UChicago holds third place with Yale in 2018 USNWR ranking

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
41

I think there’s a growing perception in certain private boarding and day schools that if you’re high-stats and unhooked, UChicago will often give you a very good look - particularly if you apply ED or otherwise communicate directly or via your college counselor that you’ll matriculate if admitted. It suits UChicago: average scores, yield and the proportion of full payers all go up.

Some examples of New York high-end private day schools to go with the others cited by @85bears46: at Trinity, UChicago ranks seventh in matriculants over the past five years, trailing only Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Yale: https://www.trinityschoolnyc.org/page/Our-Program/College-Counseling/Trinity-School-Matriculation . At Brearley, it’s fifth after Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Brown: https://www.brearley.org/page/academic–student-life/upper-school/college-advising . At Collegiate, it ranks equal-ninth in this period: https://www.collegiateschool.org/page/academics/college-guidance . At Dalton, it’s 16th: https://www.dalton.org/page/programs/high-school/college-counseling. Equal-fifth at Chapin: http://www.chapin.edu/page.cfm?p=3725 .

I’d be surprised if these numbers don’t continue to rise - both because of UChicago’s recent climb in the rankings and because UChicago is clearly communicating that these kinds of kids are a priority.

42

FINALLY!! An affirmative action program for rich, white, unhooked prep school kids. How come UChicago is not on the USnews “Most innovative school” list? Also, can we see this demographic broken down in the admission data please?

RWUP friendly schools

Pepperdine - RWUP - 97%
WashU - RWUP - 60%
UChicago - RWUP - 40%
Georgia State RWUP - Say what? .002%

43

@DeepBlue86 Number are much higher now for UChicago in these schools. Same at Horace Mann, Exeter etc.

44

“Wow! care to elaborate? That seems like a huge class!”

@pupflier be glad to. Before pre-reg. closed, HUM/core was at precisely 0 enrollment. In other words, even if you needed to retake the class (for whatever reason) or were a transfer - you had to wait till first year enrollment was complete. Makes sense, it’s a first-year required sequence. Within a week or so (or at least when I checked back about a week later), the numbers were about 1,724 and stayed there for a bit. Section enrollment shifted around but the total didn’t change. Were there duplicate enrollments? Perhaps - though you’d expect a variable total, depending on when I happened to look at it (which was sort of at random parts of the week). About a week later still (around Labor Day weekend) - it went north of 1,750 (I was getting 1,774) and there it’s stayed through today. Schedules are out so no reason for there to be dups. Thinking that all the others (the transfers or retakes) were let in which explains the jump. That’s about 50 additional students. Not sure how that compares to the prior year (HUM enrollment vs. the official class size) but if the increase is in the ballpark then we can conclude that the magic number is, indeed, 1,724.

45

@DeepBlue86

I do not think this is the case at all. Our private school counselor told us that if a kid was high stats and unhooked, applying ED to Vanderbilt, WashU, Emory or Cornell was the way to go. If they were really, really high stats, maybe look to ED at UPenn or Northwestern, because those excellent schools really love their ED applicants. But definitely not HYPSM, UChicago, Columbia, CalTech, Amherst or Williams. She said those schools are cherry picking applicants for more than their stats.

UChicago has gotten more popular at the elite boarding schools and day schools because it has become more popular overall. Why would anyone be surprised that UChicago is 7th in matriculations from Trinity or Dalton or any other elite prep school - it’s extremely hot, is ranked 3rd in the country in US News, and is reputed to provide an intense academic experience second to none. If anything, some of those prep school numbers seem low.

Those elite prep school kids are a priority at every college. Fair or not, as a group they are the best prepared, best credentialed, high school students in America. UChicago isn’t rolling out the red carpet for them in any way different than every other good school does.

46

Chicago was second or third this year at most elite privates in NY. Same in LA.

47

For the same reason it would be pretty surprising if a school’s #5 destination was Harvard or MIT and a local match was #11.

