UChicago holds third place with Yale in 2018 USNWR ranking

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
61

Well, if you believe Parchment (and those families), @Chrchill, they’re members of an exclusive club, since three out of four Yale-UChicago cross-admits apparently opt for Yale: http://www.parchment.com/c/college/tools/college-cross-admit-comparison.php?compare=University+of+Chicago&with=Yale+University . Apart from that, I enthusiastically second your post.

@JHS makes the important point that HYPS only have so many slots for the intellectual cream, since so much of the class (probably over half) is filled by hooked candidates. That’s the opening for UChicago, which doesn’t have the same pressure from various constituencies and can admit more brainiacs rather than kids who are hooked for various reasons. That said, the kids HYPS admit primarily for their brains tend to be truly top-notch (although, as @JHS also points out, the judgment of the HYPS admissions offices isn’t infallible), and if admitted by one single-letter school, they tend to accept their offers unless they accept an offer from one of the others.

@cue7 - I wrote this post before I saw yours, which I think is right on.

62

17-year-olds choose a college with many illusions about it, not to mention misinformation. But that act of choice itself starts to define them, and then when they arrive at that school along with all those others that have made the same choice, the entire group further reinforces the definition of the school. Few would deny that Chicago has historically had a certain differentiating je ne c’est qua about it. Call it pretentiousness, call it intellectual ambitiousness (or snobbery), call it masochistic studiousness - it’s what people think of when they think of the University of Chicago. Reading the things on this board that prospective applicants say or wonder or dream about the place seems to show that this is still so. However exaggerated, these perceived differences among schools shape actual choices.

For those with actual information about the kids who really want to go to Chicago, I’d be interested in knowing whether those kids are at all differentiatible from the kids who want to go to HYPS. In these prep schools that send kids to all the elite colleges, do the kids who go to Chicago tend to be any different in temperament or character from the others?

63

@marlowe1 Always dangerous to generalize; however, UChicago applicants tend to be less into sports, more consistently studious and less focused on the college party scene. .I have also observed that they tend to have a select few really close friends rather than be part of larger social cliques.

64

HYPS with their larger endowments are now pursuing a “broaden the access” strategy. This means they are putting less emphasis than they used to on heavy recruitment from Prep schools. This puts these prep school kids at a disadvantage relative to their peers from a decade ago. That is why you have seen UChicago steadily increase its presence among prep school kids. It is one of the safer choices for unhooked rich prep school kids with enough prestige that it has become a serious contender. I think the word is getting around that if you are an unhooked white or Asian kid, UChicago is probably a good option for you provided you have stellar stats and show them enough love.

I don’t see this changing until either the Uchicago administration changes or Chicago’s endowment begins to show a significant upward trend

65

@pupflier - I think you’re right, and I think the key, which @DeepBlue86 should have emphasized more - is the word *rich/i.

Prep schools probably have more economic disparity than top colleges. As Chicago gets more students from Horace Mann and Exeter and Andover, I imagine the total number of wealthy students it attracts is ticking up as well.

I’ll give you an example from the past - of my friends’ parents at Chicago, in comparison to my friends’ circle at my grad alma mater (Penn):

At Chicago/u
Friend 1: dad worked odd jobs (handyman), mom was a cashier (estimated income/yr: $50-60k)
Friend 2: dad was a cop in Chicago, mom stayed at home (estimated income/yr: $80-100k)
Friend 3: dad was a doctor, mom was a scientist (estimated income/yr: $300-400k)
Friend 4: parents were both high school teachers (estimated income: $100-130k)
Friend 5: dad was a humanities professor, mom was a lab tech (estimated income/yr: $100k)
Friend 6: parents were both lab techs at a Big Ten school (estimated income/yr: $80-90k)
Friend 7: parents were lecturers/adjuncts at Northwestern (not tenured professors) (estimated income/yr: $90-120k)

