<p>The **overall"" admission rates for the Classes of 2009 and 2010 were in the 38 and 40 percent range. For the Class of 2010, there were still fewer than 10,000 total applications. They surpassed the 10,000 applications in 2007 with the Class of 2011, and the EA admission rate was 40 percent with an overall admission rate of 35 percent. </p>
<p>As far as a reference, in 1995, Chicago was still admitting more than 70 percent of all applicants.</p>
<p>We have been watching this trend with dismay for the last few years. My D2 (HS senior this year) knew how she would answer the “uncommon app” essay prompts in seventh grade when we visited campus with her sister, and has been carrying a torch for U of C ever since. Sooooo frustrating that it has become so easy to apply just for the heck of it and so “trendy” just in time for her application.</p>
<p>wow… UChicago truly made a significant progress in its reputation and appeals to prospective students for the last decade. For people who feel unlucky of their university application year, I think competition for more prestigious and higher ranked school will become more and more competitive. So I just tell myself, well, now is much better than 5 years later.</p>
<p>Number of high school graduates hit all time high in 2009. Current competition is more or less same as several years ago, the difference is people apply to more schools than before.</p>
<p>Look for a 19.5 % rise in total number of applications too! It’s likely there will be 30,000 applicants this year. How the U of C handles this remains to be seen, as yield will also jump from last year.</p>
<p>For some applicants, who are not obsessed with USNWR rankings, Reed College may be a sensible alternative.</p>
<p>^Why apply to Chicago then? “Any school” doesn’t offer anything like Chicago’s core or have a substantial majority students who are passionate about their studies.</p>
<p>@rhg23rd Your wording was simply confusing me. I thught you just meant people shouldnt look too closely at USNWR. Which would mean people should just look at any school that appeals to them. If you are looking for similar schools to UC yes, Reed has been said to have a similar vibe, but its structure, location and size are all different than UC’s.</p>
That is something I am very interested to learn. Giving the admissions staff a generous amount of time (45 days) to read applications, a calculation involving the number of admissions officers (~30) results in each admissions officer reading about 8 applications a day, or about one hour per application. Of course, since an application is read by more than one person, and many applications are decided in the committee meetings after the initial reading of the applications, I’d say the initial read of an application is far less than an hour - at best 20 minutes and perhaps as little as 10 minutes. Not a great deal of time for a holistic process, especially one that purports to put a lot of emphasis on essays.</p>
<p>I wonder how the university will deal with this if the number of EA apps continues to rise. A switch to SCEA or ED? Hiring outsider readers to do the initial read of apps? </p>
<p>Brown may provide a historical precedent - it switched from EA to ED largely because it found itself incapable of dealing with large numbers of early applicants. A victim of its own popularity!
<ol>
<li><p>In the 1990s Harvard also switched from ED to EA, and after one year had to institute more-restrictive SCEA because under EA it was “swamped” with early applications – over 5,000 of them! </p></li>
<li><p>I think lots of colleges supplement their admissions staffs with part-time readers (who may be seniors or grad students) during January and February.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I really hope Uchicago introduces early decision next year. That way only students will apply because of their interest in attending the school and not because of the high global and USNWR rankings</p>
<p>Really! Unrestricted EA is so much fairer and more applicant-friendly than ED. That’s why Chicago is getting so many early applications, lots more than peer colleges that are as popular or more popular – its early application rules offer a better deal for applicants than other colleges’ early application rules. Why would anyone be campaigning to change that?</p>
<p>Shifting to ED would improve Chicago’s yield by a few points, thus lowering its admission rate, so that fewer applicants would get admitted overall. If Jim Nondorf doesn’t think that’s worth it – he, who gets paid to lower the admission rate, effectively – I sure as heck don’t care!</p>