In the College Admissions thread there has been a spirited discussion of the Test-Optional admissions policy just announced by the University of Chicago. However, several of the commenters clearly also have an animus against the University itself that goes beyond a disagreement about policy. That sort of animus isn’t unique to this topic. For several years now I have been a reader of many posts about many schools, not only in the U of C forum but also in those of other schools and in general discussion threads. I would assert as a close reader of texts that no other school attracts quite the level of hostility this one does. Sometimes it is simply gratuitous, but even otherwise reasonable remarks are often delivered with a sarcastic or antagonistic emphasis of a sort I seldom see for any other school. The University of Chicago can live with this, as can an alumnus like me. But I’m interested in the phenomenon itself.
Do you agree that UChicago engenders more hostility than other schools?
Assuming 1 is true, the marketing is probably a big part of it. A rule of thumb in politics is that when people start complaining about your ads, they're working. The converse being, if your ads are working, people are probably going to complain about them. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of universities as well.
The multiple pieces of mail to every student with a PSAT score above 3.14159268 or so probably have two effects. First, they convince some fraction of recipients to look into UChicago and eventually apply. And second, they annoy a lot of people.
I assume it’s still worth it for the College, because the people annoyed by this stuff usually aren’t interested in the first place. But it would certainly explain the negativity of the average CC poster towards the university.
Other schools either don’t need as much direct mail because they’re household names (Harvard, Yale, etc.), or haven’t been marketing as heavily for as long as UChicago (basically everyone else). We didn’t invent marketing gimmicks, but Nondorf et al. went a few extra miles in using them, and as an early adopter of this approach UChicago is strongly identified with such tactics.
This is a semi-educated guess, specifically with regards to the CC demographic (most people toss the junk mail and forget about it).
In terms of sheer volume of denigration, as in any number of other areas, I think Harvard wins. In part because it attracts the highest volume of irrational, sheepy adoration, many CC participants find it hard not to point out, at every available opportunity, Harvard's many flaws, both real and (often) imagined, or at least highly exaggerated. Overall, the tone of most threads relating to Harvard is still somewhere between respect and worship, but that involves netting out quite a large absolute volume of trashing.
B. Rankings are a zero-sum game. Chicago’s relatively meteoric rise in ranking over the past 15 years has effectively devalued the degrees and college choices of the alumni of at least a dozen other very fine universities with powerful brand names. Some of those people may never have heard of Chicago until recently (which is not a big point in favor of the quality of the education they received in college), or considered Chicago beneath them when they applied to college. They feel a personal stake in exposing it as a fraud.
C. In the now-officially-considered-bad old days, when Chicago had a unique, largely self-selected student body, one of the self-selection screens was the ability to appreciate jokes like “Where fun comes to die.” Not everyone – not most people – get it. They think anyone who wanted to go to a college where fun comes to die must be a weirdo. Sounds awful: a no-fun college full of weirdos. Better warn the others!
D. I – who admire the University of Chicago greatly – will admit to being annoyed sometimes by the insistence of Chicago alumni that they are the only true intellectuals and that the rigor and intellectualism of Chicago’s undergraduate program is unmatched anywhere. Guess what? I think I am a pretty intellectual guy, thank you. I was pleased with the rigor and intellectualism of my undergraduate education at a peer university. And while I am (and was) convinced that Chicago provided its students with equivalent quality, I am not convinced (and never was) that Chicago was better. In some non-education respects I am pretty sure that, at least in the past, Chicago was a little worse. (Something that Chicago partisans implicitly admit by making its asceticism part of their argument for its intellectual superiority.)
So pardon me for getting accepted at some colleges that rejected many Chicago students over the years, and for deciding to go to one of them, and for loving it. It didn’t make me dumb, or prove that I was a fraud to start with.
I leave it to you to decide to what extent this is a different point than B above.
The Harvard case seems different to me. When an institution enjoys that much prominence, even reverence, it inspires a natural backlash from the contrarian-spirited among us. So it was with the Roman Empire, and so with another empire nearly as great and perhaps longer-lasting - that of the New York Yankees. To be a booster of empires is sort of boring. Debunking them is more fun. That is the sort of spirit I find in the Harvard detractors.
