UChicago holds third place with Yale in 2018 USNWR ranking

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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As long as we’re going anecdotal, DD and 3 of her BFFs from class of 2020:

DD: high stats legacy from rural flyover state. Initially had minimal interest in UC, intrigued by the mailings and applied EA, slowly became enamored over Jan-Apr period and committed mid April over another school that she was also quite interested in.
Friend 1: Wealthy East Coast, waitlists only at high end schools. Counselor suggested offering UC a commitment, accepted off waitlist
Friend 2: Chicago area kid, turned down Stanford to attend UC
Friend 3: Western US, came because UC offered best financial package.

None of these kids would have applied ED as none had UC as their first choice on 11/1. 3 of 4 are full pay (other than National Merit). They are great kids, doing well in school and looking forward to their 2nd year.

Outside the rarified airs of the top East Coast private schools (and the equivalent public schools), most kids don’t think about college well enough in advance to have enough info to apply ED. We actively discouraged ED as we did not want DD to fall in love with any school with <10% acceptance rate. Probably would not have gotten accepted under current system. Glad we’re done playing these games.

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Yeah, I realized that was what you were suggesting, @hebegebe. My point was that as a “Unique Selling Proposition” the highly-politicized Ellison approach would be really counterproductive — likely to repel at least as many intellectual kids as it attracts. Whereas the “we’re a place where ideas/academics really matter and where we train/expect you to think broadly, deeply, and critically” is a pitch that has appeal regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum. And it provides a context for touting the 6:1 student:faculty ratio and small class sizes.

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“Nobody wants to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and walk away thinking that it wasn’t money well spent - that their kids’ education or viewpoints were marginalized or compromised in any way.” Reflect on that statement and you’ll see why Ellison’s approach is the wrong one.

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There is no argument for safe spaces and microaggression nonsense. Life is nasty brutish solitary and short. Deal with it. Grow up !

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“Reflect on that statement and you’ll see why Ellison’s approach is the wrong one.”

Please elucidate for us, @exacademic.

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The 3,000 person drop in applications might have been due to myriad reasons (confusion over application plans, discouragement from applying RD, etc.). But totally agree with @exacademic that some intellectual kids were likely turned off by the Ellison approach. And probably for the better - they’d be very uncomfortable at UChicago. It’s not for everyone.

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It was an invitation to self-critical reflection, @JBStillFlying.

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@exacademic - I invite you to assist with that by explaining your point further.

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I’m generally more willing to help when people first put effort into figuring things out for themselves.

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@exacademic - why the mystery? Weren’t you once in academia? No secrets or “groupthink” here - put it on the thread. I’ll clarify my question: Why do you think Ellison’s letter somehow marginalizes or compromises viewpoints further - or is that NOT what you were getting at?

191

Amongst the elite prep/boarding school kids of the east coast the concept of HYPSM is very strong. However, you will see many people applying ED to places like Columbia or Penn and increasingly Chicago to increase their chances of getting into a top school, because they d rather forego their chances at HYPSM and get into a top 10 or so school than jeopardize their chances at an elite school altogether by doing HYPSM early and the other top schools RD.

Especially kids who are not at the vey very top of their class at these schools, are very conscious of the insane competition they will face since practically all of the star kids at these schools are gunning for HYPSM. So they opt for non-HYPSM schools, and also many have legacy status at those non-HYPSM places so they usually are not willing to forego the legacy boost for the HYPSM crapshoot. But for most of these kids it is true that if they had a HYPSM vs the lower elite group option they would overwhelmingly pick the former. This crowd is very prestige- and status-conscious.

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@Penn95 I love how you always try to "implicitly : downgrade UChicago … You add a welcome dose of predictability and constancy to this crazy world.

193

Let me try explaining the Unique Selling Proposition a different way.

It was probably around 20 years ago, when my career trajectory changed from engineering to business matters that I read a famous (at that time) marketing book called The Discipline of Market Leaders. I will use that framework to describe why I think this approach is important.

