UChicago is a different kind of place. They pride themselves on filling that campus with people who really want to be there, who really embrace the life of the grind. The single best way to signal that is to apply ED. If you need money, you can run the NPC and decide whether or not it’s worth it. If you need to compare offers from several other places before you decide if you want to meet the UC EFC then you probably aren’t the best prospect. There are plenty of really bright kids out there, from every SES, that love the idea of UChicago and don’t need to see a Harvard or Stanford offer before deciding.
Sure they care a bit about yield but they care a heck of a lot more about finding smart kids who want to be there.
Chicago cannot be really blamed for adapting to the rules of the game as they are now. It is just following the example of the other schools that are in the same position as itself, namely Columbia and Penn i.e. schools that are a notch down from HYPSM in terms of public perception and preference and play second fiddle to HYPSM to a certain degree and thus are looking for ways to compete. Both Penn and Columbia have built strong ED programs and have clearly communicated the advantage of applying ED, and that is a major reason why they get over 5000 and 6000 ED apps respectively of top students who are ready to commit. Chicago is simply doing the same, which is a great strategy for the school. If it does not favor the ED applicants then it is not going to be able to build a strong ED program.
Sure Chicago is different from the time my parents were there but its objectives are a bit different now that it has chosen to model itself as more of a mainstream top school, than a niche academic powerhouse. Some people affiliated with the school from back in the day like this change and some others don’t. But it is happening whether people like it or not.
Does anyone know how many kids got deferred??? I hear u of c BARELY defers people but everyone seems to have gotten deferred. Even at my school, if you were not accepted, you were probably deferred. However a lot of applicants in my school and on college confidential seem to be highkey qualified, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I never heard anything about UChicago barely deferring people. It seems to be quite common amongst early applicants. They waitlist a lot of people in the RD round though, much more so than peer universities
Can anyone estimate the ED 2 acceptance rate? Would it be lower than ED 1?
any accepted people get their CNET ID and login stuff yet? i haven’t
Hi, I’m an international student from China who has just been accepted to EA with a Provost Scholarship (36000 stipend over four years provided I do reasearch at Argonne or Fermilab+ 1500 travel allowance). It seems that Chicago has admitted about 40 students in China, but only 2-3 of them are EA applicants. Most EA got deferred or rejected.
This is the correct one.
Why would I ever typed in “dividend” in place of “stipend”??? Maybe I am beneath the vocabulary sophiscation of a typical Uchi Student…
Thanks for the info, @GraniteRidge! This is helpful. Do you have a sense of how many from China actually applied ED and then EA?
@GraniteRidge nah, you made a typo. it’s far too early for the imposter syndrome to set in, take a deep breath and trust that you deserved to get in
Accepted but still have not received financial aid award and package. Any thoughts? Will it show up in the portal as well? Financial Aid said it would be either end of this week or first of next week, but I know other accepted students have received their aid awards.
@JBStillFlying3 I can only claim a basic understanding of game theory (although I’m a huge fan of Nash) so it’s reassuring to hear more knowledgeable people toying with the notion.
I am not hating on ED at all; it’s obviously the choice that maximizes chances for many applicants. (And of course, in the school’s best interest.) I do want to point out, however, that EA applicants also love Chicago. It’s unfair to make blanket statements that someone doesn’t belong if s/he doesn’t think binding to Chicago is worth threatening her parents’ retirement funds (things can change in 4 months). Money matters, and it really just takes time to figure things out-- especially if you have a wonky financial situation that NPC can’t accurately judge. I have heard many stories of negotiating aid, but that requires peer acceptances in hand (from what I understand).
Going back to what I said about EA, an EA applicant sacrifices the opportunity to throw a ticket into SCEA pools, which could likely have been the tipping point in. EA applicants give that up for Chicago. I at least hoped it would help. I agree that what makes Chicago so unique is how unequivocally the students fit. What I question is how things actually play out. I feel like they will use a tactic of accepting ED to boost that yield, and then go for cream of the crop RD applicants. Then Chicago will have the leeway to offer merit and entice those applicants away from other schools. I would think Chicago hasn’t had too many issues with finding the students who fit best, and ED seems to me a shift away from that.
@notveryzen, I’m kind of bristling about your comment that if you need to compare financial aid packages you are not the best prospect for UChicago because this is exactly where my kid was at last year. But thank goodness, UChicago was still only doing EA. In fact, they even mentioned this at presentation where they said that they were not the jealous type. Because my D absolutely was the right type of prospect for UChicago in terms of academic/social fit but since she needed to compare financial packages (our family would not qualify for need based) we needed to see what came through first.
Again, just because it would be in their best interest to wait for the fin aid pkg doesn’t mean that the student isn’t the right kid for UChicago.
This move was motivated by UChicago’s continued effort to go up in the rankings. I’m not going to blame them. They are a great school and have honed this process to a fine art. A school has to decide what is going to keep them going.
I still stand by my previous assertion that the ED strategy in the college admissions game was created with the best interests of the school in mind and not what is in the best interest of the student.
