<p>What is the thing that UChicago borrowed from German academia? </p>
<p>This is mentioned on several places on UChicago's website. Any insights???</p>
<p>Two things: </p>
<p>1) The notion of the primacy of research over undergraduate education in a numerical sense. JHU brought the idea over, and it was quickly copied in turn by Chicago / MIT / Stanford. To this day graduate students outnumber undergraduates by 3:1 at Chicago, and that is a good thing. It gives you access to a wide array of graduate courses if you prove prepared as an undergraduate, and also gives you insight into the academic life-cycle beyond college, i.e., what is the culture at a top PhD, medical, law, or business program like? Attend a few social / academic events and find out…</p>
<p>2) The importance of the non-medical / non-theological doctorate, which while already weakly present at the Ivies, was frowned upon as a departure from the Oxbridge model wherein the MA plus publications was considered sufficient for being a professor. Domestically, up until the introduction of the GI Bill after WWII, the business of many elite schools was principally educating the children of the upper crust, so shifting attention to graduate studies was considered out of touch.</p>
<p>The importance of the German model has diminished though as most schools reformed themselves away from being liberal arts colleges in practicality and universities in name only to placing the emphasis on idea generation.</p>
<p>uchicagoalum: Isn’t the ratio more like 2:1?</p>
<p>Graduate students only outnumber undergraduates by any significant margin if you count professional school students (law, medicine, business, public policy, divinity . . . ), who really aren’t competing for the same resources. There are only about 3,500 PhD and MA students in the various academic divisions at Chicago that correspond to the college, as compared to 5,700 undergraduates.</p>
<p>And, by the way, if you count everyone who isn’t in the college, the ratio is about 5:3 – 9,500:5,700 – nowhere near 3:1. <a href=“http://registrar.uchicago.edu/sites/registrar.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/pdf/statistics/enroll_summary/Census-Aut13-Summary.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar.uchicago.edu/sites/registrar.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/pdf/statistics/enroll_summary/Census-Aut13-Summary.pdf</a> Business school (3,150) and law school (700) students account for 100% of the difference, and that has nothing to do with the 19th Century German higher education model.</p>
<p>Other German innovations included having focused majors for undergraduates and acknowledging the value of extracurricular activities and clubs (like fraternities).</p>