UChicago Admission Rate EA/ED

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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  1. I think you may have that wrong, @JBStillFlying. My understanding last winter was that they were nowhere near 400 EA admits, and 400 was a pretty good number fro ED II.
  2. Note that the administration documents recovered from a trash can and published by the Maroon indicate that there has been a sharp drop in prospective applicants visiting. I posit they are facing the predictable fallout of what they did: No one wants to apply EA or RD anymore with a 2% chance of success, and relatively few of the people who might have applied EA or RD are willing to commit to ED. Chicago had been getting well over 10,000 EA applications per year. None of its peers gets more than 4-5,000 ED applications (and most fewer than that). Chicago could see its applications fall by 50% this coming season. I don't think that will really happen, because I assume Admissions will figure some way out of the bind, but that would reflect a rational response to what happened in 2016-2017.
  3. I appreciate @marlowe1's passionate defense of Chicago tradition, but I think he vastly overstates the differences between Chicago and HYPS in the past and the present. HYPS are full of really intellectual kids. The Yale I attended was every bit as intellectual as the Chicago my kids (selected by Ted O'Neill) attended. (My daughter and her Chicago BFF, after they graduated and moved to Brooklyn, commented that the Yale alumni they met were a lot like their friends at Chicago.) A friend of my daughter's who went to Stanford was the only PhD student in his cohort admitted straight out of college by no less than the Chicago English Department, which took no one from Chicago. Four of my kids' favorite grad student TAs at Chicago had been Harvard undergraduates.

I also think his view of “Midwesternness” is very skewed, and almost unrecognizable. Midwesternness is Ohio State, Indiana, UIUC. The University of Chicago is a region all its own. But in any event, Chicago is full of kids from the (sea) Coasts, and that has been true for a while. There were six kids from my daughter’s fourth grade classroom in Philadelphia at Chicago with her, plus a kid from her ballet class and a guy who lived in our neighborhood to whom she had sold a prom corsage at the flower shop were she worked. And that didn’t count kids she didn’t know, or kids she knew who were a few classes older or younger.

Yes, I think the East Coast and West Coast kids notice that it has Midwestern qualities, but I think the Midwestern kids experience it as threateningly East Coast. (One of my daughter’s close friends her first year, a woman from Missouri who had turned down Stanford to go to Chicago, told me just that. She said she really appreciated having my daughter as a friend, because my daughter – who is very soft-spoken – could 'translate" New Yorkers for her without being scary.) My cousins who went there in the early aughts came from small-town Minnesota, and generally hated it.

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@MentorDad - my own calculations suggest something north of 30% but others might have better underlying assumptions than I do. You can probably conclude that 30+% was the ED/EDII admit rate this year but not sure that’s sustainable over the longer term as more get clued in that 1) UChicago likes that commitment and 2) they are generous with need-based aid (not sure about merit - my own kid’s National Merit scholarship was cut this year over prior years so guessing they are less generous in this category LOL).

@CU123’s strategy is definitely one to consider if your son thinks he has a good shot at an SCEA admission at another first or even a 2nd choice. The school hasn’t really discussed EDII at all so I’m really wondering how many new applications they had vs. deferred from UChicago EA. My hunch is that they were expecting more EDII new apps. than they got but I’m just going off the smaller numbers in the later pools (in total) compared to class of 2020 as well as some unofficial comments from AO that there might have been some confusion for the applicants this year given all the changes. Just a hunch, but guessing if they were swamped with EDII applications we would have heard some bragging from Admissions. If the “confusion” persists then that might be the unheralded way into the class of 2022 as it seems to have been for the class of 2021. Especially if there are fewer EA deferreds (because there are fewer EA’s) :smiley:

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“1. I think you may have that wrong, @JBStillFlying. My understanding last winter was that they were nowhere near 400 EA admits, and 400 was a pretty good number fro ED II.”

IIRC from @Chrchill back in Feb(?) 13,000 applications - 9% accept rate ED/EA. 2/3 of the accepts are ED. That translates to approximately 1200 admits in the early pool, 800 of which are ED and 400 of which are EA.

Am I misremembering the post? Can’t look for it now but someone is bound to (re) enlighten us.

