UChicago holds third place with Yale in 2018 USNWR ranking

Just perused the UChicago forum over the past year or so - below are some relevant threads. There are probably some safety conversations in portions of the longer discussions about the quality of UChicago - those threads can be found just by looking at number of views.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2008673-safety-of-cta.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/2008428-safety-renting.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1987425-uchicago-new-dorms-south-side.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1973304-city-of-chicago-p1.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1916433-uchicago-letter-and-chicago-crime-in-the-media-p1.html

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1914358-midway-travel-question-p1.html

@whatisyourquest notes Chicago’s high crime rate above and writes “I’ve never been to Chicago, so of course I’ve never seen the university.” I write as a native to the South Side of Chicago and an alum who frequently returns to campus and to Hyde Park. The area surrounding the campus has undergone massive improvements over the past several decades. Pass through the Bronzeville neighborhood to the north of the university and you will see beautifully restored mansion-type homes.

https://www.choosechicago.com/neighborhoods/south/bronzeville/

The area to the south of the university is looking better than I have ever seen it. Certainly, there are serious crime issues in Chicago. But the area around the university is coming up nicely.

  1. I'm not certain what the Lab School figures mean. My kids attended a school where we live that is not so different from the Lab School, except it's not officially part of the the University of Pennsylvania. It has sent 10% of its class every year to Penn for a long time. There's a lot of noise in that figure, though -- well over half of those are legacies whose parents have a lot of involvement with the university, and there are any number of faculty and administration children, since the school is very popular with that set. The fact that the school sends double-digit numbers of kids to Penn every year does not mean that students there generally prefer Penn to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, or even Chicago (which is also very popular there). They generally prefer getting accepted to getting rejected, and in many cases they prefer going to college for free to paying something significant. So lots of them go to Penn. I'm sure the dynamic at the Lab School is similar.
  2. In interpreting @regina2017 's story about her daughter's school, it's worth remembering this: A significant majority of the people Chicago accepted last year had either applied ED or had applied EA and converted their applications to ED II, or applied ED II. Which means that most of them had not applied early to any of HYPS, or if they had applied early they had likely been rejected or deferred. (While it is theoretically possible, I sincerely doubt there were a lot of ED II applicants who had been accepted EA at one of HYPS.) So of course, at a strong school with a good track record at all or most of the foregoing colleges, A student thought to be a strong candidate for HYPS admission would not likely have been in the pool from which Chicago accepted most of its class. @marlowe1 is happy with that. I don't think it's such a good idea.

Regarding Chicago Lab, a large percentage of it’s students are offspring of employees of the University, so it’s numbers are highly skewed. You can see it’s placement here:

https://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/uploaded/publications/La_hs_profile_2016-17.pdf

“This is and is not Cressida.”
Shakespeare.

^^^^That was at Prezbucky at 23.

I agree with @JHS, as I do most of the time. In my corner of the private school world, it’s perfectly obvious that UChicago is consciously targeting high-stats kids who don’t have a special reason for HYPS to take them (and who generally don’t have much interest in sports or Greek life). As a result, the school ends up with a lot of smart, hardworking kids (if most of them are like the kids I know who’ve gone there the past few years), and that’s great, but they’re not often turning down HYPS to go there.

And yes, I know Harvard man @Chrchill can find the odd person who turned down Yale for UChicago - but if you believe Parchment, it’s 3:1 the other way - and Parchment’s population is skewed toward Midwestern kids who at the margin should prefer UChicago.

What UChicago has done is cement its niche as a preferred place for smart, serious kids who previously would have gone to Penn, Columbia, Duke, etc. Nondorf has been hugely successful in this, and I respect his achievement - but those fabulous selectivity and yield stats come from fishing, most of the time, in a different pond than HYPS.