@goingnutsmom sorry to have offended you but I’m not disagreeing with you. There is no question that ED is designed to benefit the schools rather than the kids. I guess I don’t understand what kind of financial packages anyone would be considering if they don’t qualify for need based aid. We’re a full pay family and I was under the impression that our only choices at UChicago were to pay $70k a year or go somewhere else for school. If you were a UChicago admissions person and you had a choice between a kid whose family did the math and said we think it’s worth it vs another family that said we really like UChicago but we’re not going to spend $70k if our kid can get a big merit scholarship to USC instead, well I’m just saying from UChicago’s point of view that kid who doesn’t need to compare any other offers is a better prospect. Doesn’t make it fair or right. And I’m certainly not implying that my kid fits better there than yours. They both could be perfect fits but only one of them is a sure thing.
And I sort of bristle at your suggestion that UChicago is using ED to climb the rankings. They got up to number 3 with EA. I’m pretty sure they are OK with that spot.
No, a family always has a choice- look at how all the fin aid packages stack up once they are in. Because UChicago does give some merit scholarships. With EA this was pretty clear cut. With ED the onus is more on the family to make a decision without having all the relevant information in because why would a school give merit to ED applicants?
And no kid is a sure thing to matriculate. My D’s friend applied ED to her first choice and got in but in the end couldn’t swing it after all. ED does allow for a family to withdraw if they cannot afford the fin aid pkg offered to them. There are things that come up for families that impact affordability.
Just to be forthcoming I had one kid apply to a selective school ED and we pretty much were certain that he would get no need based aid/merit based aid but were willing to pay full price. It worked- he got in. But with my other kid, we decided as a family to wait for all offers and then decide. It worked- got into UChicago EA with merit. UChicago was her top choice ( but she would have made other schools work out for her too). Then we could see what other schools came in with merit.
Your logic does not make sense about the admissions counselor comparing kids because UChicago is need blind. Unless you know something different? Are they need aware for admissions?
Remember they have to keep that spot. My understanding that at some point a long time ago, UChicago was considered above the Ivy schools. They may want this spot back, who knows? And they still do not have the endowments of these schools. I think that they also need this aspect to change for them too.
Your speculations could be totally on the mark. I don’t have insider info. I’m just happy my kid is there and happy.
@notveryzen, I don’t get why anyone would bristle about a school wanting to go up in the rankings or doing what it can to maintain its current rankng. Schools can do whatever strategy works for them after a cost benefits analysis. It’s certainly within their right. I was not saying anything different.
Hard to know if ED is a step away from fit without seeing essays and recs. ITA with PeregrineFlute that kids who are strong candidates for HYPS make a real sacrifice to apply EA to UChicago. My kid fell into that category last year (double legacy at one of the other schools, legacy at another) and it took some persuading for her to convince her parents that U of C was the right choice for EA. And part of the reason she won that argument was the prospect of having the right to compare schools later, after RD results were out. ED would have been a non-starter in our household as of November 1st – despite the fact that DD ultimately ended up treating her EA admission as if it were an ED admission. The six weeks between application and acceptance were crucial for evaluating whether U of C really was the right option for her (and/or for her convincing us it was).
In general, I hate EA/ED because it’s both wrong and counterproductive to think that there’s one right/best college for any given student. There are lots of great options that have different appeals. Pressuring kids to plight their troth and/or forsake all others so early in the process just adds more stress to an already stressful process. I really think we should go back to the days when every kid pretty much heard all of his/her options roughly simultaneously and at the same time as every other kid. It was much saner. And it blows my mind that the corporate corpse of a crap magazine has been the calling the tunes re college admissions for the past few decades.
In the DC metro area, at last year’s EA admitted students reception, the U of C rep said 60% of the admittees were from private schools. In some technical sense, admissions may be needblind, but when each application contains many indicators of each family’s SES (zipcode, high school, parents’ degrees and occupations) and when the admissions skew so dramatically toward very affluent students, I find it hard to believe that the school is completely oblivious to the economic situation of applicants.
I’m not totally naive about the admissions process having read a lot of info on what colleges need to do these days to survive. Culling data of course is one- there was an article that talked about how colleges give merit to a certain income because then the families believe that they are getting a better deal. So spreading the merit out to attract these families is more lucrative than giving a low income kid a lot of aid. I’m not saying UChicago does this. They have the No Barriers program and a lot of outreach programs. But I think it’s not a linear thing. I also wish that everybody’s could just go back to RD sometimes too.
@exacademic we were in the same boat on Nov. 1st of this year. D17 loved both UChicago and one other school. That other school has a very restrictive ED process so she knew applying early wasn’t right. She applied RD there. But she wanted the time not only to compare any potential merit offers but also to another, deeper, comparison of the two schools w/o the distraction of standardized tests and academics taking up her time and attention. She’s 17 years old and told us, quite sensibly, that she couldn’t figure out if one was better than the other. Since Nov. 1 she has come to appreciate UChicago as a better fit and the EA deferral gave her the opportunity to let them know that. Her chances of being admitted are probably much lower now, but she’s not the type of kid to let disappointment rule her personality. She knows how difficult it is to be accepted. It’s a shame that everything switched this year when she was gearing up for an EA application and didn’t have to worry about ED. But hey - c’est la vie and at this point it’s also the norm! LOL. She has benefitted from some of the switcheroos that have happened (read: PSAT/NMSF) and will probably get burned from others. Of her five uni’s, only one of them had an unchanged admissions process from prior years - everyone else changed significantly (either by going on the common Ap. for two of her flagships, or requiring additional subject tests, or offering ED). These changes are a reflection of the increasing competitiveness at the elite or “very selective” level.