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“I also think his view of “Midwesternness” is very skewed, and almost unrecognizable. Midwesternness is Ohio State, Indiana, UIUC. The University of Chicago is a region all its own. But in any event, Chicago is full of kids from the (sea) Coasts, and that has been true for a while.”

class of 2020 profile shows that the largest segment is “Midwest”, and while East Coast is a close 2nd, West Coast is a bit farther behind. https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2020

Also, @JHS, with all due respect you might be misunderstanding “Midwesterness”. This is key to understanding UChicago vs. a vs. East Coast elites, at least at one time in the school’s history. In the Economics dept. they referred to “Freshwater” vs. “Saltwater” thinking, particularly for Macroeconomic theory. The former: UChicago, Northwestern, CMU, URochester, UMinnesota. The latter: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, possibly MIT (at the time). Now, this was approximately 30 years ago - more than a generation in terms of economic thought but it represents how deep this “Midwesterness” ran at one point. The school has a tradition of being more maverick (there’s that word again!), less bound to “established” traditions, more interested in bringing a fresh perspective to some age-old issues. One UChicago PhD student I knew at the time commented that when he visited an Ivy for a job market talk, they seemed far more concerned with the wine at dinner than with his paper. He got the distinct impression that these well-known and well-respected tenured academics were really more into lifestyle than ideas (and they were pretty famous in their fields). Just an impression, of course. But his comment underscores how different is the training at UChicago, at least in certain grad. departments. That can’t help but filter down to the college and it’s probably more a symptom of the school’s overall culture than one department’s experience.

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Well we can do this again since we have a yield #, 13000 EA/ED leaving 15000 RD

Yield 73% = 2330 admits out of 28000 apps for a class of 1700
RD admits = 540 (2% of 27000 assuming everyone not admitted early was deferred)
EA/ED admits = 1200 (9% of 13000)
ED1 ~ 400 out of ?
ED2 ~ 400 out of ?
EA ~ 400 out of ?

Total 1740 admits

So this isn’t adding up…obviously the numbers (% wise) aren’t quite right

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@CU123 nothing like visiting favorite old subjects! :wink:

IIRC, @chrchill’s admission event and corresponding #'s came out BEFORE EDII admissions were released. The 13,000 pertained to EDI/EA, not total ED/EA. So . . . 9% of 13,000 is 1200 EDI/EA. 2/3 are EDI (800). 1/3 would be EA (400).

EDII . . . crickets on that, from what I recall.

RD 2% (as we all know).

My numbers aren’t like everyone else - I’m sure there’s a mistake in there somewhere. But I’m coming up with higher EDII numbers than you guys. 800 EDI, 500 EDII, 400 EA, 550 RD = 2250 (approximately). Totally agree with your approximately 27,000 (new RD + Deferred EA).

28,000 total apps * .08 = 2240 accepts (we see the breakdown in the above para). 73% yield is about 1635 enrollees.

FWIW.

Of course, all will be known in a few weeks . . . right? LOL.

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Ah - found the original thread. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1961894-sobering-statistic-ea-ed1-class-of-2017-university-of-chicago-p1.html

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@mentordad I congratulate your son on his discernment - and you on conducting that odyssey with him to the many schools you both visited and pondered. It must be rather wonderful to do that with a child just at this crucial juncture of his life, not only sharing the travel together but all the fodder for discussion that that experience must produce and your joint efforts to winnow and sort it all out. Best of luck with all that. You are getting good advice here from several of our resident number crunchers.

@JHS Midwesterness, as I, who never lived there either before or after college, think of it, doesn’t express itself in the same way at the University of Chicago as at other midwestern schools. You can find lack of irony in quite a different sense at Ohio State or Michigan State. And the University of Chicago does indeed draw its people very significantly from the coasts (though some of these may be “honorary midwesterners” in possessing the qualities I attempted to describe and which I attribute especially to the geographical Midwest). These are stereotypes, of course, and go back a long way in our national history of often jocular descriptions of regional personalities. There’s usually some truth in stereotypes. However, you are certainly right that the University is a world of its own, and you are also right to point to an urban-rural divide in which the University of Chicago probably seems to someone from downstate Illinois very much like a school in a big eastern city.

@JBStillFlying has described the qualities in the Economics Department that give it a Midwestern flavor. I could do the same thing for the English Department, at least as it existed fifty years ago in the waning days of the old Chicago School of Criticism. There’s an amusing book about the schools of criticism that existed at approximately that time (“The Pooh Perplex” by Frederick Crews) in which the Chicago School is depicted as humorlessly Aristotelian, unconcerned with esthetic felicities and utterly graceless - as opposed to the dashing worldly Yale School, the edgy sophisticated Columbians, the gracious and stylish Princetonians, the estheticized Virginians, and so on. I might also quote one of my old Chicago friends who went on to do his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton and to become an eminent mathematician in his own right. As he says, at Princeton the goal is “elegance”. At Chicago mathematics is meant to be hard work… One could go on in this vein through many departments, I think.