IIRC, the key points were that a company could be successful in one of three ways: 1) Lowest price, 2) Highest Quality, or 3) Differentiated consumer experience. Examples of successful companies in each category are Wal-Mart, Mercedes, and Apple. The key thing to understand is that a company doesn’t need to win every potential customer, or even a majority of them, in order to successful. You just need to understand the best approach for your company in order to win more than your fair share.

Let’s now consider each of these categories in terms of UChicago competing for elite high school students:

Lowest Cost: HYPSM, due to their large endowments, can meet or beat any need-based award given by UChicago. However, since HYPSM do not offer merit scholarships, UChicago can win over some students. But UChicago seems less interested in competing using merit than in the past.

Highest Quality: H, S, and M win in the overall Highest Quality category, with honorable mentions to Y and P. Prestige-focused student will choose one of these over UChicago almost every time in the same way that people will choose a Mercedes over an Infiniti. And if the students are indifferent to what UChicago has to offer, this is the right decision for them.

Differentiated Customer Experience: UChicago has a number of things that are on offer here (I exclude MIT here because IMO the potential student bodies barely intersect):
• City Life: Many kids want to live in cities, an advantage over SYP. Princeton was immediately off D’s list for this reason. However, Columbia probably offers a better big-city experience than UChicago.
• Rigorous Intellectual Experience: Exemplified by the “Where fun goes to die” motto, although Princeton and Columbia again come close in terms of having a rigorous program. @JHS would probably also include Yale, but my nephew disagreed saying at Yale “It is hard to get an A, but harder to get a C.”
• Open Intellectual Discourse: This commitment is basically unique among elite colleges, and for students where this matters, UChicago can win them every time.

So yes, @exacademic, UChicago may lose some very bright students due to pushing Open Intellectual Discourse, but I believe they will gain far more than they lose. And the students that dislike this have plenty of other good options.

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@Chrchill - @Penn95 is describing exactly what I see.

You’re justifiably proud of the fact that UChicago is now one of the top destinations at fancy prep schools, but why do you think that is? Because a substantial subset of the high-stats kids at those schools, many of whom would happily accept an offer from any of HYPS, look around them and see (i) a few kids who are absolutely the academic creme-de-la-creme or somehow uniquely talented, (ii) a bunch of comparable-stats kids who happen to be HYPS legacies, (iii) some ultra-talented URMs and (iv) occasionally some recruited athletes, ahead of them in line.

They know how to use Naviance, which makes it clear that HYPS are only going to take so many from their school in a given year, so they do exactly the calculation @Penn95 is describing, with the active encouragement of their college counselors: they look for the highest-tier place that they like and apply early there, with their eye on the odds (two-thirds or more put in an early app at top prep schools these days, or so I’m told, mainly because of the big boost you get from applying ED). They know that if they don’t apply early, they’re declining to use a valuable bullet, and if they aim too high with SCEA and don’t take advantage of the ED boost somewhere, they could end up at a lower-tier place than would otherwise be achievable for them.

Some apply ED to a top LAC, others ED to UChicago, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Vandy, etc. UChicago is now arguably one of the most popular destinations in this group of colleges, because it’s great, but also, I would venture to guess, because now they have two ED options that apparently last year gave applicants a huge boost, and, in the case of ED2, a unique ripcord to pull if SCEA at HYPS didn’t work out.