If Harvard is an empire, Chicago - led by Nondorf and company - are the barbarians at the gate. Chicago inspires a different sort of fear and loathing, that reserved for vulgar and jumped-up usurpers. Dun is saying this as well as JHS in his points B and C. The Chicago-haters may be fighting a rear-guard action, but their resentment is real: their ancient territories have been overrun, and they are full of revanchist fury. They have none of the esprit of the Harvard bashers.
JHS is also right in a way in his point D: the detractors hate the idea of any institution claiming to be principally about the intellectual life. They seem to take it as a personal affront, as if to claim this about itself, as Chicago does, must necessarily mean that Chicagoans think themselves “the only true intellectuals” and believe that smart people can’t come from other schools. I willingly dub you an intellectual, my friend, but I do detect in you the same flawed logic of the Chicago haters. The intellectual life, unlike the commodity of prestige, is not dispensed in a zero sum game. Chicago’s bottling of its own brand of that substance does not diminish the amount of it available to the rest of the educational world.
Perhaps the old meme about the death of fun is more important than you suggest. There is self-deprecation in that old quip but also more than a hint of truth as applied to the College of yesteryear - that is, if fun is understood as collegiate hijinks of the sort the world thinks of as the model of the college experience. If you think that - and many of the detractors do think it - then naturally you will despise a place that famously had so little of it, and you will be appalled that such a place could have unaccountably become popular. Could it be that serious study Is a form of fun? In hedonistic mass-market America who ever heard of such a thing? For these folks the rebarbative University of Chicago is the skunk at the picnic. Ugh.
Eh who cares. I have more or less stopped engaging with threads on here that won’t directly help some applicant or prospective student learn about the school.
I think this is symptomatic of a very different and bigger problem: students are slowly avoiding CC. Percentages of posts on this forum by actual applicants or prospies has dramatically dropped, and the volume of new posts has slowed to a trickle! I suspect this is a combination of parents using the forums to Fight the Good Fight and defend their school’s honor (which annoys literally everyone else, including me, and makes people not want to stick around), and the rise of College-Confidential-like communities on dramatically more young-people-centric forums like Reddit.
I think this is in general a bad thing because, for all of CC’s flaws, I honestly do think it’s the best place to get information that is unlikely to be horribly wrong or biased to the point of having no utility. So I stick around.
Here is my pet peeve: U of C has been world famous for many, many decades. But it was mainly known among academics or senior law and business circle. But many with the UChicago Derangement Syndrome (UCDS) complain as if U of C just burst on the national scene in the last 15 years.
The first US Nobel Prize winner is Albert Michelson. He was the Head of the Physics Department when the University opened its door at 1892. The first chain reaction was done at the underground rackets court at the old Stagg Field:
I love to highlight this fact. For many years all the most advanced US space telescopes are all named after U of C grad or professors: the Hubble Telescope (Edwin Hubble Class of 1910), Compton Gamma Ray Telescope (Arthur Compton Professor 1922-45) and Chandra X-Ray Observatory (Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Professor 1937-85). We can add the soon to be launched Parker Solar Probe to the list (Eugene Parker Professor 1955 - present).
Out of the very few Chinese (or Chinese American) Nobel Prize winners, three of them got their PhD from U of C: TD Lee and CN Yang in 1957 and Daniel Tsui in 1998. Y T Lee was a professor at the Chemistry department from 1968 to 1974.
I am not going to start on the Chicago School of Economics but you get my point.
U of C is not an upstart that con its way through admission game into the top universities in US and the world. It has done groundbreaking work in many different fields for decades. Now I am not saying U of C is far superior to HYP. But DEPENDING on the academic subject and time frame, U of C can be as good as any university in US or in the world for that matter. What Dean Boyer and Nondorf have done is to introduce U of C to a lot of high school students and their parents who previously did not know about this wonderful national research institution.
Personally, far from hating the University of Chicago, I greatly admire it. I’ve said often on these boards that I think it’s one of the top universities in the country, and I believe it’s made immeasurable contributions in many areas over the last hundred years.
What I find less appealing (echoing @JHS) are some folks on CC’s UChicago board who argue ad nauseam about what a unique citadel of free thinking UChicago is, the most consistently intellectual of all the universities, certainly deserving of at least its equal-third US News ranking, because of course it’s much better than equal-third snowflake haven Yale, leaving aside numbers 5-8 (Columbia, MIT, Stanford and Penn).
