@ScrnNme I was referring to the slingshot change from EA/RD to ED1/EA/ED2/RD, a 180 degree change as JHS has pointed out from the student’s perspective.
I am just glad to have no more kids coming up.
The frenzied pace would appear to be unstable and unsustainable.
For those interested in the Sit-In of 1969, a little walk down memory lane, compliments of Dean Boyer:
Edit to add: scroll down to page 20 to begin the specific narrative.
@denydenzig said:
I don’t think it has anything to do with being liberal, but being closed minded. My belief is that UChicago is trying to discourage closed minded students from applying and actively encouraging open-minded students to make UChicago their first choice. As I said, it worked for my D.
@hebegebe Your choice of words were much better than mine 
I doubt Chicago will admit 2/3 of class of 2021 in ED and EDII. I think a reasonable number could be 800 (ED and ED II which are very high already) and 400 (EA). Then that will leave about 1000 for RD. People forget that the admission game (LOL) is not only about the admit rate and yield rate but also the number of applications. In theory a school could have 1% admit rate and 100% yield in one year. But people will be discouraged to apply in the future. What is good for that school?
In Chicago’s case if the RD admit rate is insanely low this year the future applicants will be significantly lacking interest to apply RD. And Chicago can only get a certain number of ED and ED II applicants (SCEA and RD other places). So its total applicants will be decreased significantly. I do not think that reduced number of applicants with super low admit rate and super high yield rate will do its good in the long run.
Remember Chicago is not in the league of Harvard and Stanford reputation wise. It needs to grow its number of applicants (and recognition) IMO.
^^ I understand @denydenzig’s point, however. When my D17 was touring a well-regarded LAC here in MN (rhymes with “Schmarlton”), they proudly declared that being a “liberal” arts college of course meant that they were politically “liberal” as well. D17 was immediately turned off, not because she’s politically conservative (she isn’t) but because she was most unimpressed by such a skewed understanding of what “liberal arts” actually means.
UChicago seems to be fighting against the tide on this (Northwestern, for instance, took the opportunity to strike a different pose), but we know many academics who regard the institution as one of the last to preserve genuine academic integrity. And they felt that way PRIOR to the statement last summer.
This is precisely why, they will not officially release the admit rate by category separately. They will insead release
Total applications, Total admits, Total matriculants as they did last year, making it very difficult for the average student to figure out what their odds are with RD. Remember most of the students applying are not CC readers, where all this is discussed in detail.
@eddi137 pretty blanket statement about reputation - think that would entirely depend on the school - Booth certainly is.
More marketing out of UChicago today to help with yield certainly. Those numbers better Harvard’s 2016 class.
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/03/01/career-resources-put-class-2016-path-success
What I meant was the overall school reputation. When people hear Harvard they think that entire university not only College or HBS.
Booth is good but the general public may have a little bit hard time to associate it with Chicago.
IMO the general public recognition is important to Chicago as well as its students.
@eddi137 at #444 has made a couple of good points:
His/her ruminations support the numbers that @fbsdreams has heard. It would be very foolish for Nondorf and company to have a short-term view of admissions and discourage folks from applying RD in future years. RD is the last chance to round out the class the way the admissions dept. wants it so those RD kids are important. I was playing with the FBS numbers last night and determined that if they admit between 950 - 1100 RD’s, that implies about a 70-75% overall yield. 70% seems a tad low (would Admissions change it’s policy so drastically to increase yield by 5 points?) but 75 seems reasonable. BTW, the total commitment rate of “unboundeds” (i.e. non -ED/ED II) would be 50 - 58% which doesn’t seem out-of-the-ballpark either. EA commitment rate would be higher than RD, most likely, but a blended average might well be hovering around 50%. So a case could be made that they might well, indeed, be spreading the acceptances out so that the class is evenly represented by EA, ED, EDII, and RD kids. Hopefully we’ll have more evidence with time to support or refute this hypothesis.
