73% is definitely in HYMPS territory since Yale’s. MIT’s and Princeton’s is in the 70s.
Not sure if yield at 73% makes UChicago break away from the other top schools though since UPenn and Columbia are likely going to break into the low 70’s this year too. We shall see.
A 10 point jump in yield because of this ED/EA “experiment” is interesting. It would be cool to see the data that admissions is seeing. (Makes one guess that if MIT goes ED, it would have the highest yield of all top schools)
Here’s a sampling of top schools.
HYMPS
Harvard University 84% (2021, SCEA)
Stanford University 82% (2020, SCEA)
**University of Chicago 73% (2021, EA/ED1/2)
MIT 74% (2020, EA)
Yale University 71.4% (2021, SCEA)
Princeton University 68.5% (2020, SCEA)
Other Top likely hitting 70’s this year:
University of Pennsylvania 69% (2020, ED)
Columbia University 65% (2020, ED)
**University of Chicago 63.7% (2020, EA)
Other Top not likely hitting 70’s this year:
Dartmouth College 61% (2021, ED)
Notre Dame University 56% (2020, EA)
University of California Berkeley 55.5% (2020, none)
Northwestern University 52.9% (2020, ED)
Cornell 52.7%Georgetown University 49% (2021, EA)
ED/EDII certainly provides an advantage in the admissions process, but keep in mind that the average ED/EDII applicant is significantly more qualified than the average EA/RD applicant. Does anybody know when Uchicago will be officially releasing their admissions stats for the Class of 2021?
I honestly don’t follow the logic that ED/EA applicants are a much stronger pool. If I am a strong applicant assured of getting into many schools wouldn’t I apply RD so I have a choice? It seems that if I am an average candidate I would apply ED/EA to maximize my chances? No?
UChicago has stated in the past that their early pool candidates tend to show more enthusiasm and have better quality essays which is a big hint that they feel their early pools are stronger. We heard this from Admissions last year, before the application plans changed.
Early pools at all the top schools contain a greater proportion of hooked candidates (e.g., recruited athletes and legacies - maybe less of an issue at UChicago than elsewhere) and are skewed to kids who are smarter about the process and have a record that’s good enough so that a strong first semester of senior year isn’t necessary to make the case. Accordingly, the average quality of the pool is higher than in RD, so the apparent advantage to applying early isn’t as great as it looks, if you’re unhooked. That said, if UChicago handles things this year the same way they did last year, you’d be well advised to apply ED if you want to go there.
OK so better quality essays, I get that, but overall qualifications (scores, GPA, EC’s) these are still the most important but literally every top college claims that their early applicants are stronger if not “much stronger” than the RD applicants. Taking out all those with hooks (which doesn’t mean stronger and in a lot of cases can mean weaker) it still doesn’t pass the logic test as to why the overall pool is more “qualified” then the RD pool. More motivated, yes, but that doesn’t mean more “qualified”. JMHO
@CU123 So, most colleges claim that their ED applicant pool is stronger than their RD applicant pool. This could mean that there are more “qualified” candidates in the ED pool as some have suggested. But I always took it to mean that there are also fewer “unqualified” candidates in the ED pool. Both have the same effect in making the ED pool stronger relative to the RD pool.
@CU123 could be a selection thing. For instance, those who are nearly straight A’s or already have very high standardized scores or did their EC’s throughout High School (not just first semester senior year) don’t need to wait for the RD deadline. There is probably a strong correlation between those attributes and having it together enough to know where to apply early.
Yes I can see it being a combination of the two, those who are ready and want to commit/ find out early are probably more qualified then someone who is unsure/unmotivated to get all the work done early.
@CU123 - when I say the early pools tend to have higher “average quality” than the RD pools, I mean that on average that they contain a higher proportion of kids who have good-to-very-good chances of being admitted. Included in this are the well-prepared kids with already-very-strong records who are savvy about the process, as well as the hooked kids, who often don’t have the best stats but stand out for having something the school wants (e.g., the recruited athletes). By the way, one subset of the hooked kids - the legacies, who tend to apply early - contains many members who have really strong stats, often better than the pool as a whole. Sure, many legacies are underwhelming, and most get denied, but quite a few are as smart as you’d expect kids of UChicago alumni to be. And some of their parents are involved/big donors, which helps too.
The RD pool, which is much larger, also contains a lot of highly-qualified kids, but has many more who are less-well-prepared or who are relatively less-qualified and just taking a flyer. Accordingly, the average quality and admit rate of the RD pool are lower.
The UChicago ED pool is likely more “qualified” than the RD pool in a different sense than the ones mentioned above: A fairly significant number of these applicants must be especially attracted to the qualities of a Chicago education that make it a bit different from that of its peers - the uniqueness of the core, the academic ambitiousness of students and faculty, the privileging in campus culture of serious study over extracurricular activities. All other things being equal Chicago wants to identify and recruit kids who show a knowledge and desire for its sort of education and ethos, not simply kids looking to get into the best elite school they can.