At UPenn/u
Friend 1: Parents were both specialized doctors (e.g. surgeons, interventional cardiology, etc.) (estimated income/yr: $500-$1M)
Friend 2: dad was a cardiologist, mom stayed at home (estimated income/yr: $400-$800k)
Friend 3: parents were both executives at a pharma company (estimated income/yr: $750k-$1.5M)
Friend 4: parents were both engineers (estimated income/yr: $300-400k)
Friend 5: parents were both dentists (estimated income/yr: $300-400k)
Friend 6: parents were both specialized doctors (estimated income/yr: $750k-$1.5M)
Friend 7: dad was a fairly major hedge fund/finance guy, mom was a corporate lawyer (estimated income/yr: $5-$10M - maybe more)

I noticed a definite difference in family backgrounds at these two schools. NOW, though, I imagine this has changed.

Now, more than ever before, my guess is that Chicago’s drawing more kids from the families I outlined at Penn. I have a hard time believing that Chicago is vacuuming up all the exceptionally bright non-URM prep school kids who come from middle class backgrounds.

66

@marlowe1 : Je ne sais quoi.

67

@JHS As Henry James said about Walt Whitman, “I wish he wouldn’t venture into foreign languages.” Or should I simply say, “Touche” and “Pardonnez moi”. In Quebec: “Tabanac!”

68

Oh, that’s exactly what I meant, @Cue7, although I think my references to “full payer” may have been overly subtle.

Let’s look at the big picture. UChicago is one of America’s great universities and a fount of research and scholarship. What has it historically been missing? Many on this forum know much more about this subject than I do, but here’s how it looks to me:

First, as we’ve heard from the UChicago alums repeatedly, for many years it was seen as a home for quirky intellectual loners, the proverbial place where fun went to die, and the campus and neighborhood were a mess.

Second, and related to the above, it was ranked lowly, in part because it had a high admit rate relative to its peers, which in turn was a product of the factors above.

Third, because it was relatively young and attracted quirky students, its undergraduate alumni had little presence within many of the power centers of American society and around the world (particularly outside of academia, certain areas of the arts and the law) relative to its intellectual peers, HYPS. Most notably, it had a glaring lack of undergraduate alumni who’d succeeded in business and become very wealthy.

Fourth, its endowment was far smaller than those of its peers, in part because undergraduate alumni didn’t tend to be wealthy or feel inclined to donate (they might have learned a lot while there, but apparently didn’t create many happy memories for themselves in the process).

What has UChicago done about all this?

First, they levered up during this decade and rebuilt the campus (the financial picture is much more uncertain than is readily apparent, I think, but this was an investment they probably had to make).

Second, they brought in Nondorf with a mandate to ramp up selectivity and yield in order to rise in the rankings, at which he’s succeeded admirably.

Third, early in the century they relaxed the core, which was the prelude to an apparent determination to “Princetonize”, i.e., start to look rather more like their Ivy League peers (save as to sports), which led them to…

Fourth, begin to fish much more extensively in the prep schools and court full payers through ED, which has the effect of…

Fifth, increasing average test scores (because preppies tend to be able to afford, well, prep), yield and the proportion of full-pay customers, which in turn leads to improved rankings because of perceived higher selectivity, higher yield and greater retention because rich kids are less likely to drop out, and

Sixth, in the medium term, increasing the proportion of undergraduate alumni who are likely to be or become rich themselves, “give back” to the university and eventually ascend to a broader array of influential positions around the world, thereby increasing UChicago’s reach and power so that they can become more comparable to HYPS, who have been at this game for centuries in most cases.

It all makes sense to me…what am I missing?

69

@Chrchill and @DeepBlue86 There isn’t overlap between Caltech and UChicago in the engineering fields or much overlap in computer science. However, UChicago has a highly-regarded Physics department and some excellent quantum physics/computing researchers, and there is significant overlap there. The same might be true of chemistry and/or math; I don’t know specifically about UChicago’s strength in those areas. Caltech undergrads do certainly look at UChicago for grad school in physics.

