this thread. Perhaps we can start a new thread in a more general area on CC.
"how about universities that just do rolling admissions, isn’t that even fairer?
No, that practice is unfair because the university would have to make an admission decision BEFORE all other applicants who haven’t applied. Schools that do rolling admissions tend to be the least selective and they just want you to apply.
The fairest would be to do away with early admission all together, but that would ruin every applicants’ holidays, not just some of them, I guess.
@JBStillFlying - “Bullying” was my husband’s choice of words - I said “strong-arming.”
And yes, deferring a perfectly qualified applicant that has applied EA and telling them that if they really want to be accepted, they should apply ED2 amounts to strong-arming them. Either accept the kid or don’t accept them. Do what HYPS and M do – let them choose you over other schools with all of the data at their disposal. Don’t back them into a corner, insinuating that their best (or perhaps only) chance to get in is by forsaking all others. It’s just wrong.
If UChicago really, truly wants to know that they are students’ first choice and if the school truly want to be considered in the same league as the “lettered” schools, they should, as I said earlier, put on their big boy pants and go SCEA rather than paying lip service to EA and strong-arming the RD applicants – many of whom had likely applied SCEA to HYPS or perhaps applied EA to M – into switching their apps to ED2.
And, while I don’t mind your snark (I’ve shown enough of my own with my “big boy pants” comment), I do think that both your analogy and #E(D)Too comment amount to a straw man.
I’d be all for getting rid of any and all ED programs. I have no problem with EA and SCEA, the power imbalance of ED in general and ED2 in particular, especially when coupled with EA deferrals.
I’d love to see something like the British system or Med school ranking systems. You are limited to 5 (maybe 10) schools that you rank in order, only one of which can be Oxford or Cambridge (or in the US, a lettered school)
Why go SCEA? So UChicago can be exactly like HYPS, undifferentiated in every way. No, UChicago is doing what’s best for UChicago. Admitting top students whose first choice is UChicago.
Meritocracy doesn’t exist in holistic admissions. Problem here @1NJParent is that your looking at this through a lens of not having UChicago as your first choice. Your looking through it as having HYPS as first choice then UChicago. UChicago is being magnanimous in saying that you can apply early to whatever college (including HYPS) you want and see if they accept you. If not and you think that UChicago is the place for you you can apply ED2 or RD to the college. ED2 is a second chance for those who want it. I don’t see this as unfair or sad.
As with so many of the rants on this board against the Chicago admissions system, this one imagines a one-size-fits-all level of conformity among the group of elite colleges always vulgarly called “the big boys”. The Bard would not have approved of that level of systemization. He broke the rules, for which the theory-ridden 18th century critics punished him. Take your inspiration, dear @LoveTheBard , from the Bard and not from his detractors.
Every school ought to design the system that works best for it, given its history, objectives and the maintenance of its identity. If that system is going to be organic and healthy, it will not be fixed and unchanging, and it will not be the same system as that of other schools. Chicago’s many experiments with almost every aspect of its educational philosophy and practice over many years make it a very special instance of this more general truth. Is it so surprising that Chicago would design a similarly experimental and perhaps idiosyncratic admissions system? Chicago has always done things like that, and it has always upset the established schools. In the 1950’s the President of Harvard, in vetoing an entirely merit-based system of admissions, needed to give only one reason for doing that: “It would make us like the University of Chicago.” So it has gone throughout Chicago’s history.
I vividly recall Charles Gray, one of the most thoughtful of my profs at Chicago, expounding the contrarian views of the great English historian, Sir Lewis Namier. Sir Lewis told us that to understand an institution we need to examine in fine detail its thick texture and identify its special genius. The life of great institutions is not in slogans or in abstract panaceas, such as “one man, one vote” or “every elite school should go SCEA.” The people who urge the latter on this board generally do not value or else outright deny the special qualities of the University of Chicago. They have no interest in its history and no desire to perpetuate whatever is unique in it. For them the College ought to go into the hopper with all other elite colleges, there to fight it out for dominance, as if we were dealing here with lobsters in a cage. Or, more aptly for the present discussion, as if the choosing of a school, one of the more important things any young person does, was simply a matter of entering a lottery and taking the best on offer at the end of the day. If you believe the top schools are all more or less the same, then that’s logical. I don’t believe that. Sir Lewis Namier would not have believed it. Nor should anyone believe that the act of choosing is oppressive for the chooser. It is actually what makes us free, and that’s a good lesson to learn at the age of 18.