162 #163

@JHS @Zinhead This is not a thread about Lab Schools and so I don’t want to hijack the thread. Yet as my friends who are Lab Schools parents tell me, while 60% of Lab families are related to the University, not all of them are professors or trustee’s kids. In fact, many of them are just average University employees (programmers, grade school teachers or even janitors in a few extreme cases). Lab Schools has recently undergone a major expansion because of donation from (among all people) George Lucas. It has certainly attracted the attention of parents from all over Chicagoland. And the fact that U of C is No.3 at USNWR will certainly entice a lot of parents to send their kids there.

Let’s face it: even if Lab Schools does not provide a major hook to a senior applying for The College, there has to be some advantages. In this hyper competitive world of elite college admission game, every single bit of edge helps.

I think UChicago was making tremendous progress over the past several years, to the point that it had yields similar to that of UPenn and Columbia, but using EA rather than restrictive ED.

If it chose to, UChicago had a viable path to challenge HYPS: Use its improved ranking to get the mindshare of kids that had a shot at HYPS, and sell a subset of them on based upon a better fit (for them) at UChicago. The freedom of expression that UChicago stresses was hugely appealing for my D, and in marketing terms, I feel that is a unique selling proposition. And continue to bravely offer only EA. You need only win a fraction of the total pool to start taking on P, with HYS being more of a challenge.

Instead, I feel they cheapened the process the process by effectively making admission mostly dependent upon two rounds of ED. This is not the way to challenge HYPS, no matter what the yield numbers show.

I wonder two things at this point. First, was this driven by money, given that UChicago is well behind the others in terms of endowment and needed the higher percentage of full pay students that ED provides.

Second, I wonder if Nondorf is out of tricks to further improve admissions. We know that the number of applicants was flat for class of 2021, and there is a real danger it can decrease for class of 2022.

It’s of no concern to me that Chicago generally loses cross-admits with HYPS. Indeed, what that tells me about those particular kids is that they prefer the educational experience offered by whichever of those other schools accepted them - or else they were overcome by the sheer snob appeal of those schools or by some marginal financial differential in the assistance package. In any of those cases the culling process has worked to the advantage of Chicago so far as I am concerned.

For similar reasons the selectivity and acceptance stats do not mean much to someone like me, who believes the goal is not stats but the recruitment of Chicago-appropriate kids. However, I do pay attention to GPA and SAT/ACT scores. Though certainly not the only measure of Chicago-appropriateness, that data is meaningful. As many have pointed out, even in UChicago’s bad period those measures were pretty good, though not up to the level of HYPS. Nowadays they are up to the level of HYPS. This tells me that in the matter of pure brains UChicago kids are as good as they come. That’s something I can cheer for.

If the ED1/ED2 apparatus was having the result of recruiting committed full-pay but significantly less brainy kids, then that would or will show up in the GPA and test-score stats. The lower bar for those applicants will dilute the putative higher braininess of the RD-admitted kids. I don’t believe that is or will be the case. If it is not, then why is it such a bad thing that large numbers of equally highly qualified kids are making Chicago their first choice? These ED kids should, however, get a break vis a vis their RD counterparts, and everyone, including me, seems to believe they actually do. Their attainments must be roughly similar to those of the RD-admittees - not so stellar as to make them stand out from the herd of stellar RD’s but in a band of excellence such that there is little to choose among them. Other than this: the ED’s are kids who want to come to Chicago rather than merely the “best” of half a dozen schools that will accept them, or the school that offers the marginally best financial assistance. To me that quality is something work selecting for (within the parameters indicated). Of two similarly qualified kids I want the University to find the kid who most wants to come to the University. That does not appear to be the goal of several other posters on this board. But if one posits that as the goal, then what are the tools for achieving it? Essays and no doubt other indicators are a big help, but nothing beats the certainty of decisive commitment.

The hypothesis of @JHS and others is that the low rate of RD acceptances will dry up the pool of stellar uncommitted applicants in that category. I doubt this is so - in part because stellar applicants know they are stellar, even if the numbers game at HYPS happened to beat them. Surely it’s the unstellar RD’s who will be most discouraged. There’s also an automatic regulator that will correct in some degree for this phenomenon: if fewer kids apply RD, then the percentage of RD acceptances will increase, and there will be less discouragement and a corresponding uptick in applications. Like others here I don’t want to exclude the uncommitted RD types, but my heart lies not with them but with their committed peers.

