“Wherefore the UChicago derangement?”
Doubles down on the proclivities and pretensions that (probably) feed that “derangement”.
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Supernal.
Good to know that you answered your answer before you asked your ask.
Nothing exudes “Nonconformity! Fullthroated genius! Maugrethecoastalestablishment!” like a (w)rack of Nobel Prize(s).
“Nothing exudes “Nonconformity! Fullthroated genius!” like a rack of Nobel Prize(s).”
@Parapraxes, you have confused the Nobel for the Oscar, and the correct quote is actually: "[N]othing can take the sting out of the world’s economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with golden statues.” - Billy Crystal, Host, 2012
Peeps… just want to ask one question… Do we know for sure that going TO will drastically increase the number of applicants? I mean, how many applicants, (1) admire UChicago, (2) has every characteristic and number pegged right (3) with the exception of SAT? Is that really a huge population?
As for sports analogies…
I see HYP as the jocks, while UChicago is the gamer-geek who because of demographic trends has found itself to be just as cool or even cooler than the jocks. This, irks the jocks, a bit. But the group that it truly irks are (1) the jock wannabes and (2) the jock worshipers.
The odd thing is, this gamer-geek seems to be flaunting itself - an act that is traditionally uncool - but in this new topsy-turvy world, it only seems to make it much cooler.
Meanwhile, the other, truly dyed in the wool gamer-geeks don’t care about what’s happening (M, CalTech).
“Do we know for sure that going TO will drastically increase the number of applicants? I mean, how many applicants, (1) admire UChicago, (2) has every characteristic and number pegged right (3) with the exception of SAT? Is that really a huge population?”
Also, how many applications could it lose by going test optional? I don’t have enough information on the entire population of students who apply to UChicago to know what the entire pool is composed of, but I do wonder if going TO might be unappealing to the high scoring gamer geeks that it currently attracts? Part of the attraction for some of the student body is the geek chic allure of studying with and among the other uber geeks. At least around here, those are not the same kids who are attracted to the TO schools like Bates, partly because the TO schools are seen as prioritizing things other than academic ability.
I liked @FStratford 's sports analogy and agree right now UChicago attracts similar types of students as M and CalTech. Will those students be less interested if they perceive the student body as becoming less able, less qualified, more alternate and less academic?
I question whether the typical UChicago high school aspirant is geeky-technical in the way of the typical MIT and Caltech aspirant. No doubt there is some overlap, but Chicago’s appeal seems to me to be oriented toward a kid who has more general intellectual aspirations, which may certainly go with a specifically scientific-mathematical interest. But also may not - think of all the many other strengths of the school. If nothing else the existence of the Core and the lack of the usual engineering majors creates a less geeky orientation. These factors alone must filter out most true uber-geeks. Unless by geekiness is meant simply a very serious student - one who knows something of the traditions of the University of Chicago, is undeterred by its relative lack of sports, EC’s and name recognition, and who - quite frankly - has got beyond thinking of high SAT scores as being any sort of accomplishment. For such a kid - exactly the kind Chicago wants - it’s surely more a question of finding kindred spirits and a serious educational milieu. Anyone deterred by the TO policy is someone not really simpatico with the aims of education at the U of C. Could it be that the policy is meant in part to screen out such types?
@FStratford No one can answer your question. Maybe not even Dean Nondorf. But I can rephrase your question in a different way and I can answer it: will going to TO drastically REDUCE the number of applications? Will that harm the competence and “fit” of the overall application pool by going TO? My guess is that the answers will likely to be no.
If that is indeed the case, the decision to go TO will be a free call in finance term. There is no downside and there may be some decent upside. So why not going TO?
I honestly believe (with no scientific proof) that there is a reasonable big population of low income and low test score but truly high intellect students out there. They are just waiting for their chance at the right institution to blossom. If U of C can harvest a bunch of them, they may pay back U of C someday with a Nobel Prize or a nine figure donation.
I get a kick out of the relative lack of sports. You do know they finished near the top of the Learfield Cup standings for outstanding DIII program. Maybe attendance by students isn’t quite the big 10, but the program as far as ability to compete is actually pretty strong.
Also, my opinion is that ranking #3 with Yale and ahead of all but Harvard and Princeton will have a greater impact on # of applications then being TO will. Like it or not, it is a source of external validation that high school kids and their peer circles point to.
“I get a kick out of the relative lack of sports.”
From listening to the HS seniors we know, so do the ones that are UChicago’s greatest fans. Not caring about sports is a bit of the geek chic culture. I haven’t heard any of them talk about test scores as being an achievement in themselves, but they do seem to value and seek out a college that attracts what they perceive to be academic peers - geeks in various subjects.
But I also hear mixed reaction to the Core, not the passion that some of the older UChicago alums express. Not hearing much love or yearning for the Core, hearing some resigned acceptance of the benefits of such an education or even resentment about not having as much time as they’d like for subjects of their choosing. And that was consistent with what my son heard during his admitted student overnight visit as well. Small sample size, so possible it’s not representative, but then again so is the sample size of the older alums expressing this mythical love.