I plead guilty to overstating differences. If that’s so in a Chicago-positive dimension, then I can only say that many do so in a negative one. There must be a reason why so many protest so vigorously that the old College was a failure and that radical change was and still is required to banish a certain universal and still persisting stereotype - the one which I myself had a little fun with in my previous posting. And, yes, Yale is also a serious school and much to be admired, and no doubt its students are highly intellectual, but one thinks of so many things that make it so different from Chicago - wealth, sports, clubs, snob appeal, a culture that highly regards extra-curricular activities, a student body highly drawn from private schools and imbued with eastern irony, polish, etc. Chicago just seems different from that, Midwestern in a word.

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As an expat (sub)urban Midwesterner, educated at H and P, who raised a kid in Coastal Elite culture, I do think that currently there is a difference between UChicago’s culture and shared aspects of HYPS culture(s). Of course, as JHS points out, intellectual kids go to all of these schools (and many others), change places in grad school, find each other, and identify as kindred spirits. But those two observations (difference/similarity) aren’t mutually exclusive.

Basically, the kids who gravitate to Chicago (a) pride themselves on working hard to understand/do difficult things and (b) aspire to be and want to be surrounded by people whose center of gravity is intellectual and whose education is well-rounded. A kid who has the choice and who does not share these attitudes is unlikely to choose Chicago over HYPS. In a world where spin/talent/connections/specialization are already highly valorized, I appreciate UChicago as a place where hard, sustained work is treated as a crucial component of mastery (and where mastery itself – vs success/recognition/“winning”-- is the ever-elusive goal).

70

Is having genial and unpretentious “Midwestern” vibe a bad thing?

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No, but somehow “genial” and “unpretentious” aren’t two words that spring instantly to mind when you’re looking for adjectives to describe UChicago!

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One other bit of testimony on the Midwestern question has come to mind. I recollect a passage from Bellow’s “Herzog” in which the distraught protagonist, wandering about Hyde Park in the full fury of his personal dilemmas and ruminations, pauses to contemplate an inelegant slightly shabby house of the sort we ex-Hyde Parkers are all familiar with, probably somewhere east of Dorchester near the (then) Illinois Central tracks. This house seems to him to express the life of its occupants in all their touching bookish awkwardness, unworldly but well-meaning and idealistic about the human condition. It seems to him distinctly Midwestern, set down in the middle of bruising brawling Chicago. In fact, it strikes him as specific to the culture of the University of Chicago.

Bellow was well-placed to make such observations and comparisons, growing up in rough working-class Chicago, spending lots of time in New York but living during his most creative years in Hyde Park and teaching at the University. He said somewhere that he always went to New York in a sprit of anthropological research, but that the place with all its glitz and glamor was not conducive to the hard work of writing. For that he always returned to Hyde Park and his buddies at the University.

Whenever I’m back in HP and go for a stroll I think of a tormented Moses Herzog contemplating with envy his mild-mannered Midwestern neighbors. I suppose it could have happened anywhere.

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As someone who went to grad school at UIUC back in the 80’s and took an econ course taught by a UChicago prof (this was actually at U of Iowa where I I spent a semester before transferring to UIUC) that I count amongst the best I’ve had, I must admit to a soft spot for the Midwestern work ethic and the complete lack of agenda except the desire to really delve into the subject and appreciate the beauty underlying the analysis/math. Unpretentious about sums it up.

Coming from the top engineering and business schools in India (IIT and IIM) I was particularly struck by the high quality of teaching that this UChicago prof epitomized. Too bad there weren’t many like him during my time at UIUC though several others came close.

For my son I’m hoping for a really productive, fun, intellectually stimulating 4 years of undergrad education that he will cherish for the rest of his life and UChicago seems a good candidate. He actually spent a couple of weeks at Yale this summer (YYGS program) and came away quite excited about that school so @CU123’s strategy makes a lot of sense in terms of how we approach the application process.

Thanks to everyone on this thread for their insightful comments! I’m so glad I stumbled upon you all!

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Unpretentious actually IS a good adjective for the UChicago I remember - at least in terms of the day-to-day academic culture. The description that they take their work, rather than themselves, seriously seemed very accurate to me at the time. However, the university as a whole also struck me as existing in a bit of a bubble and that insularity can’t help in the brutal race for money and academic dominance. Wouldn’t call it pretentiousness as much as, perhaps, cluelessness or inability to make the needed changes. As a result, some departments have slipped in reputation. The college has done an outstanding job in landing at an appropriate - and well earned - spot in the USNews rankings, but whether it remains there will depend on the university’s ability to attract top academic talent going forward.

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I grew up in freshwater country. I know what the Midwest is like. For the most part, it’s not like the University of Chicago.