You don’t generally see that sort of thing on the boards of the peer schools. Have a look at the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT boards. With the exception of one Stanford partisan (who happens also to be a vocal UChicago partisan), there’s a negligible amount of posturing of this kind by people who have actual connections to these schools.
My second issue is that, based on posts and reactions to them, more than a few on the forum (including, apparently, some UChicago fans) share my view that the abovementioned US News ranking was obtained by an unseemly pattern of gaming US News’ ultimately arbitrary ranking system by going where other schools in UChicago’s peer group won’t go.
All of which to say, in response to @marlowe1’s questions, what I think annoys people (on here, anyway) is the combination of statements about UChicago’s purportedly unique intellectual climate and aggressive admissions gamesmanship (which includes moves that manifestly dilute whatever uniqueness UChicago has).
Sure, one person’s gamesmanship is another’s hardball competition, but, to put it bluntly, it seems obvious to some of us that the combination of mass mailings, reliance on EDI and ED II and now test-optional admissions and playing games with fees - a combination seen nowhere else among UChicago’s peer group - is all about puffing up applications and yield, not identifying some unquantifiable population of kids presumed to be seeking that UChicago je ne sais quoi.
@DeepBlue86 Is it possible that the tactics that UChicago is using isn’t to game the rankings?
Or if it is to game the rankings, is it to accomplish something bigger and better by doing so?
For example, could rising in the ranking help them get more donations which in turn allow them to offer free tuition to those students who come from families that earn less then $125k/year? Which in turn will allow people who could not afford to come to a school like any of the CHYMPS if UChicago wasn’t there?
I guess the motivation to raise in rankings is what is important to me. I don’t believe that the administration wrings their hands in a dark office “What are we going to do today Brain?” “Why we are going to rule the world!”
Similarly, I don’t think the administration believes what many of “us” on the CC board think; in terms of UChicago, then a few Ivies, and then everyone else. I do believe, and rightly so, they look at the HYPSM as peers (in fact I think they’ve been rather public about it).
As far as the angst on this board towards UChicago. Some of it has to be envy. Nobody is in the news as much for changing Higher Education lately then UChicago. From the rise in the rankings, to the press around the “right to free discussion,” and now the “Empower Initiative.” They don’t like UChicago for the same reasons I don’t like the Patriots.
I am a little baffled why people are upset at the marketing materials. We got marketing materials from a ton of schools and many of them just as much as UChicago. Of top ranked schools, Columbia may have actually sent us more. JHU sent us a cadence of 2 postcards a week over the summer and they all gave us something to think about and put that school at front of mind.
So what if they have ED1 and ED2 where others don’t even have ED. So what if they decide that entrance exams are optional. These are all policies that others are free to implement and they have chosen not to do so. If the motives are there for the right reason, to get the right class of students then if they decide to personally pick feeder high schools that traditionally produce perfect UChicago students, have the Dean of Admissions personally fly to students houses that the GCs think would fit in well at UChicago, and offer them admitance without an application, transcript, recommendations, or essays, that is their prerogative. Again, if the motive is right, I don’t think we can judge the method.
I don’t understand the angst about direct marketing and mailings. From my days in marketing I learned it has a response rate of <1% (think of all the catalogs you get ay home that get trashed without opening). I personally don’t think its that effective. In our house my son never read either the UofC or other college catalogs, even though he has been interested in Chicago since his sophomore year in high school. I doubt that many applications are triggered by the mailings and wish Chicago would find something more effective.
@BrianBoiler , to the Chicago haters (well, let’s call @DeepBlue86 a detractor, more in sorrow than in anger) it is always and only and forever about rankings and the manipulation thereof. That’s why I say there’s something more than a mere critique of particular policies in play here. It’s every single one of the policies, the whole shebang, all explained as parts of the maniacal ambition to achieve and stay at number three. Chicago ain’t playin’ the gentleman’s game, and how do we know that? --Because the peer schools are not doing what it’s doing. Not fair! Chicago has a long free speech tradition and makes an important and influential statement about that at a time when that’s a big deal on college campuses. --Not fair. Grandstanding. Should keep quiet. All done for the rankings. Chicago has a long history of offering a certain kind of rigorous education. --Its grads ought not to talk about this because it might put noses out of joint at other schools. Chicago makes submission of SAT/ACT optional, creates new forms of assistance for poor kids, waives application fees. --All deeply cynical moves. Harvard doesn’t have to do this, so Chicago shouldn’t. And don’t even think of suggesting that ED’s 1 and 2 have anything to do with recruiting a student body composed of kids who really really want to be at the University of Chicago because of its history and culture. --No, it’s all about finding rich kids to pump up average student wealth to somewhere near a level effortlessly achieved by the ivies.