70

@DeepBlue86 - you’re not missing anything - you write a good summary.

Also, I don’t have a problem with this approach - if Chicago wants to continue to compete with the big boys, it needs lots more money.

If anything, I wish the school would utilize hooks MORE aggressively - to recruit intellectually-minded students who also happen to be from mega-power families, or budding (or former) movie stars who also take a serious approach to education. Same thing goes for great soccer players or squash players - if the student has a genuine interest in learning and approaches study diligently, I have no problem getting those students.

As I’ve said before, if Steven Spielberg’s kids or Tom Hanks’ kids or Barack Obama’s kids demonstrate a commitment to learning and appreciate an intellectual environment, Chicago should be going after these recruits hard. Every year we should be in the news for getting a Sasha Obama or a Bill Gates’ kid. Surely there are some children of the mega-powerful who would take to the Chicago approach. And the more you get, the more high-profile the campus becomes. (Balance that with pell grant students and others, of course, but make sure you at least have some high profile, ultra high-net worth families in the mix. Chicago, in the past, had virtually none.)

71

Ugh, @DeepBlue86 . Some of your list is right, and some dead wrong.

First: The campus and the neighborhood were a mess in the '70s-'80s, but not in a way that was fundamentally different from, say, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, and any number of other urban universities.

Second: During the period of USNWR rankings, I don’t think Chicago was ever ranked outside the top 20. It was ranked where places like Brown, Cornell, Rice, Georgetown are ranked today. That’s not “low.”

Around 10 years ago it jumped from the mid-teens to the bottom of the top 10 simply by changing the way it reported its data, e.g., reporting Core seminars as separate classes with fewer than 20 students instead of megaclasses with 100s of students and lots of little sections. That had nothing to do with admission rate. While its admission rate may have depressed (slightly) its ranking, it always had very high test scores, and so was ranked highly for selectivity in the USNWR algorithm.

Third: It’s not really “relatively young.” It’s roughly the same age as Stanford, and only a generation younger than MIT. The policy to which Dean Boyer attributes the decline of the college – admitting qualified students before they graduated from high school – may have been poor policy, but it produced graduates like Susan Sontag and Mike Nichols. The college did not, however, produce a lot of big political players or ultra-rich businesspeople.

Fourth: Endowment growth did indeed lag its peers in the '80s and '90s, in part for the reasons you cite, and in part because of poor investing. Before that, Chicago’s endowment was competitive, not so much less than Yale’s.

Most of Chicago’s issues are a hangover from the two decades after WWII, when its path diverged from that of its peers. not from time immemorial.

As I said earlier, Chicago has always attracted preppies, and it has always had relatively high test scores. That’s not much of a change at all. What’s different today is that it is getting more students who have high test scores and a lot of other things to offer as well.

72

@DeepBlue86 Great post at #67
@Cue7

I would normally agree with this in all other areas, except admissions. I think Chicago has been given a great gift by HYPS when they pivoted away from rich prep school kids. Without this pivot, Chicago could not have competed with HYPS. Now these kids face a stark choice. Keep banging their heads trying to get into HYPS with lower and lower probabilities as these schools openly try to recruit “previously under served populations” or look for other options.

The Rich kids have to go somewhere and it is a good idea for schools to compete for them. I am just curious how this pivot from “the rich elite” to the “common” will affect the endowment growth at HYPS in 30-40 years. If they spurn a whole generation of “rich elites”, their alum donations are going to flow elsewhere in 30 years right?