A high number of applications from these schools is perfectly normal for a university with a good reputation, but it’s harder to explain UChicago enrolling more Trinity students than (much closer and somewhat less selective) NYU. This is the opposite of the pattern seen at many non-prep schools, as many of those applying far from home are likely to also apply to (and occasionally attend) the same local match schools.

While most Trinity students leave NY, and many apply to more out of state schools than in-state schools, I’d wager they’re less likely to apply to any given out of state school than a similarly ranked NY school. The logic being that a good student has dozens of top-tier options outside NY, and only a few in NY. And this smaller number of applicants, if they face the same odds as similar students at other schools, is less likely to be admitted at UChicago.

This suggests that applicants from prep schools have a considerable edge at UChicago that makes up for their lower numbers.

Another factor that hasn’t been discussed at length here, but which has a significant effect in this area, is the waitlist. UChicago’s use of the waitlist and Z-list to fill spots has risen sharply in recent years, and at this point in the process admissions primarily looks to schools they know well (usually places where guidance counselors have the free time to make themselves known) and/or development admits.

48

As I have said any number of times before, this isn’t really news, or new. When my first kid was applying to college, in what now looks like the Middle Ages (2004), the University of Chicago was like a secret club for intellectual preppies. At the very intellectually snooty private school she attended for many years, over the period 1995-2004, the University of Chicago was the third most popular college in terms of matriculations by graduates of that school, behind only Penn and Harvard, and just ahead of Yale. Out of 24 kids in her 4th grade classroom (a vertical 4-5), five wound up at the University of Chicago, and a sixth almost went but chose a LAC instead at the last minute.

My daughter herself counted as a public school kid, as did my son, but they were demographically and socially indistinguishable from their former private school classmates.

There were plenty of kids from Andover and similar schools in her Chicago class.

Of course, there are plenty of non-preppy kids as well.

49

@JBStillFlying Nice Analysis!! That must have taken some determination to comb through the enrollment data, but given that the administration is so tight lipped about admissions data this year, people have to resort to all kinds of creative ways to find out the class size!!

1,724 would put the yield at 77%. Insane! given that last year it was around 63%. Looks like ED definitely paid for for UChicago even if it may not have paid off for students who applied RD

50

@pupflier it was actually quite easy because within Course Search you can specify somethign like “Required for Core” and then just type in Huma and get the results.

We don’t know what the actual admit rate is. So it’s possible that the yield is lower than 77%. Still pretty high. Obviously this class size was going to be the largest ever but an increase of 100+ is gulp-worthy.

51

@JBStillFlying actual admits rate as disclosed in numerous meetings is at or a touch below 8 percent. Yield is in the seventies. Big jump. And test scores highest ever.

52

@Chrchill I heard that as well (didn’t hear that it was a “touch” below 8% but rather that it was “about” 8%). We’ll know the numbers soon enough. We can probably all agree that the yield is somewhere in the vicinity of 75% which is a big jump from prior year.

BTW, not to throw a monkey wrench into the thought process but the O-Book app. mentions the cookout on Sat. night for “all 1600+ of you”. Doesn’t quite sound like 1700 unless they’ve (inadvertently or otherwise) kept that number vague.

53

@JBStillFlying The app also frequently refers to our class as the “Class of 2020” so there is definitely a good amount of recycled material in there.

54

@ThankYouforHelp - I respectfully disagree with your college counselor’s advice. UChicago’s undoubted top quality notwithstanding, in terms of admissions difficulty it’s not - yet - in the same category as HYPS, at least not in the private school world I know best.

UChicago hasn’t released the stats, but some CC commenters have done a lot of work reconstructing them with such information as is available, and it looks likely that applying ED to UChicago gives you similar odds to applying ED to Penn, Northwestern or the like. Frankly, the ED II option seems largely targeted at kids who missed with their early bullet at HYPS.