I could go on, but you get the idea. To a hammer everything looks like a nail. Chicago’s every move is outrageous, unfair, illegitimate and not what other schools are doing. It’s either the place where fun goes to die, or it’s a place like any other. Take your pick, both are reprehensible. Take her down!
Back to the chicken or the egg, if you want a wider market to consider UChicago then you have to market it which tends to bring more applicants which tends to make it more selective which tends to make it rise in rankings…
These are all mutually re-enforcing results, so some might say its UChicago gaming the ranking and some might say its UChicago looking for a wider market…personally I think its the latter, because ALL of its recent decisions favor the latter (e.g. going test optional), while only some the former.
Re: post #5 UChicago people transformed Chile’s economy, but yeah, the econ area is also too big to mention.
Re: post #7 probably the same reason why people hate the Yankees too–players don’t have their names on the back of their uniforms, hair cut short–all to show that only the team matters; and especially: too many championships, lol.
@BrianBoiler, you’re absolutely right that UChicago, like any other private university, can choose to admit whoever it wants, in whatever lawful way it wants, based how it views its interests. Teaching, research and the association of influential people with the university community are the means by which private universities pursue those interests. In practice, whether or not a university openly acknowledges it, those interests generally are to increase the university’s wealth, power and influence in society. I believe UChicago has decided that climbing the US News rankings and making itself look more and more like its peers is the best way for it to promote the above interests. I wish UChicago and many of its fans would just admit it, and acknowledge the tradeoffs this path entails.
If the other “CHYMPS” (to use your term) engaged in similar admissions gamesmanship to UChicago, UChicago would be falling, not rising in the rankings: if “HYMPS” went test-optional and routinely waived app fees, they’d get many thousands more applications, and if they admitted a majority of their classes ED, their yields would be in the high 80s to 90s. Why don’t they do it, and push down UChicago, if they feel as envious or threatened as you seem to think? Because they don’t wake up in the morning and go to bed at night thinking about UChicago, and the downside of doing these things outweighs any benefits to them.
There’s no high-minded principle at work here. Given the number and quality of apps that HYMPS routinely get, there’s little incremental benefit from getting many thousands more apps from students who are overwhelmingly unlikely to be admitted. These schools also don’t want to fill a majority of their spots ED because it means that they have to reserve most of the class for students that were willing to rank them first and are full payers (since that’s the other thing ED filters for), which is a relatively small subset of the applicant pool.
The HYMPS schools think they can attract better classes than that (with, in particular, more and higher-quality URMs and first-gens), and they’re confident enough in their ability to win jump balls, given their high level of financial aid as well as all the other things they have to offer, that they’re willing to take yield risk by admitting roughly half their classes early action and the rest RD. And, not coincidentally, it would send a powerful negative relative status signal if one of them felt the need to adopt ED.
Academically, UChicago is a peer to all these schools. Unless it puts up comparable admissions stats, shows a more diversified student body and attracts some more children of tycoons to pump up the endowment and pay for fancy buildings, though, it won’t look like one, so it takes these shortcuts. This is a marketing game, not about finding that unquantifiable pool of students who rank UChicago first and will flourish uniquely there. Personally, pace @marlowe1’s sentiments on the issue, I’d be surprised if 10% of the UChicago undergraduate population fits that profile - I think most of them (unless they’re from the Great Lakes area and proximity to home makes a difference) would have an interchangeable experience at any of 10 or 15 schools.
UChicago is actively ginning up tens of thousands of applications from no-hopers to increase perceived selectivity, consciously restricting the talent pool for a substantial majority of their classes to mostly full-paying kids willing to apply ED in order to goose yield, and going test-optional in order to be able to admit larger numbers of low-scoring “institutional priorities” without hurting its 25-75 stats, all to prove it belongs at the top table. The irony is, UChicago unquestionably belongs at the top table, but these shortcuts make it look like it doesn’t. And, as I’ve said, most of these shortcuts are likely to dilute what its alums believe makes UChicago distinctive.