Cross-admits will disproportionately be kids who either favored HYPS in the first place or were undecided. My kid was double legacy at one HYPS and single legacy at another. Applied EA to Chicago, got in and accepted the offer, never even submitting the other apps she’d already written. She knew what she wanted and it was UofC. Ten years ago, that probably wouldn’t have happened (she might not have been as interested/convinced and/or we would have insisted she SCEA one of the others and RD Chicago and decide where to go once she knew all her options.) Kids who are serious candidates for HYPS and who prefer UChicago early on are likely to get into Chicago and thus have no need to apply to the others.

While it’s probably obvious that I offered up my kid’s example as additional support for hebegebe’s analysis, I’d add that, for my daughter, the Ellison letter (which came out after she was committed) was a real turn-off. For her, what made UofC more compelling than HYPS was that the undergrad focus was clearly on academics and that the assumption was that a well educated person should be interested in both sciences and humanities. The Core per se wasn’t the draw, but the notion that every undergrad who attended was willing or eager to broaden their knowledge base rather than just specialize was something she found very appealing.

@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.

For mine it was exactly the opposite reaction, and I would say key in terms of making UChicago her top pick.

IIRC, this letter came out about the time that controversies were raging in many campuses about the role of free speech. Of her other top picks, Yale was badly handling the Christakis Halloween incident, and Columbia’s faculty was showing support for the train wreck known as “mattress girl”.

Perhaps the letter was ham-fisted, but its message was very important. As I said, it is a Unique Selling Proposition and UChicago should highlight its stance as a campus where open discourse is encouraged rather than stifled.

UChicago – the last bastion of elite academic sanity and freedom ! I can tell you that Yale, Columbia and Brown were disqualified based on those issues.

Contrast the Ellison comments with those of Northwestern’s president.

https://dailynorthwestern.com/2016/09/21/campus/schapiro-to-freshmen-people-criticizing-safe-spaces-drives-me-nuts/

@Zinhead it was very interesting that NU was eager to draw a contrast. And Schapiro sounded like he needed a hug. For my family, we decry both safe spaces AND country clubs!

Anecdotally, of the kids we personally know in the class of 2020, University of Chicago was their absolute first choice and they would have applied early decision given the opportunity. In an interesting contrast to JHS’ narrative, one of those also applied early decision to Columbia but pulled the application after being admitted early action to UChicago so as not to be committed to another school. That student definitely liked Columbia but there were some aspects that made it a clear second choice to UChicago. Nobody we know was unhappy with the Ellison letter - quite the opposite - and the parents I talked to were giving big cheers. 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. Also, I really wonder just how much class those Columbia and Yale kids were allowed to skip.

We have several friends whose children have attended or are attending some pretty elite schools. Stanford, Princeton, Yale, MIT, etc. in addition to UChicago. None of those kids at those other schools even applied to Chicago - they knew upfront that it wasn’t the right fit for a variety of reasons (heavy writing requirement during first year, lack of engineering, etc.). Not sure how those students would’ve responded to the Ellison letter but guessing a more mixed response, and that at least some of those kids don’t have a problem with, say, the signals that Harvard has sent regarding free association. To each his/her own.

The guy sounds like he has some issues.

There is an argument for “safe spaces”, but a college president shouldn’t be making that argument by insulting people at a convocation speech. It is well below the dignity of that office, and a mark against Northwestern.

^^ Couldn’t agree more. Not very presidential. And contrast to Zimmer and Boyer, who used their podium time at Convocation to lay out the principles of UChicago. I particularly liked Boyer’s speech, though it ran a bit long. It was an interesting angle on “liberal education”. He has the benefit of being a historian of universities so was able to add some enlightened thoughts I wouldn’t have thunk up myself.