Do those accepted off the Z-list become the following year’s A-list? Or are their stats not part of the published numbers? My impression of J-frosh is that the admitting schools can skip over their stats or avoid tabulating these kids in the admit rate for reporting purposes (especially if the description is for " this fall’s entering class"). The Z-list seems distinct from this scenario - not exactly a back door since you are considered part of the following year’s entering class. That suggests having a decent-enough application (stats, EC’s, essays) to be admitted normally but they just ran out of room this year. Question: are those RD kids or deferred kids? Guessing RD (because if the app. was strong enough to be admitted, they would have been so had they applied earlier).
I agree there can’t be that many of them, although as few as 15 in any given year can bump up the yield a notch if “Enrolled” includes Z-listers from the prior year but “Admitted” is from the current admission cycle. Normally the university would report this activity on the Common Data set report but if you don’t make that report available then who’s to know?
@FStratford Have to agree with @exacademic, none of the other schools’ yields are in HYPSM territory since they are achieved through ED. Yield is a meaningful comparator only among schools on the same level/with the same admissions policies etc. Comparing HYPSM yields (even RD yields) with the lower top 10 tier of schools like Columbia, Penn,Chicago etc is not super meaningful. On the other hand comparing overall yields amongst HYPSM and RD yields amongst the next tier of elite schools can yield some meaningful insights.
@DeepBlue86 I dont think accepting the vast majority (75-80%) of the class early, and especially ED, sends the message that Chicago is somehow on HYPSM level now, quite the opposite really, it reinforces the established view that Chicago is part of the lower half of top 10 group. But Chicago is already established in this group so that is why I do not see the benefit of their strategy. Besides jumping from the second tier to HYPSM is something next to impossible for any school and requires much more than a decrease in acceptance rate and increase in SAT scores.
@Penn95 I don’t think so either. At least not yet. When UChicago only had EA it was ~5 points behind Princeton. Now that it has ED it is 5 points ahead of Princeton.
What this implies, to me, is that a switch from EA to ED1/2/EA is worth ~10 points. UChicago has to have a yield that is 10 points above Princeton to be within the lower range of HSMYP cluster. (Or perhaps a little less since the EA vs SCEA baseline favors Princeton a little)
Who knows what happens next though. This past year, I bet the AdCom learned a lot about applicant behavior because of this forced segmentation of applicants. They can definitely use that learning this year. I’m pretty sure that one of the findings would be that the complexity of having at least 8 segments (ED1, EA, ED1 to ED2, EA to ED2, ED2, ED2 to RD, RD, Waitlist) has messed up their messaging and dampened application volumes in the all-important RD round. If they fix that and implement narrower target marketing, then not only can they improve the applicant experience but they can also attract more of the “right fit” to apply.
Ten years from now, this would be a great case study.
I agree with all that, @Penn95. I think UChicago’s yield will get a bump this year, they’re now competing using a similar (if more aggressive) arsenal to those of peers like Penn and Columbia and the switch to ED will help them target the class more precisely. It won’t make them a member of the HYPSM club in most people’s minds, though, and it has a cost in terms of potentially reducing RD apps and removing the ability to compete for many top RD applicants. I think they’ll find they’re hitting a ceiling. That said, they can exploit the niches of being arguably the top school in the Midwest and the most exclusively academically focused and least politically correct liberal arts-focused university in the top tier, for those who are looking for that.
Oh, and another thing - if you fill more than three-quarters of your class ED, inevitably it will skew toward full payers, since ED admits basically give up the right to compare fin aid offers. Maybe UChicago has consciously decided they want a wealthier student body less dependent on fin aid; it seems likely that will be the result if admissions in future years are handled the way they apparently were last year.
In this perpetual controversy over the modalities of admissions I see the expression of two distinct Weltanschauungs.
Many sincere friends of the College want it to become the Midwestern super-Ivy, a C added to HYPSM. They therefore want to see it attract proportionally more kids drawn by the allure of an ascending general prestige rather than anything special about the place itself. Many of these kids will be from the eastern seaboard. Many will be applying in the RD pool because they have failed to get into the elite school they really wanted to go to. They will be objectively very good students, and most will embrace at least some aspects of the unique Chicago educational experience once they arrive. However, their true model, the fatal Cleopatra from which they will never quite free themselves, is the Harvard or Yale that rejected them. If that’s your model for the College, you will believe it’s a good thing to have large numbers of such kids on campus. You will want to see campus culture devolve accordingly, so that these kids will feel less isolated at Chicago and the new Chicago will itself attract more of their kind. You will feel that you have history on your side, given John Boyer’s narrative of the failings of the old College and given the statistical successes of the plan implemented over the past two decades. Indeed, rankings and statistics will be at the core of your analysis.