By the way, @marlowe1, I love the free speech stand UChicago is taking. It’s one of my favorite things about the place. I wish all the peer schools would do it, and I think it’s a powerful differentiator.
@DeepBlue86 The biggest reason that HYPSM don’t do these things you decry is because not doing them is a marketing tool in itself. We are so established that we don’t need ED. We are so special that marketing would be beneath us. If you want to be viewed as the ultimate in exclusivity and percieved prestige, pretend to be above it all.
That’s how you play the prestige game if you are already in the catbird’s seat like those 5 are.
But it’s still the same game.
ps - many thousands of no-hopers apply to HYPSM just the same as they do to UChicago. UChicago isn’t tricking huge numbers of mediocre applicants to apply - even mediocre applicants can read admissions stats. Those same no-hopers will thoiw off hopeless applications to Yale and Princeton, the way they always have.
“There’s no high-minded principle at work here. Given the number and quality of apps that HYMPS routinely get, there’s little incremental benefit from getting many thousands more apps from students who are overwhelmingly unlikely to be admitted.”
Don’t Y and P receive approximately the same number of applications as UChicago? It’s H and S who are already in the lead here and may not benefit from thousands more. Any school that receives 30,000+ applications is going to be able to fill their class with top kids - there’s no evidence of a quality difference between any of them.
“These schools also don’t want to fill a majority of their spots ED because it means that they have to reserve most of the class for students that were willing to rank them first and are full payers (since that’s the other thing ED filters for), which is a relatively small subset of the applicant pool.”
There are PLENTY of SCEA applicants who won’t file for fin. aid. because they are worried it’ll hurt their chances. And now with the Empower Initiative, there’s no reason for a low SES kid who really wants to go to UChicago NOT to apply ED. Some won’t, simply because they would be counselled to keep their choices open given their stats, demographic, etc.
The main reason why HYPS doesn’t admit ED is that it doesn’t have to - they know their yield rates from the early pool. SCEA is a nice way of forcing the applicant to specify “first choice” w/o having to sign anything. Why else would you forego competitor schools in the early round?
There’s test optional and then there’s test optional. At Bowdoin for instance, a very high % of applicants submit scores even though the school is test optional. At other test optional schools, the % submitting is much lower. I bet a very high % of Chicago applicants continue to submit
@DeepBlue86 , what is the source of your belief that all but 10 percent of Chicago students “would have an interchangeable experience at any of 10 or 15 schools”? Or that the admissions game at Chicago is not about identifying Chicago-style kids but in “attracting children of tycoons to pump up the endowment and pay for fancy buildings”. You sound authoritative. If you have sources for these views, please provide. Cynicism is a seductive rhetorical posture, but argument and evidence are more convincing.
As to the first point, despite some amelioration of the old Chicago educational experience, are you really saying that with its still distinctive features - the Core, the rigor of its courses and essential seriousness of its students, its less exuberant extracurricular culture - that a Chicago education is really no different from that a kid could get at the other usual suspects? Who has been telling you that? If I judge only by what kids (and parents and alumni) say on cc, I would conclude that they see Chicago to one degree or another as a different sort of place. It has still seemed that way to me in my visits of recent years. The people who always want to downplay that difference, I have noticed, are people who never went to the school and who, I am tempted to say if it were not so impolite, don’t know what they’re talking about.
As for admissions being all about attracting children of tycoons, I’ll believe that when I see it. I have some familiarity with the children of tycoons: they are seldom cut out for really hard work at a school without glamor. A school like Chicago is the last place they’d want to go. Not that there’s anything wrong with such a kid who actually does have the royal jelly Chicago-style. I trust that Gates Jr has it. Why do you think he selected Chicago, by the way? Could it be that he had heard something about the special quality of the education there? Perhaps conferred with his dad on the matter? Or was it merely that he looked at US News one day and picked out any old school because it was number three in the rankings?