"And yes, deferring a perfectly qualified applicant that has applied EA and telling them that if they really want to be accepted, they should apply ED2 amounts to strong-arming them. "
No it doesn’t. It implies that they figured this qualified candidate applied ED somewhere else. Which happens to be true. Hey - maybe HE bullied THEM! LOL.
“Do what HYPS and M do – let them choose you over other schools with all of the data at their disposal. Don’t back them into a corner, insinuating that their best (or perhaps only) chance to get in is by forsaking all others. It’s just wrong.”
@LoveTheBard - wouldn’t quite put HYPS in their with M - as SCEA is actually restrictive as well.
UChicago uses it’s early admissions and ED options more aggressively than other schools but that’s a difference in degree, not kind. And - ED is more honest. You can divide the SCEA-admitted pool into two categories that will look remarkably like what UChicago sees for their ED and EA admits. One group will be a practically 100% commitment; the other needs the school to show a little love because they are going to be looking at other offers. Wouldn’t be surprised to find the relative proportions equivalent as well (2/3 die-hard commits, 1/3 need/want to shop). So they are basically doing the same sort of sorting as Uchicago’s ED and EA, only with these guys you are locked up w/r/t other schools till they’ve gotten a chance to look you over and see if they like you or not. And somehow it’s NOT coercive or taking advantage to shut a kid out from the first half of the college application season? If a recruiter came to campus and pulled that on the kids seeking jobs or internships they’d be in serious trouble.
@CU123 HYPS may or may not be my first choice. It all depends on what I wanted to study if I were an applicant. As I stated earlier, I’m not wowed by prestige. I would think and analyze on my own, rather than being brainwashed by some college propaganda materials. CC boards are supposed to be the places to help applicants find what’s best for them, not places to disseminate propaganda.
@JBStillFlying I wouldn’t go so far to say that UChicago bullied me, but the guidance counselor certainly strongly suggested I switch over to ED2—I kind of gave it no thought though. I just assumed she would say that to everyone. Though you are right that I applied ED somewhere else. Though, I’m not quite sure I “bullied” them. Although, my mid-year update I sent to the counselor might have been a little excessive in that I probably talked to much about how I’ve been expanding on my own theory which I call “Atheist Delusion Theory” —feel free to PM me if you want to know about it—I guess that could be considered as bullying. LOL.
@LoveTheBard I do like the idea of switching to the UK system and applying to a few schools and ranking them. Though, only picking one of the lettered schools might be difficult for some. Choosing between applying to Oxford or Cambridge last year was incredibly difficult for me; I think I ended up doing “eenie meenie minie moe” (is that how you spell those?). The schools have so many similarities in certain regards that applying to one over the other might seem difficult. This system would certainly help with schools determining if they are an applicant’s top choice or not. I agree that the ED system is pretty immoral, and I feel bad saying that I can apply ED because my parents can afford to pay for my education. I also find it ridiculous that high school seniors feel pressured into applying ED because they think it’s the only way to get in. One of my friends last year really wanted to do SCEA to Princeton, but his mother kept telling him to do ED to Penn because there was no way he could get into Princeton SCEA and there was no way he could get into Penn RD (He ended up getting into Princeton SCEA and Penn RD, so he proved her wrong), but that’s just abhorrent.
“If UChicago really, truly wants to know that they are students’ first choice and if the school truly want to be considered in the same league as the “lettered” schools, they should, as I said earlier, put on their big boy pants and go SCEA rather than paying lip service to EA and strong-arming the RD applicants – many of whom had likely applied SCEA to HYPS or perhaps applied EA to M – into switching their apps to ED2.”
Interesting thing about those EA and RD -admits last year: they probably had no more than about a 33% yield (by pretty decent guesstimates). There’s actually another way to view all that “lip service” and “strong-arming” and that would be allowing those who had a strong preference to UChicago to signal that by applying ED. It’s pretty clear that those who didn’t most likely weren’t the most interested in attending.