Maybe they are rich enough and don’t care, or maybe they are just “virtue signalling” and continue to recruit “plenty of rich kids” behind the admissions black box, but cleverly hide it to avoid being publicly shamed

73

@DeepBlue86 You and Cue are definitely singing from the same hymnal. The closest I can come to finding the final cause of that Rube-Goldberg machine of yours is in its delivery of very rich alumni, who will pay some of their riches back to the school and keep the machine going. However instrumental that may be, I don’t call it an end. Let’s suppose that it has the effect of reshaping the student body in a Princetonizing direction. I take it that you would accept as collateral damage the resulting diminishment of non-full-payers and the whole change of tone of the place - the diminishment of ivory-tower types, political radicals, dreamers and the merely quirky. The whole thing starts to sound a bit like an academic version of urban gentrification. The improvements to the neighborhood make the neighborhood more comfortable for the, well, comfortable. Let the original inhabitants go elsewhere - their absence is necessary in order to save the neighborhood. But what is lost? One of the scholastic philosophers (Duns Scotus, I believe) had a concept and developed a term called haecceity. Essence doesn’t quite capture the meaning of the term. Call it “thisness” - the thing inside a being that makes it different from all others. There is a thisness about the University of Chicago. Many desire all these changes because they simply don’t like the University’s thisness, all that quirkiness, etc. The whole apparatus of rankings/selectivity/power-alumni as practised by the ivies is, for these people, just a way to beat the thisness out of the University. So it seems to the cranky old alumnus in me.

74

Our endowment in 2016 stood at half a million dollars per student (including the graduate divisons). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment

This isn’t Princeton territory, but let’s not forget that HYPS don’t spend most of their endowments - they invest them to generate a larger endowment, and don’t spend most of that either. Chicago doesn’t need to catch up to HYPS to have comparable offerings while allowing the endowment to break even. It’s grown even in the middle of a massive spending spree by the administration.

What seems to be happening at HYPS is that the share of Pell Grant, first-gen, etc. students is rising modestly, but the families that really impact the endowment (the upper crust of the upper class) are still welcome. Pell Grant straight-A students have a better shot than they used to, the Kushners who can scrape a gentleman’s B- do fine, and middle-class or upper-middle-class students with solid academic credentials had better cure some form of cancer by the application deadline.

Some of my best friends would fall in this group, and my reaction is still the same: ew. Can we stick to the students we’d consider qualified before Dean Nondorf peeked inside their checkbooks? With the access to good schools and extracurriculars money can buy no matter what the University does, this would hardly make UChicago a college of paupers.

75

@marlowe1

You raise a very important point. In the ideal world Chicago would “retain” its “Thisness” as you put it without paying any cost for it, but today the landscape of higher education is very different. Govt funding is rapidly diminishing with open hostility from one political party towards anything remotely intellectual or elite, because they perceive these institutions as undermining their power and voter base by brainwashing “young minds” against conservatism. Grants and Research dollars are not going to be easy to come by in the future.

So educational institutions are at a cross roads. You can retain “thisness” at huge expense to your financial well being or pursue “academic gentrification” aggressively to attract “fresh sources of funding”. It is one or the other, I don’t think thee is a happy medium here. Look at what happened to Chicago’s endowment because it prioritized “Thisness” over “gentrification” for 40 years.

76

As I said, @JHS, I know many on this forum (including you) know much more about this subject than I do. I think we would agree, though, that if you scroll back 20-30 years, whatever the causes and background, UChicago was, relative to HYPS, ranked meaningfully lower, meaningfully less selective and significantly undercapitalized.

The first two disparities appear substantially to have been addressed (although there’s been a lot of debate about reality vs. appearance, and the means employed to address them). The last issue persists, though, and this is what I was getting at.

Picking up on what @DunBoyer was saying:

The critical issue is that as their spread of activities has increased, universities like HYPS and UChicago have come to rely to an increasing degree on distributions from the endowment to cover operating expenses - sometimes as much as a third of the budget. If the endowment isn’t big enough, or investment performance isn’t good enough, to generate the requisite distributions, big adjustments can become necessary very quickly (see here for a not-entirely-serious take on what happened at Harvard in the wake of the global financial crisis: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09harvard.html?mcubz=1) .