Small observation on the advertising: like many, my rising senior has received her fair share of mailings from U of C. However, the 96-page booklet that arrived today from Yale is far bigger than all the U of C mailings put together. (Also, after the ACT, all of HYPSM sent mailings; I can’t imagine the criteria - maybe everyone. I wonder if U of C uses SAT mailing lists more than HYPSM.)
If U of C should somehow end up on her list, the initial intrigue would have started with the essay prompts. Perhaps they should go into a mailing.
As I noted, there’s no high-minded principle at work here. All these schools are competing with each other to a greater or lesser extent. They all send out marketing materials, although UChicago seems to send out more (in the small sample size that I’m directly familiar with, that’s clearly been the case - maybe because the people in question lined up more closely with something UChicago was looking for).
I also noted - because I agree that a lot of this is about marketing and prestige - that one reason HYPS won’t go ED is that it would send a negative status signal by showing that they felt they needed to do it (and, as you imply, ED is seen as a marker for the next level down). I do believe, though, that the main reason that HYPS don’t fill most of the class ED is that they already have 70-80% yields overall, probably get 80-90+% yields on the roughly half of their classes they admit SCEA and would rather cast the net wider, not send a negative signal to non-full payers by admitting most of the class ED, and take some yield risk in order to get what they view as a better class.
I think you misread me. My point is that if HYPS went test-optional and routinely waived app fees, they’d get thousands more apps than they get now, and they neither want nor need that (with the important qualifier that all these schools are marketing hard for academically elite URMs, since that’s how they burnish their diversity credentials while admitting the academically strongest class).
I don’t know how many kids who apply SCEA need aid and don’t file for it (I hope not many; it seems nuts to me, particularly given that HYPS are need-blind and have an enormous amount of aid available). The point is, though, that a kid who needs aid and applies ED has much less negotiating power than one who applies SCEA, so if UChicago fills most of its classes ED, which seems to be the case, it’s actively deterring those kids. The Empower Initiative is clearly meant to counteract this message, but, as pointed out in this Chicago Maroon article (https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/6/16/uchicago-get-much-credit-admissions-announcements/), it’s not obvious that financial aid is going to increase much overall.
I don’t think you or I can prove or disprove the first statement, which is why I expressed it as a conjecture. My basis for it was knowing personally some 20 kids who’ve matriculated at UChicago in the past few years. At the places I’m most familiar with (certain non-Midwestern elite prep schools), the kids who go to UChicago tend overwhelmingly to be academically strong but not monastic about it, not recruited athletes, URMs or legacies at any of HYPS or Chicago and infrequently possessing some particular spike. In other words, they tend to be kids who’d fit in fine at HYPS, UChicago or any other top-15 school, and I can’t recall meeting one who thought they only belonged at UChicago (even if they applied ED I/II there, which a number did for strategic reasons). Your mileage will undoubtedly vary, particularly if you live in the Great Lakes area.
Chicago’s undersized endowment relative to its peers is a matter of public record, and has been extensively discussed elsewhere on CC, as has the limited population of super-wealthy alumni of the college. Since financial resources per student and alumni giving rate account for 15% of the US News ranking, my assumption is that the UChicago administration is focused on this too, and going test-optional can help them address it. If UChicago wants to build up that endowment, they’ll need to take a few more development admits (which could certainly include young master Gates, although I know nothing about him and can’t speak to his academic chops one way or another, or why he and UChicago chose each other).
I am tempted to say if it were not so impolite, that this is just “argument from authority”. I didn’t attend UChicago but have spent a fair amount of time studying it, directly and through the prism of alumni I know personally. I’ve got deep, direct experience over decades with some of its peer schools. I’m going to surmise that you, conversely, have about as good a relationship with UChicago as I have with some of its peers, and a weaker relationship with some of those peers than I have. In other words, neither of us can claim to have the full picture on our own.
We can stipulate that all these schools are unique and have distinctive characteristics. As @JHS has often said, though, the top tier are a lot more similar than different, at least in my experience, and I believe that most kids who are happy at one of them could be equally happy at many others. They’re all big and diverse enough, and all have the academic strength to satisfy even the most demanding Chicago kid, even if the overall vibe differs somewhat place to place. With all of the innovations at UChicago tending to make it more closely resemble its peers, I think this will only become more true.