As to “really, truly want(ing) to know that they are students’ first choice” - not sure what someone can do more than apply ED for that. And being “considered in the same league as the ‘lettered’ schools” most likely isn’t something that UChicago is striving for. My guess is they don’t want to shoot that low.
How appropriate that Marlowe be schooling The Bard, @marlowe1 (and perhaps vice versa)
To deny that Chicago has been gaming admissions for that coveted notch up in the USNWR ranking and/or to say that ED is the same as SCEA is ludicrous. We have come a very long way since the time when UChicago refused to use the Common App and didn’t play games with EA and ED, and we’ve come an even longer way from when fun used to go there to die. And, yes, they have every right to experiment in any way they see fit, as do I have a right to criticize their experiments. Forcing a kid to make a choice without all of the available data at hand is not allowing them to be free. It’s advantaging the school at the expense of the applicant and advantaging full-pay students over those that want to compare offers.
Things could have easily gone the other way for @takacatboy’s friend, much as they did for one of my D’s classmates. Given Penn’s penchant for filling up more than half it’s class with ED applicants, this kid probably should have applied ED to Penn; he decided instead to apply SCEA to Stanford and applied RD to Penn. Ended up not getting into either,
Chicago is the perfect school for the right kid (and would be an awful school for the wrong kid. I, for one, would have hated it; my husband loved it. I believe that @takacatboy will love it there). As a friend of mine is wont to say, “That’s why they make ice cream in both chocolate and vanilla!” Ben and Jerry’s alone list 51 flavors of ice cream (and that doesn’t include frozen yogurt or their non-dairy options!)
“Immoral” and “abhorrent” were words I used to freely throw around, @takacatboy. That was before An inspirational Prof at Chicago, Norman Maclean, started red-pencilling those words with the comment “Excessive and feeble. Save this language for life’s true enormities.” That’s the sort of lesson - one of many - that a first-rate education teaches. It also teaches the distinction, @1NJParent , between argument and bald assertion. I’ll let you decide which of those constitutes propaganda.
@1NJParent Like I have said, some find it distasteful to receive mailings from colleges trying to get your child to apply. Personally I don’t, I learned quite a bit from those mailings (including HYP). All the top schools send out mailers to students to inform them of what they have to offer. Top students normally go to college so they should be made aware of opportunities (you would be surprised how many high school students don’t know top schools meet full need). Somehow I think that it irritates those who are already aware of the colleges they want to go to or it irritates those parents who don’t think there child has the credentials to get in. There is no doubt that UChicago suffers from a lack of recognition that HYPS has, so how do you correct that…marketing.
@marlowe1 Thank you for that. I have a politician as a father, so I’ve kind of gotten in the habit of “strongly expressing” my opinion in all situations —it’s unscrupulous that you ate all the brussels sprouts, it’s simply atrocious that you forgot to turn that lamp off! I’m incredibly excited to go back to school though—even if it means just learning small lessons like that.
@CU123 Very random, but I actually loved receiving college brochures. I didn’t particularly like the ones from my local state school, but I loved UChicago’s. I particularly remember one that talked about Richard Thaler winning the Nobel Prize in Econ and something about relating econ with unicorns and Selena Gomez and such. As well, those brochures are incredibly handy for writing the “why this school” supplement. So many of them tell you about random programs at the school, and they can be really handy for inserting them in the supp. Plus, my brother and I like to make up stories about the stock photo looking students.
That was a pretty neat quip, @LoveTheBard . You can’t be all bad!
With your talk of “gaming” and all the rest of it you simply go once again down the primrose path to admissions hell - the assumption that none of these very substantive admissions levers and mechanisms were designed for any other purpose than “gaming the rankings”, the golden calf before which we all must bow. Fie upon it!
However, I do agree completely with your last paragraph. Choosing a college because its ethos suits you is what it’s all about. I happen to love Chicago and don’t hesitate to say so. I don’t denigrate other schools - except for those cesspits, the lettered ones!
—it’s unscrupulous that you ate all the brussels sprouts, it’s simply atrocious that you forgot to turn that lamp off! I’m incredibly excited to go back to school though—even if it means just learning small lessons like that.