That’s what’s going on in my neighborhood…

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Is it possible that a subset of ED1 and 2 applicants are status-seeking eastern kids who have calculated closely and reconciled themselves to never possessing the true Cleopatra of their dreams? If so, ED at Chicago or other schools might constitute a de facto fallback choice. That’s a bit disappointing if the fallback choice is Chicago, but it must be the case in some instances, and it’s the way of the world. (As Thomas Carlyle said upon hearing that Ralph Waldo Emerson “accepted the Universe” - “by God, he’d better.”) However, I have heard it said on this board that the kids who choose Chicago in these prep schools have somewhat of a distinct identity - defined by seriousness, academic ambitiousness, perhaps some level of introversion, unsportiness, uninterest in Greek life, and even for some, an attraction to maverick thinking in the free-speech tradition of Chicago. Perhaps some of those characteristics are the very ones that keep such kids from having that heroic patina that renders them suitable for Harvard. Or, then again, did all those kids, especially the independent-minded ones, actually buy into the Harvard mystique in the first place?

Granted, there are many kinds of excellent kids who favor Chicago over all others. We are generalizing here. Nevertheless, if kids having the characteristics just described tend to disproportionally favor Chicago, that is telling me they’re making more than just a fall-back choice of the highest status institution that’s practically available to them. If they were only doing that, wouldn’t one of the lesser ivies or one of the more prestigious lac’s be the logical choice?

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Yeah, Chicago as a fallback is not the for the faint of heart among the NE private school crowd. Status-conscious kids who didn’t emerge at the top of their pressure-cooker HS class aren’t eager to repeat that experience in college, especially at a school that doesn’t have the same kind of social cachet that an Ivy or NESCAC school does in their milieu.

197

If the goal is to sell UChicago to the people who will pay the most money for it, then dog-whistling to aggrieved, entitled, and increasing insecure UMC families may well be the way to go. If the goal is to attract a diverse group of very smart, hardworking, and academically ambitious kids and to challenge/motivate them to broaden and deepen their intellectual horizons, then not a good plan.

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“Because a substantial subset of the high-stats kids at those schools, many of whom would happily accept an offer from any of HYPS, look around them and see (i) a few kids who are absolutely the academic creme-de-la-creme or somehow uniquely talented, (ii) a bunch of comparable-stats kids who happen to be HYPS legacies, (iii) some ultra-talented URMs and (iv) occasionally some recruited athletes, ahead of them in line.”

“Is it possible that a subset of ED1 and 2 applicants are status-seeking eastern kids who have calculated closely and reconciled themselves to never possessing the true Cleopatra of their dreams? If so, ED at Chicago or other schools might constitute a de facto fallback choice.”

This is a bit of a stretch. UChicago had two rounds of ED. What’s to prevent those HYPS wannabees from applying SCEA anyway? If my D had followed her Naviance stats she wouldn’t have bothered applying to UChicago. GC’s at those prep schools might might be very competent but they are neither smarter nor more knowledgable than the kids and families in this upper eschelon.

Would be great to know how many of those EDII admits had been deferred or rejected by the SCEA schools. Practically all commenting on this forum were deferred EA’s who, like my own kid, re-optimized their admission strategies. If that’s representative, then it really does appear that a sizable majority of applicants - perhaps enough to render any other possibility as a small group - applied to UChicago as a clear first choice. I suppose that someone was secretly wishing they could get into an Ivy. I wish I were 20 pounds lighter, but I’m also eating a bag of cashews as I type up this post :)) Actions mean something.

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JBStillFlying – Per Wash U – 2016 geographic breakdown – 6849 undergraduates from all 50 states, 12 US territories and 48 countries. 1,101 from West (NM, AZ, CO, WY, MT, ID, AK, HI, CA, NV, OR, WA, UT), 1,1178 from South (TX, OK, AR, LA, MS, AL, GA, FL, SC, NC, TN, KY), 1920 from East (VA, WV, MD, DC, DE, PA, NY, NJ, MA, RI, VT, NH, ME) and 2,066 from Midwest (KS, IA, NE, SD, ND, MN, MO, IL, IN, MI, OH, WI).

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@Parche - that’s actually a lower percentage from the Midwest than I thought. So perhaps WashU vies with UChicago for being notably diverse geographically. Thinking that the centrality of the Midwest has something to do with this.