“I think you misread me. My point is that if HYPS went test-optional and routinely waived app fees, they’d get thousands more apps than they get now, and they neither want nor need that (with the important qualifier that all these schools are marketing hard for academically elite URMs, since that’s how they burnish their diversity credentials while admitting the academically strongest class).”
@DeepBlue86: If UChicago - with its similar application numbers and similar quality of matriculant to Y and P - is using test-optional admission and waived app. fees to “game the rankings”, then why wouldn’t Y and P follow? After all, no “high-minded” principle at work here and they are all competing for the top, including academically elite URM’s. You must be saying that Y and P get an overall better candidate(?) Where’s your evidence for that? That was my point.
“I don’t know how many kids who apply SCEA need aid and don’t file for it (I hope not many; it seems nuts to me, particularly given that HYPS are need-blind and have an enormous amount of aid available). The point is, though, that a kid who needs aid and applies ED has much less negotiating power than one who applies SCEA, so if UChicago fills most of its classes ED, which seems to be the case, it’s actively deterring those kids. The Empower Initiative is clearly meant to counteract this message, but, as pointed out in this Chicago Maroon article (https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/6/16/uchicago-get-much-credit-admissions-announcements/), it’s not obvious that financial aid is going to increase much overall.”
Families who apply SCEA to HYPS are just as hesitant to file for fin. aid. if they don’t absolutely need it as they are to do so applying ED to UChicago. And, in fact, ALL of these schools claim to be need blind and ALL of them meet full demonstrated need. Where they might differ - say, UChicago might be less generous than the others - would be in how they define “full demonstrated need”. However, we know for a fact that UChicago DOES meet full demonstrated need since they did so for our D. So either they are ALL equal or HYPS is more stingy. I suspect they are all equal and if my D had applied SCEA of the Ivy’s or Stanford, and had been admitted, she would have been offered a similar aid package - one that included not one smidgeon of merit aid.
When you reach that level of selectivity, the ability to negotiate for merit is small-to-nonexistent. I have a young relative who will be playing a sport for an Ivy this fall. She’s a world-ranked athlete and her backup was another Ivy and then a third Ivy as her safety. She got in to #1 SCEA - guess how much merit aid she’s getting? Also, guess what her parents opted NOT to apply for in addition to her application for admission, precisely because they didn’t want to compromise her chances?
“We can stipulate that all these schools are unique and have distinctive characteristics. As @JHS has often said, though, the top tier are a lot more similar than different, at least in my experience, and I believe that most kids who are happy at one of them could be equally happy at many others. They’re all big and diverse enough, and all have the academic strength to satisfy even the most demanding Chicago kid, even if the overall vibe differs somewhat place to place. With all of the innovations at UChicago tending to make it more closely resemble its peers, I think this will only become more true.”
However, that vibe matters, which is why some kids gravitate to one school as opposed to others. And academics we know say that the undergrad. vibe is different at UChicago vs. other places. They see - and teach - a variety of high achievers and they know which schools just tend to have more engaged students and which don’t. Heck, we know faculty who have graduated from these other places and prefer the culture at UChicago over their own school. Culture is hard to shake off. Nondorf might be gaming the rankings and pulling all sorts of admissions high-jinx but even he can’t change the type of kid who’s attracted to the high-level intellectual vibe of the place (a vibe that, from what I’m reading, seemed to have been baked in the cake from early on in the schools’s history). Kids and parents are a lot more knowledgable about colleges today than they used to be, thanks to rankings and the internet. They know that a quarter system is more fast paced, they know that UChicago requires a bunch of 4-course quarters and they know that you can’t get out of the Core. This information tends to excite some and nauseate others. I’d argue that @DeepBlue86 is wrong: the main thing that turns kids off from ED at UChicago isn’t perceived lack of fin. aid - it’s the Core. The free-speech issue also got the attention of many families who were learning about the school for the first time. Some on CC will continue to state that none of this matters in the day to day “do I like the place” kind of way. But overall, a school’s culture does impact your experience and how much you enjoy being there and what you take with you when you leave. While all UChicago kids could very likely thrive elsewhere, preferences matter as much to them as they do to those who have declined to apply and/or attend. If we are going to agree that Admissions offices everywhere avoid the “high-minded” approach to the process, let’s also agree that matching the right kids to the right place is good for the undergraduate program and the university for the long term