Another sort of Chicago well-wisher treasures the uniqueness of the old place and wants to see it preserved through the recruiting of students who have signed on to that uniqueness. Such students need not be the stereotypic one-dimensionsal brainiacs of yore. Indeed, part of the reason in my view that the College has risen in popularity in recent years is that a greater proportion of the world’s smart but not utterly unworldly kids have come to long for a Chicago-style serious education than was the case in Chicago’s bad patch - the decades that followed the sixties. I don’t know how to measure this, it’s just a hunch. The world - at least the world of the smart and thoughtful - is becoming more like the world of the University of Chicago. If that is so, it would be a shame to undercut and dilute the very features that are drawing these kids - drawing them in sufficient numbers that the early admission regimes which identify them are filling the class with high-quality true Chicago believers faster than anyone could have thought possible. I am far from convinced that the result will be a cherry-picking of rich kids and athletes (time will tell), but by the same token rich kids and athletes can be as smart as the rest of us - and some of them can also be true Chicago believers and not fearful of using their minds in the way a Chicago education encourages. In this world view rankings and statistics matter much less than maintenance of the essence of a Chicago education, and C will forever remain separate and apart from HYPS.
@marlowe1 The majority of people associated with Uchicago (including the administration) are pushing for the university to become associated with HYPS. The truth is that 1) students at those schools are just as committed to their education as those at Uchicago and 2) the “old” College wasn’t attracting the same numbers of the world’s top-notch students like the new one is. A lot of brilliant students would like a serious academic education without being overwhelmed, and they would like to have time for extracurriculars and social activities as well. If Chicago was still the way that it used to be I wouldn’t have even applied. But because of the incredible place that the university has become over the past 15-20 years, I applied and accepted its offer of admission.
It’s easy to get this impression from the contacts our administration encourages, and as a prospective student I’m guessing Admissions was in touch often enough.
Nobody’s agitating to move the College to Alaska so we can remove distractions like socializing and exploring the city, but the picture Levi Hall paints isn’t the full story. There’s a healthy contingent of student activists who loathe the administration, and many more who have serious misgivings about individual decisions, the administration’s lack of concern for the surrounding community, and especially the push to convince the Coastal Elite™ that we’re just like HYPS. Attract enough of those students, and we might get more than Dean Nondorf bargained for.
No doubt there are many serious students at HYPS, but a narrow group of industries (consulting/finance at HYP, tech startups at S, with a fair number of consultants at S and startup types at HYP) is hoovering up a huge share of graduates. Nothing about those jobs is incompatible with rigorous studies or a commitment to learning, but students who aspire to enter these industries (particularly finance/consulting) are more likely to consider schmoozing just as important as studying. This is a general feature of those industries, as well as a campus meme that (in my experience) definitely has some truth to it. Hence the recent rise of Greek life and (in some dorms) weaker house culture.
Every school will have some of these students, but when they reach a critical mass, academics and Chicago’s campus culture may be affected. At a school where academics (and an unorthodox approach to the same) is the College’s defining trait, that possibility shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Class of 2016 Outcomes Report - Industry Outcomes:
Business & Financial Services 27%
STEM 16%
Public Policy and Service 14%
Consulting 11%
Education 11%
Journalism, Arts, Media 8%
Healthcare 6%
Other 4%
Law 3%
Interesting that there is no mention of the Ivy’s large varsity teams and that impact on their yield. As example, Harvard yields 42 varsity teams and 20% of each class is a recruited athlete.
Very difficult to have a true apples to apples comparison in my opinion.
Congratulations, @bluesky100. You’ll have a great ride during the next four years - one you’ll cherish so much that one day you’ll want to tell a younger generation about it! As @DunBoyer says, stay skeptical of the received wisdom you hear about (and in some cases, from) the University and keep your priorities straight. The struggle to understand and the pleasure of friendship have always been the main events at the University of Chicago.
Harvard indeed has 42 varsity teams (more than any D1 school - the other Ivies are lower, e.g., Yale has 35 and Princeton 31 - UChicago has 20), but although 20% of Harvard students (i.e., about 1,200) participate in intercollegiate athletics, only about 800 of those (or 13% of Harvard students) are athletic recruits.
The Ivies don’t offer athletic scholarships (neither does UChicago, to be fair); if they did, one imagines their yield would be even higher.
Re the push to convince the Coastal Elite that we’re just like HYPS.