UChicago’s reputation, despite being stellar, is NOT Harvard/Yale/Stanford quality yet. It might well be over time. The test is very specific: when faced with a choice between UChicago and Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or MIT, which do you choose? So far, using this criteria and based on our obviously very scant anecdotal evidence, UChicago still ranks below these other five. (This is an informal experiment that someone I know is gathering data on).
Absolutely, UChicago has a peer reputation for its academics amoung academia with the best universities world wide, however that has not translated to the public view/recognition of the school as say the HYPS schools, heck any of the Ivies have better public recognition than UChicago. This is what they are trying to fix in order to attract the best students in the world.
I wonder how Zimmer feels being compared to Trump 
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/3/3/video-activists-make-wall-front-hull-gate-protest/
And I am sure he knew this would generate a reaction
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/2/22/zimmer-tells-wsj-would-fine-richard-spencer-speak/
And it did. In response to which the Student council sent this
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/3/3/college-council-invites-zimmer-discuss-free-speech/
I understand that there are four council reps in each class. Interesting to note how many signed on to this letter. I also find the way this letter was phrased quite interesting.
On one hand it states
and on the other hand it says
I wonder if the Council wondered why Zimmer given his Jewish roots is still committed to letting a white nationalist like Spencer come to campus and spew his hatred, even though Spencer in fact would most probably call into question Zimmer’s “worth as a human being” as the Council puts it. That I think says a lot about Zimmer’s view on free speech which the Council wants to understand as they state below
Should Zimmer accept the invite? or just ignore them?
BTW, I did not know Spencer attended UChicago! I did find this a tad troubling
Interesting contrast between the reaction of UChicago vs. his high school on Spencer
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2016/11/29/asked-uofc-disavows-white-nationalist-alum-richard/
@JBStillFlying @CU123 Wrong! Uchicago is tied in third place with Yale in the latest USNWR college rankings. It is routinely at the very top in world academic and graduate school rankings. It is clearly outranked generally by Harvard and Stanford. Most kids would probably pick Princeton and Yale over Uchicago (althoough less so Yale than Princeton). MIT and Cal Tech are specialty schools, so you cannot really compare them to the others… Uchicago is ahead of the other ivies, in some cases by a wide margin (e.g, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and Penn). Brown and Dartmouth are unknown globally. Penn has a reputation only in business due to Wharton . But Uchicago Booth business school is now second tied with Stanford ahead of Wharton. Uchicago is a globally recognized powerhouse and employers in the US and abroad know that.
@Chrchhill I realize that but there still some skepticism in the meteoric rise, and HYPSMIT all have a bit of an edge in terms of their historical placement in those rankings (Stanford another relative newcomer, but its rise has been more gradual). When you consider that only 17 years ago, the UChicago fall 1999 entering class faced a 47.5% acceptance rate (!), this skepticism is understandable
The test I mentioned earlier is one based more on perceptions than anything else, and based of course on factors of varying significance, ranging from what you knows about the grad program or faculty, to what know about the undergrad. experience, to what the neighbors and grandma say when you mention the name, etc. Oftentimes it’s hard to capture which factors are the most significant (weigh most heavily) in one particular ranking or another (CWUR? Shanghai? USNews? Forbes?); however, there is a wealth of implied information in someone’s revealed preference for one institution over another.
I think UChicago College has the ability to remain in a top-5 place permanently. I saw it happen at the graduate level while at Booth (my entering year was the first to see it really climb in the rankings). To the extent that it edges out one school one year, or gets topped by another school the next, doesn’t really matter all that much as long as it remains in that general area and doesn’t let Columbia or Penn or CalTech edge it out. That won’t be easy as UChicago is essentially a liberal arts college so doesn’t, for instance, offer the full gamut of STEM majors. But it also hopefully believes that cut-throat competition among the top of the elite is as good for the schools themselves as it is for their consumers and other stakeholders.