In recent history, it is very doubtful that Chicago’s EA pool was in fact better qualified than its RD pool, because the RD pool was full of people who had applied SCEA to one of HYPS. Of course, there were probably lots of marginal applicants in there, too, but I suspect that there was a stratum of ultra-high qualified applicants in the RD pool who didn’t show up in similar numbers in the EA pool.
Of course, the ED-II gambit is designed to capture at least some of those people. But it’s hard to believe there aren’t still a bunch of people in the RD pool who are there because they haven’t given up on a legitimately decent chance of acceptance at HYPS or MIT or the equivalent. @marlow1 and others here may argue that Chicago doesn’t want those kids, but I don’t see why not.
I wonder if your first statement is right, @JHS, because in recent years, as has been noted elsewhere, UChicago has been sending out a staggering amount of direct mail to potential applicants. I’ll bet a lot of the resulting apps are unrealistic, such that on average the RD pool is less qualified even if there are a lot more HYPS-targeting kids there now.
I agree, @marlowe1 - although I think it can be argued (and has been, on various threads) that some of that uniqueness is being scrubbed away as the school and students come to look more like HYPS. Until UChicago gets D1 sports, though, I think they’ll still be clearly differentiated in the ways you describe.
Separately, I’d suggest geography is relevant, too, and that nowadays many more top-quality kids from the Midwest are likely to choose UChicago over HYPS than was historically the case.
We met a couple of HYPS RD-admits at one of the local UChicago admitted events so UChicago seems to want at least some of them Perhaps it depends on the kid’s application - having a special talent or partiular hook. IIRC, one was very gifted at a particular non-athletic EC - discussing it on the way home, we guessed that he/she had been REA-deferred, then waitlisted, from #1 and was accepted RD to #2 and #3 so checking both of those out. If course, this is just a guess but it’s a reasonable narrative to explain how some kids might be striving for an Ivy and yet are still accepted to UChicago (and may well attend, for all we know).
Thar was certainly the case for a nice young matriculant we had lunch with on the admitted student day who was cross admitted with MIT and decided on UChicago. I also think that UChicago’s marketing budget, fly-ins and generally raising the awareness of the college in general has made a significant impact on the quality of the students coming in.
“On average” is really a red herring here, and you know it, @DeepBlue86. If Chicago gets (a) 3,000 ED applications, of which 500 would be legitimate top-flight candidates, and which generally track the measurable stats distributions of enrolled students, and (b) 25,000 RD applications, of which 3,000 are legitimate top-flight candidates, the top 18,000 generally track the stats distributions of enrolled students, and 7,000 are basically below minimum acceptance standards, then it will be absolutely true both that (x) the average qualifications of the ED pool will be much higher than that of the RD pool, and (y) the class will likely be weaker if 1,000 students are admitted ED and 700 students are admitted RD to fill 500 slots.
The question isn’t which pool has better average stats. The question is which pool is a richer source of desirable students to admit.
I don’t disagree, @JHS - but what I’m guessing (we don’t have the stats) is going on at UChicago nowadays is that between ED1 and ED2 there are enough top-flight candidates to fill something close to half the class and more than enough “generally-stats-tracking” ones to fill the rest. Because the game there seems to be to maximize selectivity, yield and average stats, the question is how much of the class to admit ED. The answer last year seems to have been: a lot more than any of the peer schools.
Virtually all of those admitted ED will enroll, and UChicago can cherry-pick the ones it wants, but if they admit too much of the class that way, the number of RD apps will crater (since the RD admit rate will be lower than Harvard’s or Stanford’s) and selectivity will suffer - quite apart from the fact that UChicago will be declining to compete for many of the best candidates, since it will have already filled too much of the class in the ED rounds. Moreover, I think the average quality of the RD pool might go down, since some of the smartest kids will figure out that it just isn’t worth applying.
The way I think UChicago is trying to deal with that issue, though, based on some anecdotal evidence, is to waitlist lots of top-tier RD candidates - many more than they can take - and indicate in waves (based in part on demonstrated interest) that they’ll make them an offer if such offer will immediately be accepted (i.e., ED3). If you’re a top-tier candidate and you like your chances of a third bite at the ED apple if none of HYPS works out for you, you might consider it a good use of time and money to apply RD to UChicago, notwithstanding the daunting-seeming odds.
UChicago did admit some waitlists to the class of 2022 (i.e. offered a gap option and accepted some who switched their applications to that) so there’s your ED3, @DeepBlue86. Or, more accurately, ED-Nought since it pertains to the following year.
Pretty much everyone handles waitlist admits the same way, i.e., you commit informally or you don’t get the official offer of admission. The Z-list gap year option is less common (although many colleges offer waitlist admittees admission beginning second semester), but I don’t think that distorts things terribly.
Perhaps it depends on the kid’s application - having a special talent or partiular hook. IIRC, one was very gifted at a particular non-athletic EC - discussing it on the way home, we guessed that he/she had been REA-deferred, then waitlisted, from