@milee30 , I wouldn’t put too much stock in complaints about the Core coming from current students. Complaining - or, I would call it, curbing a simplistic take on things - is part of the culture of the place. It will be interesting to see what those kvetching students will say ten years out about what they most valued in their Chicago education - there’s a fair chance it will be the Core. And of course everyone coming to Chicago knows or ought to know that the Core is part of the package. Judging from what one reads from prospective students on cc, that’s a feature, not a bug. If it’s the latter, then why come to almost the only elite school (with Columbia) that has it?
I do agree that a disinclination to valorize sports is part of the culture. To refine my casual observation about “the relative lack of sports”: While there are students who participate in sports and do so at a high level, they do not enjoy anything like the prestige on the Chicago campus that they do on the campuses of the Ivy League peers (not to mention Stanford and Duke, of course). At Chicago the smart interesting original kid is king. He/she could easily also wear a jersey, but that’s - as Aristotle would say - an accident. Does anyone disagree with that proposition?
Even fans of the Core are going to have a course or two - or even a subject or two - they are not wild about. Even within a sequence you might be covering material that you’d rather skip or reading someone you don’t spark to at all - and then find you’ve been assigned the guy for your final paper! It’s all good. It just may not all be enjoyable.
Anecdotal, but going the other way. My D, who joined expecting to major in STEM but now pursuing a different major, has become a big believer in the Core.
@hebegebe - I suspect the Core is similar to exercise. Not always much fun while you’re doing it, but most people appreciate the end results and recognize the benefit in hindsight.
@milee30 #48
Students in the middle of an intensive academic program usually don’t appreciate the benefit but they would hate all the difficult work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcNT2pMyFn4&t=133s&index=95&list=FLVzXBm41kw9MJbRuuXRWgUA
But listen to the beginning of the David Brooks speech at the Institute of Politics earlier this year.
Quoted: “If you have told me in 1983 when I left here I would walk through campus misty eyed and nostalgic, I would have thought you were crazy. But walking in here I really felt that. I feel that, especially I am older, I feel more attached to this place now than I did at any point even when I was a student here. I feel so every year more formed by the University of Chicago.”
My D was immersed in Core classes this past year so she has a lot of perspective on this topic. Full disclosure: she had a pretty positive attitude about the Core going into first year. Now, she considers it invaluable to a true liberal arts education. She told me there are definitely students who aren’t thrilled about taking subjects out of their zones of comfort and interest but that they need “to suck it up” and appreciate the learning opportunity. If anything they’ll develop a more thorough understanding of what it is about that area they never liked. Or, they may discover, like she did, that certain subjects are a heckuva lot more interesting at the college level.
This can’t be an unusual sentiment about the Core. Most probably end up appreciating it at some point.
However, and this also might not be all that unusual: it’s hard to ask someone in the midst of the quarter how they feel about their courses. My daughter told her relatives last fall that it was “hellish” (she was playing it up a bit but she had also just been through 4th week and gearing up for 7th week so it wasn’t all exaggeration). Perhaps everyone feels a lot more positive about the Core when they have a chance to step back and breathe for a bit. In other words, when they are on break.
My kids loved the idea of the Core going in. One a little more than the other, because the other had the benefit of the one’s not-so-positive experience (as seen at the time). In both cases, though, the Core was an important part of the attraction to Chicago.
Kid #1 pretty much despised the core-Core first year. Really disliked her Hum section: “They have six different levels of math so I’m not holding back anyone who really cares about it. I don’t understand why I have to study poetry in a class full of kids who have no idea how to read poetry but feel privileged to take up class time expressing their contempt for it. It’s just like high school.” Like Sosc somewhat more, because she didn’t know anywhere near as much going in, and because she was taking a more traditional sequence and had better chemistry with the teachers (who were grad students). Hated having to take math. Liked the arts stuff and Civ. Was contemptuous of Core Bio and her Core PhySci classes, because of their lack of rigor, but didn’t want to take regular science courses with all the pre-meds. So there was a lot of whining about the Core. She wished she had gone to Brown.
By the time she was a fourth year, and even more so in the years after graduation, she was an enormous fan of the Core. She understood how it had affected her education overall, and how it made it easy to get to a deeper level with other Chicago alums much faster than with other people. She understood how her experience at Chicago had differed from that of people at other, similar schools.
Kid #2 had diminished expectations based on listening to Kid #1 whine, but took her advice. He’s a reader who had never liked his English classes, but he adored his Hum class, and he learned a ton from his writing instructor, to whom he was very grateful. Sosc was much less successful, except he was inspired by the senior faculty member who taught the winter quarter. He was a pre-med at the time, so he took regular Bio and Chem rather than the Core versions. He loved Civ. He didn’t fully meet the language requirement going in, but rather than taking the minimum (one quarter of Latin) he took an intensive summer Arabic course that supposedly compressed three quarters into one. It was a complete waste of time and money; he didn’t learn enough Arabic to be able to take Arabic 2, which meant that within a few years it was like he hadn’t taken it at all.