Add to that @DunBoyer’s observation regarding UChicago’s strategic use of the waitlist/Z-list (of which I have personally observed evidence), particularly when they’re communicating through college counselors at schools they know well, and I can confidently assert that if you’re an unhooked top academic performer at a well-known prep school and you show the love to UChicago, you’re meaningfully more likely to be admitted there than if you tried the same strategy at HYPS (which, of course, you can’t, because they don’t have ED, the most powerful means for showing the love in college admissions that there is).

The proof of the pudding to me is that, in my bubble, over a number of years I haven’t yet seen a kid with a bid from HYPS turn it down for one from UChicago, although of course I know it happens (in a substantial minority of cases, per Parchment).

@Chrchill - that’s what I also hear on the grapevine, but I’m not sure it means what you think it means. I would assert that if UChicago is now the number one destination at Horace Mann and some places like it (as I’m told), it’s because a certain profile of applicant is now being funneled very explicitly and efficiently by the Horace Manns of the world to UChicago, particularly through the ED process, because UChicago has made clear what it wants from these kinds of schools.

I think the UChicago market niche nowadays is very strong academic candidates - ideally full payers - who aren’t quite in the HYPS strike zone (maybe because they’re unhooked or otherwise insufficiently differentiated from the pack). I’m guessing you’ll retort something to the effect that UChicago doesn’t want all the jocks and politically correct underwater basketweavers / tokens that HYPS want, and that UChicago prefers to have the most intellectual student body on average. Maybe - but HYPS (plus M and Caltech) also want (and, I believe, mostly get) the absolute cream of the academic crop.

You may argue that a lot of the smartest kids prefer the UChicago intellectual climate to what you find on a typical Ivy League campus. That may traditionally have been the case, and I’m sure in the new regime some still do, but, absent evidence to the contrary, I think the tippy-top intellectual kids choose, and will continue to choose, HYPSM+C by a clear and convincing margin.

55

@elmejor21 LOL let’s hope that they at least properly updated the “Mandatory” stuff.

56

@DeepBlue86 Cal tTch and MIT are in their own category. For STEM specific kids, they would generally be the first choice. I don’t see see them competing for the same kids with UChicago, certainly not Cal Tech. .

57

@JHS Going back to your #35, agreed the situation in 2011 was not as fully developed as it presently is, what with Nondorf having just arrived and the rankings not yet having skyrocketed. However, as many have repeatedly observed, the College had been evolving in all these directions (the Dean Boyer though perhaps not the @DunBoyer narrative) for twenty years or more. You yourself have described this and have just added now at #47 that as early as 2004 some word of this had reached the private high schools of your children where Chicago was at least semi-hot by that time. If that is so, wouldn’t we expect to see at least some small tendencies to a change in the demographic distribution of the student body for the decade ending in 2011? Not the full flower, just an early bud or two. Instead the distribution (many fewer wealthy, many more poor, than the Ivies and other privates) remained virtually unchanged. Indeed, in the years 2008-2011 there was a slight trend in the opposite direction. Let me accept that at that date the full fury of Hurricane Nondorf had not hit. Like you and Dun, I expect the trend in later years will be different, though I think not as different as some here wish and as others fear. What the 2011 figures tell me is that the appeal of UChicago is special and sticky. It was then and will continue (fingers crossed) to be based on its tradition of being a different kind of place, appealing only to a certain sort of kid, rich or poor.

58
  1. Agree with @Chrchill , there's no overlap with Caltech. MIT, maybe some, although that also may be in the past, based on their (former) common EA policy, so you might have had a fair number of people applying to both. The average brilliant kid is more STEM-my today than in the past, but notwithstanding MIT's high-quality humanities and social science offerings I still don't see kids who aren't totally committed to hard-core STEM applying to MIT, much less treating it as a top choice. And lots of STEM-oriented kids opt for the integrated liberal arts model as represented by HYPS (and Chicago).
  2. Agree that in the real world very few kids turn down actual acceptances at HYPS, and even fewer turn them down to go anywhere besides one of the others or MIT. (In the real world, very few kids are turning down actual acceptances at Chicago, too, but that's in large part because most of them were accepted ED and don't have a choice.) I do know at least one kid who turned down an actual Stanford acceptance to go to Chicago, but that's just an exception that proves the rule.