UChicago has a comparable number of students to Yale and Stanford, has somewhat fewer than Harvard and twice as many as Princeton. It has a similarly broad spread of graduate and professional schools to HYS. Yet as of 2015 it had an endowment one-fifth the size of Harvard’s and about a third the size of Yale’s, Princeton’s and Stanford’s. These ratios have worsened over time: in 1990, UChicago’s endowment was nearly a quarter the size of Harvard’s and ~40%-~50% the size of those of each of YPS (individual tables here: http://www.nacubo.org/Research/NACUBO-Commonfund_Study_of_Endowments/Public_NCSE_Tables/Total_Market_Value_of_Endowments.html). Fortunately, revenues from the hospital have taken up some of the slack.

The building spree that the university embarked on to keep up with the HYPS Joneses (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130817/ISSUE01/308179974/u-of-c-tries-to-keep-up-with-the-ivy-league) has saddled it with debt, operating deficits and a low credit rating relative to its AAA-rated peers (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20160223/NEWS13/160229950/university-of-chicago-downgraded-by-s-p). As noted, I think UChicago had to make these investments or face visible decline relative to its competitors. That said, with mediocre investment performance in recent years and lacking a donor base as large and reliable as those of HYPS, the school has a problem and, frankly, needs to increase its proportion of full payers.

By the way, @marlowe1, I’m not suggesting that UChicago try to turn itself into HYPS, just that if it wants to keep up with them, it needs a bigger capital base.

Regarding another point by @DunBoyer, as the proportion of Pell/first-gens ticks up at HYPS, it seems to me that it’s actually the legacies who are getting squeezed. Nowadays, being a legacy really just gets you an extra look - two-thirds to 80% of legacies are denied, and those who are admitted are generally really competitive in the overall pool.

77

@DeepBlue86

The evidence legacies are being squeezed by declining admissions rates in a way other applicants aren’t is mixed at best. 30% of Harvard’s class of 2021, for instance, is made up of legacies. That number is actually higher than the figures for the classes of 2018, 2019, or 2020. It doesn’t look like surveys of the class of 2017 and earlier cohorts asked this question, but the data we have suggests legacies are doing pretty well.

http://features.thecrimson.com/2017/freshman-survey/makeup/

Even if 80% are denied admission, that would put legacy applicants’ odds at more than three times the overall rate - a figure consistent with this study.

http://beta.hollis.harvard.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=HVD&search_scope=default_scope&docId=TN_ericEJ918731&fn=permalink

Aside: I can’t help being amused that the Crimson article has a section that specifically asks “How Yale compares.”

78

That chart from the Crimson is misleading, @DunBoyer - in fact, how the Harvard admissions office describes legacy consideration is as follows:

You don’t get any special consideration if your aunts, uncles, siblings, etc. went to Harvard - why would Harvard care?

The (self-reported) proportion of the class that had at least one parent as a Harvard College grad is <20%, probably around 300 kids, who were probably selected from a pool of over a thousand legacy applicants (within the pool of greater than thirty thousand applicants overall).

This has been discussed exhaustively elsewhere, but legacy applicants tend to be better qualified than the overall pool, so would be expected to have a higher admit rate. They come from families that value education (after all, at least one parent went to Harvard) and - this theme again - the families tend to be wealthier than average, often very much so, and can therefore afford high-quality private schools, test prep and the kind of enriching experiences/opportunities that make for an attractive application. Oh - and the family may be very generous/involved…which definitely can help…

On your last point, Harvard people think about Yalies a lot more than they admit - just look at the posting history of one UChicago partisan who happens to be a Harvard grad :wink:

79

It is interesting that the Crimson reports legacies by region. The spread is as follows:

Northeast: 39.6%
Southeast: 21.4%
Midwest: 23.5%
Southwest: 13.7%
West: 32.6%

Given that 16.3% of the class is "first generation, roughly only 54% of the total slots are available to someone who is not a legacy or a first generation.

80

Again, @Zinhead - it would be more accurate to say that “something over 70% of the class (of whom roughly 16% were first-gens) didn’t have a relative who attended Harvard College”.