@marlowe1 You have this ultra-romantic view of Chicago ED applicants. Of all the recent Chicago graduates (and a couple current students) I know, many of whom are truly wonderful and impressive people, I think there are only two for whom Chicago was really their absolute first choice, and who would have applied to Chicago ED without taking into account any game theory.
One was a sports recruit from the city of Chicago. He was a star, and could easily have taken a Division I scholarship, which is what his parents expected him to do. His father had serious dreams that he would have a professional career. The son, however, in his heart knew that he was not going to develop into a professional at his sport, and he wanted to be high income (unlike his parents, who have never been high earners). He liked Chicago because his parents could still come watch him play, he would not be under pressure to sacrifice academics for sports (vs. Northwestern), and it seemed like a good route to a career in finance. His parents were flabbergasted when he applied early and insisted on going there – they didn’t think he was academic enough for it, and they had no idea he thought about the future that way. He was one of the best athletes in his sport in Chicago history, and he works in finance on the West Coast. He enjoyed the academics at Chicago, but no one would ever mistake him for an intellectual. (And he was the one who showed me that Chicago indeed had a “math-lite” path to an economics degree.)
The other is my daughter-in-law, who is a serious intellectual, but was also a committed pre-med from the cradle on. The main attraction of Chicago for her was that it was exactly as far as she was willing to go from her parents in southern Wisconsin. Northwestern, her other top choice, wasn’t quite far enough, and Chicago seemed to offer more opportunity for social service in the immediate neighborhood. She also liked the idea that her fellow pre-meds would all be guaranteed to have a broad education.
Maybe there’s a third, the brilliant child of college professors at a midwestern flagship. She chose Chicago over an actual admission to Stanford (but note – she did apply to Stanford). She said she did it because of her almost-full-tuition merit scholarship at Chicago, but she was also psychologically delicate (medicated, therapied, often on the point of stopping out) and very unsure of herself. Being driving distance from her parents mattered to her (and to them), and she was literally frightened of classmates from New York and California, who came across to her as very aggressive and hypersophisticated.
I don’t mean to denigrate these people at all. They are smart, hardworking, and admirable in all sorts of ways. But none of them had some sort of mystical dedication to Chicago’s brand of intellectual inquiry when they made their college decisions at 17 or 18. Their preference for Chicago was largely a combination of geography and generic prestige. That’s not to say that they didn’t have some sort of mystical dedication to Chicago’s brand of intellectual inquiry by the time they graduated. They did, and so did all those other kids who might have gone somewhere else had they been accepted.
My daughter applied EA to Chicago and ED to Columbia. The colleges seemed very similar to her at the time, and Columbia was in New York, in a really cool neighborhood with easy access to the subway. High school teachers she trusted told her she was a “Chicago person.” She really wanted to be in New York. She didn’t get into Columbia, and after a lot of thought chose Chicago over NYU (and some other places) because of its intellectual atmosphere. She’s been in New York now since the week after she graduated from Chicago, and knows tons of peers who went to Columbia. She thinks getting turned down by Columbia was the luckiest thing that ever happened to her. She’s very happy to have gone to college at Chicago and to be living and working in New York as an adult. But she didn’t know that as a high school senior.