It’s true, though, that one important quality about traditional Chicago is its insularity. That was one difference that really stood out when my wife and I compared our experience at Yale to our children’s experience at Chicago. At Yale, we felt like we were in an Ivory Tower of sorts, but the Real World was just on the other side of the door. There was the same kind of opportunities for service in the immediately surrounding community that people at Chicago have, but there was also easy access to city politics and national politics. When I wanted to see what a career outside academia might look like, the university got me a paid internship at the gold-standard bank on Wall Street. One of my roommates, an art history major, got a similar position with a big commercial real estate developer, and found his life’s work. My wife worked for the NYC City Planning Commission. I really valued that – not when I started college; I barely thought about it then, but later – precisely because I felt like I was from nowhere, and it was a crazy gift get access to the inner sanctum like that more or less just for asking. My kids never felt anything equivalent at Chicago. They both had interesting jobs they loved, but with one exception all the jobs they had were inside the University bubble. They were more or less mystified by life beyond the University, other than enjoying culture in Chicago. (The one exception – my daughter talked/wrote her way into an internship with a music magazine in Chicago whose the editor claimed to have never previously met a University of Chicago student or alumnus.)

I don’t think that made the University of Chicago experience richer or better.

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Here’s something for the Chicago exceptionalists to chew on. I checked the educational backgrounds of the four faculty members who were most important to each of my children’s experience at Chicago – the people who really made college there worthwhile educationally. None of them had been an undergraduate there; four of the eight got their bachelor’s degrees from Harvard. There were three Chicago PhDs (in large part because two of the eight were grad students at the time). Only one of the eight went to college in the Midwest, a respected LAC, but he was from Panama. And he teaches at Harvard, now.

Then I checked the administration. Not a single Dean, or the President or Provost, is an undergraduate alumnus of the college. (A number of them are Midwesterners, though.) I got a little obsessed, and checked some other notable Chicago figures. One – Allan Bloom – got his undergraduate degree at Chicago.

My point isn’t that the undergraduate experience at Chicago isn’t good, or special. I think it’s both. But it is created and maintained largely by people who were educated elsewhere, and at places – Harvard, Texas, Wesleyan, CapeTown – that Chicago partisans hardly consider similar to Chicago. Except, of course they are.

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Actually that is quite common for administrators and professors not to be alumni of the school, if you take a look at other elite schools you will find the same thing. But to your point, I would agree that the midwestern vibe is more from the student population and its location than from the university itself.

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FWIW, I’m not a Chicago exceptionalist. I think there are particular moments in which particular universities occupy particular niches – sometimes by design, sometimes by default, often by a combination of both. It’s not a genetic theory – it’s a theory of institutional culture. Institutional culture changes in part because of who comes and who leaves. It’s rarely monolithic. And no individual is simply a product of it – especially academics, who have generally been educated in a variety of different places (starting at home!) long before they become profs.

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UChicago is a special place, but not because there is anything magical about Midwesterners. The serious scholars on the East and West coast are just as focused, intellectual and sincere as those in the Midwest.

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Someone can – and probably will – verify this but IIRC the majority of university presidents are promoted from its internal ranks. I don’t think that includes faculty who were actually educated at Chicago but mostly faculty who have been there for the long term. That also might be true for the position of provost.

What is interesting is that the two relatively recent presidents who were not from the university of Chicago but brought in from the outside each has the distinction of a relatively short tenure.

Most of the faculty I interacted with 25-30 years ago were not UChicago PhDs. But they definitely had a portfolio of intellectual work that was consistent with University of Chicago’s distinctive tradition of breaking new ground and changing methodological mindsets in several areas of study. We used to joke that you couldn’t get a UChicago faculty member or grad student to shut up about their work, even at gatherings which were entirely social. Kind of like the stories about undergrads who can’t shut up about what they learned in class while meeting for coffee. It’s kind of a place where people just geek out over ideas. Certainly there are very bright, intellectually engaged kids at East Coast elites - they might even be brighter than kids at UChicago. The difference is one of culture. Kids who love discussing Kant, Plato, Coase, or Modigliani-Miller while on a date might enjoy being at UChicago more than a whole bunch of other top schools (including East Coast elites). To highlight with just one amusing example, my hubby was dumped on his first date with someone while at Duke because he brought up the subject of why spicy food raises your body temp. She was “grossed out”. He was VERY glad to be at UChicago, where others actually took an interest in that subject!

The insularity that JHS and I have both observed there might be changing in very recent years, at least in the College. UChicago now pays kids to take on a variety of internships and most of the kids we know who have graduated there in the past 10 years seem to have their feet planted firmly on the ground. Some might have returned to campus to attend Booth or the law school, but their list of professional connections is actually quite impressive. My D17 is interested in an academic career (at least for now) but she is still looking forward to getting some practical, professional experience while at UChicago. We’ll see if that happens :slight_smile: