UChicago Admission Rate EA/ED

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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@JHS at #74: “I don’t think that made the University of Chicago experience richer or better.”

There in a nutshell we have the crux of the matter, the two Weltanschauungs. I contend that young people soon enough find their way into the practical life of work and professional advancement. I don’t like to see the tentacles of that world reaching down into and in my view corrupting the blessed time spent learning and grappling with “the best that has been thought and said”. Anthony Abbott has told us in that Aims of Education address that the University’s graduates will nearly all go forth and have very successful lives, most of them joining what in my day we refused to believe we would ever join, the wretched and despised Establishment. Why not tarry just a bit on the doorstep of all that? Why not take the time to ponder the meaning of things and do thought experiments of other possible lives? Yes, it is certainly the Ivy-league model to transition its kids seamlessly into the political and social power structures. The doors are open right from the beginning to all those connections, jobs, banks and parties. Call me an unreconstructed student radical but the thought of all that gives me the willies. It is good for the soul to spend some time in the wilderness. It is good to work jobs with people who don’t have your education or expectations and never will, indeed to feel (as most U of C students did feel in my day) that they were undergoing an ordeal of sorts which gave them some right to identify with the Wretched of the Earth. This ethic at the old U of C appalled the ivy league types of that day, not only the ones who got in to the ivy league but many of the ones who did not and who ended up at Chicago.

Times change, and the University has changed. Less suffering is no doubt better. However, I worry about the continued existence of a truly significant education that seems so heavily crafted toward the smooth delivery of youth into the arms of the Establishment. I take some perhaps unintended solace from JHS’ observations that at least as late as the date of his children’s experience the College was still not going in for that kind of thing.

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My experience of East Coast elitedom is that you talked about ideas all the time, on dates and otherwise. My relationship with my spouse started with a series of discussions about French vs. Anglo-American feminist theory. I remember being at a regular Tuesday night party some people in my college sponsored where the outgoing football team captain, all four sheets to the wind, conducted an impromptu seminar on his in-process senior thesis about an aspect of pre-Socratic philosophy, with critical questions and encouragement from many sides. Lunchtime discussions were usually about that morning’s lectures in popular classes. My wife and I had a good laugh when our son, as a Chicago first-year, condescendingly started to explain Michel Foucault to us, apparently never having noticed that he had grown up with copies of Foucault’s major works – in English and French – in his home.

During her first year at Chicago, in one of the breaks, my daughter did a quick tour of various other colleges where she had friends. That was actually an important watershed in her relationship to Chicago, because she had been chafing against the Core a lot. After the trip, though, she reported that most of her friends felt they couldn’t talk about ideas or classes during social time, and she couldn’t imagining living like that. But she wasn’t talking about HYPS. Post-college, people she knows from Yale and Stanford, at least, don’t have that problem.

Excuse me, but I had done plenty of thought experiments and actual experiments about other possible lives, including but not limited to full-time manual labor and (what everyone expected me to do) academia. I didn’t lack at all for opportunities to do that. I was completely mystified by the business world, however. Apart from a great-uncle who had run a retail business started by my great-grandfather into the ground before I was 10, I didn’t really know anyone in “business.” The useful thought experiment, for me, was understanding that I could take that route if I chose, and that my skills had applications and value there. That was tremendously liberating, especially given how utterly miserable 100% of the young academics I knew were.

For my wife, the important thing she got out of her internship was a sense of how people like her, who wanted to change the world, actually went about it on a daily basis and got results. Neither of us used our internships to start a career – we both went in very different directions when we had the chance – but for both of us the internships vastly expanded our sense of what was possible for us. I do wish my children had gotten that kind of experience in college. My son, especially, who has barely left the University of Chicago since he showed up there 10 years (less 45 days) ago. He could really use a wider sense of what’s possible to do in the world with integrity.

It’s awfully funny to think about Andrew (not Anthony) Abbott telling people to delay entering the Establishment. He was born into it and never left.

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LOL about Foucault. My daughter grew up surrounded by bookshelves filled with Weber, Durkheim, and Marx and part of what interested her (she’s probably a scientist) about Chicago’s Core was that she’d read some of that stuff in college. Not intrigued enough to tackle it one her own, but firmly convinced that these are thinkers a well-educated person should have read. We’ll see if Suicide convinces her otherwise!

On the broader point, yeah, when I went to Harvard the people I hung out with talked nonstop about ideas and about things we were reading. But we were the nerdier kids – probably not the majority even then, but a critical mass and one supported/encouraged by faculty and grad students. Some of those faculty tell me things have changed and my daughter’s perception was kids like her/us weren’t the kids headed to Harvard these days. Her perception may be skewed by coming from a private school on the east coast (DH and I were public school kids from CA and NH). But long story short(er), she was looking for what we had and found it elsewhere.

FWIW, I think UChicago’s Metcalf program has really taken off in recent years and my kid seems to have even better access to internships than I did at Harvard way back when. Unpaid internships were a nonstarter for me, but Metcalf largely takes that issue off the table. And the search/application process seems very well-organized and accessible.