Thanks to the numerous hints and figures Nondorf has given, I feel we can make a fairly accurate picture of the admission stats. I can see there is a lot of controversy over ED 1 and 2, but after examining the data and talking to students, I feel UChicago uses the system relatively fairly. If any numbers I use are wrong, please make sure to correct me.
The Facts so Far (All confirmed by Nondorf by my ears unless noted otherwise):
32,294 apps (I may remember number slight wrong +/- 50)
13,000 ED and EA apps
1100 ED and EA apps accepted
16,000 RD apps (This number I got from the forum)
4% RD acceptance rate
0.2% Deferred to RD acceptance rate
~2300 students accepted in total
Number crunching:
We can deduce ED 2 has 4000 apps, since ED 2 and RD had 20,000 apps together. We also know that 1200 students were accepted out of this 20,000 pool. Following the RD 4% acceptance rate, 640 were accepted in RD only. The reamaing 540 kids came from ED 2, leaving a 14% acceptance rate.
We can reasonably say that ED 1 has a similar acceptance rate as ED 2. It’s likely a tad higher, but it can’t be too far off. Following this assumption, and assuming around the same number applied ED 1 as ED 2, 560/4000 kids weee accepted for a 14% acceptance rate. This leaves EA as 540/9000 for a 6% acceptance rate.
In summary:
ED 1: 14%
EA: 6%
ED 2: 14%
RD: 4%
All these numbers look reasonable and follow intuition. ED applicants have a bit of an advantage, but it isn’t the 30% acceptance rate of some Ivy leagues. Regardless of which you pick, each pool is competitive and doesn’t give much mercy. And even if someone doesn’t pick ED, the EA and RD decisions aren’t the 1% acceptance rates many (including me) thought they would be.
Apologize for potentially missing this but how many EA-deferreds switched to EDII and were those applications counted in the EDII admit rate or accounted for separately? Also, a few of the RD’s are EA-deferreds, not new apps. They had something like a .5% admit rate but that might be another 25 - 30 or so. If part of the 640 than the new-RD rate is actually closer to 3.8% or so (still rounds to 4% and Nondorf loves rounding!).
If the overall yield is about 1740 kids again (76%) that implies that the EA/RD kids are near a 50% commitment rate. Does that make sense? So one half Binding at 100% (or very near) and one half Non-binding at 50% means about 75% overall yield. Certainly sounds tidy. Just wondering if a 50% non-binding yield makes sense. They might expect to go a bit lower on overall matriculants since last year’s “oversubscription” was extraordinary (+150 over year prior). 72% yield is around 1,660 which means that the non-binding yield is somewhere around 39-40%. IDK - my gut says that makes more sense as those who are gaga for UChicago would have applied ED. Perhaps those 25 ED-deferreds committed but the rest were shopping either on price or something else. Maybe UChicago was able to offer them some serious money.
75% yield might make more sense if they accepted a higher percentage of bindings but with that 4% admit rate for RD it doesn’t seem likely that they did so. The 54-46 split seems about right (binding vs. non).
When Nondorf introduced the 3:30 keynote speaker last week during the admitted student days in the chapel, he mentioned the stats too, but we missed the first minutes or so of it. Perhaps he’ll mentioned something this upcoming Thursday.
So ED2 was probably much more competitive than 17% (more like 8%), since at least a couple thousand EA apps must have been converted, and RD a lot more competitive than 4% (more like 3%), because there were probably at least 6,000 deferred EA apps in the pool, although they may not have had an average admission rate in RD. 70% of the class will be people accepted ED.
What that also means is that their yield for people who have a choice – EA and RD – is around 50%. That’s believable; that’s about what most of the Ivies other than HYP get on their RD admits. The EA yield is probably somewhat higher – some portion of the EA admits will treat it like ED – and the RD yield somewhat lower. Less than 20% of the enrolled class will be people who applied RD. That’s a heck of a paradigm shift.
It’s also a LOT of work! Someone read and evaluated an extra 13,000 applications to produce 200 class members, maybe a few more.
Looking back, 70% ED seems awfully high. Maybe my assumption on 4000 ED1 applicants is too high and more people applied EA rather than ED. It’s possible only 400-500 applicants were accepted each ED round, making the class only 50% ED (which matches the behavior of peer schools with ED). It’s hard to get exact numbers because of lots of these numbers being rounded.
A 1510 average SAT is just about right in line with HYP and a few others, higher than S, and probably just a hair lower than MIT. Nobody is catching Caltech until/unless they become more holistic. Harvey Mudd is up there too, but I’m looking mainly at UChicago’s university competition.
I’m one of those who has mentioned UChicago’s supposed 2-3% RD admit rate. Isn’t that what it was last year?
Last year the avg. SAT was either 1490 or 1499 (both were heard). So it’s gone up a bit, although it’s hard to gauge last year as there were probably a bunch of old tests mixed in with the new.
Actually we don’t really know yet if they increased RD and EA yield but it looks like they expect to. When you offer all the admission plans available, it’s possible that you can vary your admitted percentages, perhaps just plain old focusing on quality. If they had a particularly strong EA pool, for instance, and they have the merit funds, they might have cut back EDI a bit. Totally agree that EDII was more competitive this year. And RD might have been super strong as well. This would explain the 10+ point increase in the SAT; last year, in contrast, by focusing on ED/EDII a bit more, they may have sacrificed the test score a tad. But last year they got their big jump in yield. Will be interesting to see if they get the same yield even with scaled back ED/EDII If they do, then UChicago might have just graduated from Favor of the Decade to something a bit more substantial (though it’s still pretty early to call that one).
What in the world makes you think they “scaled back” the ED admits?
It’s far more believable that Chicago gets its 77% yield by admitting 70% of the class ED with a 100% yield and 30% of the class EA or RD with a 50% yield than that it admits only half of the class ED and gets close to a 60% yield on the other half.
@JHS anecdotally, it appeared that more EA admits happened this year relative to ED. Also, the numbers work better with that assumption. Your numbers make a lot of sense for last year but this year seems a bit different.