What “saves” Chicago, or at least used to, is that those schools aren’t infallible at identifying the “tippy-top intellectual kids,” and don’t have enough admissions slots for intellectual kids to be able to hedge their bets by accepting a wide range of potential tippy-toppers. Plus, notwithstanding the common assumption on College Confidential, not all of the “tippy-top intellectual kids” apply to all of HYPS, or even in some cases to any of them. (Chicago’s ED gamble is effectively that it can get students who would have been accepted at HYPS to apply ED to Chicago, rather than primarily getting kids who were rejected at HYPS.)

There are enough intellectual kids out there to support more than four or five ultra-high-quality intellectual colleges, and some of the ones who don’t go to HYPS turn out to be smarter, more creative, harder workers, etc., than many of the ones who do go to HYPS. That’s why, out in the world of employers of intellectual workers, a Chicago credential carries pretty much the same weight as a HYPS credential. It may not say as much about whether a degree holder looked like a superstar at 17 – something people don’t care that much about – but it’s very reliable in identifying someone who appreciates and knows how to apply intellectual rigor, and it certifies that the holder has actually been educated in a rigorous program.

  1. People who talk incessantly about Chicago having a much more intellectual atmosphere than HYPS don't know what they are talking about. HYPS (especially S) has more Olympians and future NFL players than Chicago, and also more current and future movie stars. There may be more of a pre-professional undertow, and less ivory-towerism. Their cultures of self-congratulation are similar, if pitched somewhat differently. But they all have fundamentally strong intellectual cultures. No successful student at Chicago would feel marginalized at any of HYPS.
59

Know plenty of families whose kids turned down Yale for UChicago for a variety of reasons. Both superlative schools and we are splitting hairs. Acceptances to either is a huge ticket potential ticket to graduate school admission or employment. What will matter more is how well they do in each case.

60

Re the talk about prep school recruiting, and the debate between @ThankYouforHelp @DeepBlue86 and others about Chicago getting more “unhooked” candidates:

Doesn’t Chicago - across the board (not just at prep schools) - utilize fewer “hooks” than other top schools? Put another way, here are hooks at the non-Chicago top schools: legacy, developmental admits (rich parents), URM, niche sports (squash, rowing etc.), bigtime sports (football/basketball), exceptional at niche extra-curriculars (a top a cappella singer moves the needle more at Yale than Chicago).

Chicago has far fewer legacies to choose from, doesn’t care about niche sports or bigtime sports, and niche extra-curriculars probably matter less.

So, for ANY savvy top applicant, if you’re unhooked, isn’t your best bet to apply to Chicago?

Also, @ThankYouforHelp - re the college counselor who said that Chicago, Harvard, etc. just cherry pick, and are a notch above Penn, Northwestern, etc., how could your college counselor know this? Chicago’s only had their ED/EDII policy in place for one year, and no one yet knows if ED at Chicago is like SCEA at Harvard, or similar to ED at Penn.

If Chicago ED is indeed like SCEA at Harvard, then sure, your counselor’s advice holds water. If Chicago ED is similar in difficulty to ED at Penn, however, that advice is hogwash. Does your counselor have info on just one year of data that the rest of us do not have?

I will say, with the ED/EDII policy, not disclosing detailed data, and only providing broad info (e.g. overall accept rate), Chicago is trying its hardest to create a smokescreen and look as similar to, say, Princeton, Yale, and MIT in selectivity as possible. It’s also very possible that private school counselors are falling for this. On its face, it looks like Chicago is perhaps even more selective than MIT or Yale - higher SAT band, about the same overall accept rate, etc. When you pull back the curtain, however, the picture may be different. I for one would be very surprised if ED at Chicago was as competitive as SCEA at Stanford or Harvard or even Yale/Princeton.