He never complained too much about the Core, except sometimes about his Sosc section. But he wound up majoring in and then getting a graduate degree in Sociology, and he is more or less a professional social science researcher. He lived with someone from his Sosc section for a number of years post-college, and he got involved with and then married someone else from his Sosc section. In retrospect, that Sosc section was pretty darn important in his life.
“[She w]as contemptuous of Core Bio and her Core PhySci classes, because of their lack of rigor, but didn’t want to take regular science courses with all the pre-meds. … By the time she was a fourth year, and even more so in the years after graduation, she was an enormous fan of the Core. She understood how it had affected her education overall, and how it made it easy to get to a deeper level with other Chicago alums much faster than with other people.”
@JHS Do you think that this feeling includes the core bio and physical science classes? I think a lot of alums do rhapsodize about the HUM, CIV, and SOSC classes, give or a take a quarter. But I wonder how many people feel that way about their science (and math, and foreign language) core / gen ed requirements.
DD actually enjoyed her physical science class; it didn’t have much homework, the lectures were engaging, the class turned out to be an easy A for a kid who’d had AP Physics, but it wasn’t a waste of time. She felt she got to her apply what she’d learned in her high school physics classes in an interesting area. Still, I think if she hadn’t had to take a physical science class, she might have chosen something else - so many subjects she will never get to take in college, even with 40 or so classes.
And she could have done without either of her quarters of Core Bio. Felt like high school science: she memorized terms for the quizzes and tests, then immediately forgot them. One class in particular felt like a lot of busy work - 15 assignments in 10 weeks. Interestingly, biology is one of the few departments that doesn’t collect and post evaluations of teachers publicly.
No, it didn’t include the Core Bio or PhySci. It’s funny. I sat at a dinner table with her and four friends their third year. They were all hard-core humanities kids – two English majors, two TAPS majors, and one honest-to-God art major – and they were all tsk-tsk-ing about the lack of rigor in their Core science classes. Basically, they thought they should have been required to take regular science classes, but they weren’t going to volunteer to do that, at least not if they had to compete with the pre-meds. They didn’t want to be filler pumping up the curve for classmates who were desperate for As in science classes. They all acknowledged how hypocritical they were, by the way.
One of my daughter’s PhySci classes was the Global Warming class, which was both about global warming and about the methodologies for forecasting anything complex. I attended a mock version of that for parents, and everyone there thought it was amazing. People were really turned on. When I talked to my daughter, she sneered at me about it. Sure, it was entertaining and sexy, but it was too easy, and they weren’t using the real math. I swear! That University of Chicago ethos; kids seemed literally unable to appreciate an entertaining course in which they actually learned something without a lot of pain.
Personally I really liked labs. I took the major-track physics (non-honors - 130s), and while the lectures and p-sets kinda felt like busywork (especially as a third year math major that already took calc-based mechanics in high school), but I enjoyed empirically verifying some of our formulas every week. Even Core Bio, which is kinda awful, has some nice labs.
Many people disagree with this, and the labs are definitely not masterpieces of educational design, but the main point is understanding how science works in the same kind of way Hum and Sosc and Civ try to teach you how to think in the humanities, in the social sciences, and through primary sources. And I think I did get that out of the science core - I learned how scientists think through problems. Similar to Hum, Sosc, and Civ, exactly what problems you work through isn’t the important part.
My daughter has been lucky enough to work on interesting final projects and papers in her (non-major) science cores. She actually enjoyed Core Bio and considered it a real improvement over what she learned in hs; her final paper there was tangentially related to a course she was taking in her major so that was pretty cool. Earlier this year in Phy. Sci she and her group were up pretty late in the lab working on their final experiment - and the prof. was there as support (the entire section must have been given the extra lab time but not everyone from class was there). They got a ton of great input and feedback from him - he’s a tenure-track physics prof. So again, very cool. Her experience overall might not be as rigorous as the honors kids or even the kids in “major science” but she feels she’s learning a ton from these courses.
It is interesting that there are gradations of intensity for Math and Science but no “official” equivalent for Hum or Sosc. Some sequences are considered “easier” than others but there’s no sorting to determine who should register for what. Should UChicago start offering placement testing and recommendations for the latter? 
Actually at my LAC they offered an advanced freshman seminar to those coming in with a 4 or higher on AP Lit. I was delighted to be in there with others who already had some idea of how to analyze poetry or write an essay. Perhaps UChicago can do similar sorting based on something like AP scores. For example, fewer than 6% of Lit testers nationwide even scored a 5 this year, so a 5 might qualify you for “honors” Hum (same texts, different pace and level of discussion). A 4 (fewer than 15% nationwide) might place you in regular Hum, and everyone else can opt for “intro to humanities” or equivalent.