17 years in colleges is akin to a 1000 in human years UChicago has only began focusing in earnest on its college about 10 years ago. Again - I don’t think MIT and Cal Tech are in the same group. Columbia has been sliding a bit, especially at the graduate school levels. (Its B school for example is now just at top 10) Penn is a one trick Wharton pony at the undergraduate level. I predict with some lvel of comfort the UChicago college admit rate this year will be between 6.5-7%. It was 7.6% last year.
Chrchill I think you missed my point, five of the Ivies are very good at using the words “Ivy League” for name branding even though these Ivies are not nearly as prominent in the rankings as UChicago. That Ivy League moniker has been used quite effectively by the 5 Ivies for recruiting. The other 3 don’t even bring up there league affiliation. As far as MIT and Caltech go, I agree with you, I don’t consider them in the same bucket with HYPS and UChicago, they are engineering schools and attract students who want to study engineering specifically. I would say that my daughter, who will attend UChicago in the Fall talks with her friends about UChicago, they ask “where is that”? Seriously they have no idea there even is a University of Chicago, and one of them is going to Vanderbuilt so you know she must have done a little research. They are shocked when she tells them she picked UChicago over any Ivy. Bottom line is I am simply talking about name recognition in the general public.
Keep in mind that while MIT and CalTech are primarily known for STEM, they are all R1 research uni’s and on the same rankings lists. Also, just in terms of revealed preference, the trend toward STEM is definitely going to be a factor that might place one school higher than another when looking at revealed preference. I also wouldn’t say that MIT specifically attracts engineering (although certainly it attracts a good number). MIT does resemble UChicago’s quality for some non-STEM departments, such as Economics (which is quite a popular major at UChicago) and both schools have excellent physics, chem, bio, etc. departments. The feel of the two schools, however, will be quite different just due to the mix of students (lack of engineering students at UChicago, for instance).
I feel that endowment strength will determine the top 5 universities in the US in the long run and by that measure, Chicago is in a very weak position compared to most of its peers and I think it is actually slipping as the gap between it and HYPSM endowment widens with every passing year. Money does talk and HYPSM and several other universities can outbid Chicago in attracting star faculty to their campus and also spend more on research, facilities, faculty and student support over the long run. Yale hired away Ted Snyder and Hopkins poached Booth’s Dean away from Chicago. Yale is showing what the power of money can do. It has bulldozed its way into an enviable position in the MBA rankings by strategically building up its program. It has caught up with other leaders in a very short time and even surpassed some of the them. I think it will soon displace Columbia.
Another example. Boyer describes in his book that often the graduate subsidy that Chicago was able to provide to “promising graduate students” was not competitive with other schools and so Chicago lost a lot of the future movers and shakers to other schools. They seem to have stemmed this problem for the moment with a temporary influx of cash but I wonder how long that will last.
I am a fan of UChicago, but all is not rosy with the school. IT will remain an excellent university, but if it aspires to be in the “top 5”, it must solve its endowment problem quickly, before it is too late.
Small point but FYI the Booth Dean was not poached. He accepted a position as Provost. That’s a huge promotion and if anything it speaks well of UChicago not bad.
That’s really wrong. Chicago has been focusing in earnest on its college since the 1980s, if not even before that. John Boyer, who is clearly the architect of the contemporary College, was first appointed Dean in 1992, and he was appointed Dean then because he was already known as a champion of the College on the faculty. It started expanding enrollment and recruitment in the mid-90s. It started replacing its outmoded dormitories then, too, and re-emphasizing the house tradition. The Core Curriculum was reformed to make it more student-friendly in the late 90s. It has taken a long, long time and a lot of work to get to the point where they are today. Nothing happened in just 10 years.
Except one thing. Nine years ago, or so, they hired Jim Nondorf, and started focusing on admissions as a signal for the College’s quality for the first time. Applications had been going up, and admissions rates going down, pretty steadily under the former admissions dean, Ted O’Neill, who was legitimately beloved. But Nondorf turbocharged the process to a degree theretofore unimaginable anywhere. Chicago only began focusing in earnest on college admissions 10 years ago.