In this particular moment, I think UChicago’s strong suit wrt attracting intellectual students is precisely that it represents an alternative to Coastal Elite culture. If it loses that selling point, it risks becoming “just like HYPS only less prestigious” (cf Columbia but without NYC).
I have often thought there’s something especially “Midwestern” about the ethos of the University. It’s a serious school in a part of the country where people are stereotypically prone to earnestness, straightforwardness and an absence of irony or high style. In a secular educational institution these qualities translate into an unironic idealism about learning and an ethic of laboriousness. Rather than snappy dressers it produces spiky thinkers. Add to the bad haircuts, bad shoes and bad Saturday nights a whole lot of bad weather and a notoriously “bad” neighborhood (a dull college town nestled inside an enormous slum) and you have the legend of… the University of Chicago!
That’s the source of the “where fun goes to die” tag and the reason why for years Midwestern kids - not all of whom are Midwestern in aspiration - have gone off to fancy schools on the coasts (or to Northwestern, for the timid). There will always be those longing to escape all that hard work and sombreness. By the same token many an eastern kid has turned up at UChicago without forewarning of what he was getting in to and had a miserable time of it (I knew some of those kids). But here’s the point, prompted by @exacademic 's observation: there’s also a hunger out there for this midwestern-flavored educational idealism - and not only in the Midwest itself: I also knew kids from the East who had come to Chicago just to get a dose of it. There will always be kids with a longing to be serious and a fearlessness of hard work. In the hedonistic me-generation seventies and eighties they were thinner on the ground, and the College suffered a decline. Now they are back. Keep faith with them, Chicago!
@marlowe1 et al : I have been reading this thread with great interest as my son is getting ready to apply to the class of 2022. Over this past weekend we visited Pomona, USC, UChicago and Northwestern. Together with previous visits to HYPM, Columbia, Cornell, JHU and an assortment of small colleges including Amherst & Swarthmore we believe we have covered the gamut of the selective colleges.
Of all these, my son picked UChicago as his first choice for all the reasons that marlowe1 so eloquently summarized above. He is in the top 10% of his class at a top STEM school in NJ and also plays the sax. His scores and grades are good enough to meet the requirements at most of these schools. I gathered from your posts that applying ED to Chicago is the way to go but I don’t recall seeing the acceptance rate for ED anywhere. Is it in the ballpark of the others (15-25%) or lower?
Yale, Swarthmore, Pomona & Princeton are his other dream schools and we are trying to figure out the EA/ED/RD math that will best serve him. Would appreciate any and all input and my sincere apologies if this is off-topic !
@MentorDad - UChicago won’t be publishing stats for the class of 2021 till the fall. It is highly unlikely that they will release ED admit rates as the’ve never officially released admission data from the early pool in the past. However, I suppose you never know, given that the admission plans changed so thoroughly this past year. So it’s a wait-and-see.
Admissions has shared unofficial numbers and percentages with the families of accepted students at various events beginning in Jan/Feb. for the ED/EA families and culminating with the April Overnights at UChicago. From these we have heard that the total number of early applications (EDI/EA) was in the ballpark of 13,000, total applications was around 28,000 (down about 10% from the previous year), the ED1/EA admit rate was about 9% with about 2/3 of that ED1, the overall admit rate is about 8%, and the RD admit rate (including all new RD applications and all deferreds from the early pool) about 2%. They have shared no information concerning EDII.
So, to summarize: 28,000 total applications, approximately 2240 admits, 800 of which are EDI, 400 are EDII, about 1040 or so are EDII and RD. From working through the numbers it’s pretty clear that there was a very large difference between ED/EDII admit rates and EA/RD. For many applicants it might have come down to whether they committed ED (that was true for my own kid, who was deferred EA, changed her application to EDII, and was subsequently accepted). Can’t help but think that sizable gap will diminish - perhaps significantly - this upcoming year as more applicants figure ED is the way to go. If that happens, you’ll see ED admit rates more in line with other schools. But this past year they were likely higher than that.
Tons of discussion about all of this on the other threads so peruse away. Good luck to your son!
Thanks @JBStillFlying. My head is spinning from all the reading I’ve been doing on the other threads but if I recall correctly, ED acceptance rate has been deduced to be around 30% which compares favorably with the ivies. As you point out, that is likely to go down this year because of the expected increase in ED applicants.
The best chance of acceptance seemed to be EA/ED2 , but that was last year. If he has two top choices then I would go that route, EA to Yale or Princeton or Pomona…then ED2 to UChicago. My daughter chose that route even though UChicago was her first choice (wanting to maximize her chances at two schools, and that she would be perfectly happy at either). If UChicago is the first choice by a good margin then I advise ED1.