UChicago is Tops at Top Prep Schools

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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There is no question that athletes as a whole at Stanford have relaxed admission standards. Football players in particular tend to have more relaxed admission standards than other sports. This does not mean that they are not academic stars within their HS or are destined to not graduate and/or not do well academically at Stanford, but as a whole football players almost certainly average lower SAT scores or GPA than non-athletes.

Stanford football players have no problem graduating. In the most recent 5 years, the GSR grad rate for Stanford football players has ranged from 90% to 99%. However, as I touched on earlier, they probably have a lower rate of pursuing co-terminal masters while at Stanford, although a good portion of redshirts seem to use their final year of eligibility to pursue a master’s degree, like Richard Sherman did. And football players probably have a lower rate of pursuing degrees that have a reputation for being challenging (Luck is an exception).

For example, the football roster is at 2023 Football Roster - Stanford University Athletics . Among the players who have declared, the most frequently listed majors are below, along with a comparison of all students. The 2 lists look quite different. CS/Engineering and other popular (among all students) math/science-heavy majors appear to be notably underrepresented among football players.

Most Common Majors Among Football Roster

  1. Science, Technology and Society – 8
  2. Management Science and Engineering – 5
  3. Product Design – 5 (should say tie for #2)
  4. Political Science – 4

Most Common Majors Among All Students

  1. Computer Science – 745
  2. Human Biology – 240
  3. Economics – 197
  4. Symbolic Systems – 179
  5. Engineering – 170

There are also other teams that are quite different. I was an EE major who rowed at Stanford (walked on team, not recruited athlete). When I attended, the team was full of engineering majors. There have been articles about how common engineering is among male rowers, such as Engineering a rowing team | Stanford University School of Engineering . It’s certainly possible to major in engineering, in spite of having the maximum allowed NCAA hours for practice, not including travel time, such as bus ride to the Bay 6 days a week. In some sports, it’s common.

There are also plenty of Stanford athletes who do extremely well both on the field and in the classroom. You can find numerous lists and awards for specific athletes or specific Stanford teams with especially high GPAs or average team GPAs. For example, a list of “academic all Americans” is at Academic All-Americans - Stanford University Athletics , which includes their Stanford GPA along with their athletic feats. One of the listed athletes was a top 50 ranked tennis player with a 4.14 GPA, which would require about half of grades being A+. When I attended A+ grades were extremely rare and often reserved for doing something exceptional in the classroom that goes beyond just getting high grades on exams and papers. And you can also find athletes who graduate with mediocre grades in a major with a reputation for being less challenging and pursue no further education after Stanford. There is a lot of variation.

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85

My child went to one of those schools you mentioned and was accepted into the class of '25. The school sends about 1/5 of its class to the ivies, and yes, Chicago is definitely gaining traction, which is a good thing for me as a prospective parent.

However, I don’t necessarily think Chicago is becoming more popular over Harvard, Stanford, or a good number of the Ivies for that matter across these schools. Certain stereotypes and preferences still run deep and old habits die hard especially on the East Coast. What I see is that Chicago has been taking in more students with good grades from upper-middle-income households with little to no hooks (legacy, athletics, big-time donors, celebrities’ children, URMs), a traditionally disadvantaged applicant pool at Chicago’s peer institutions, especially at the ivies. Chicago also needs to fill up a large class of over 1800 people now (more than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth), which means they can afford to accept a few more students from those prep schools without having to worry about the lack of socioeconomic diversity. These factors make Chicago possibly the most meritocratic school out there in terms of admissions standards with MIT, Caltech, and Johns Hopkins.

Based on what I have seen (using my son’s school as a limited sample), Chicago is becoming more popular over some of the lower-ranked ivies, such as Brown or Cornell, and maintains a decisive edge over Northwestern/JHU (among the Ivy+), a slight edge over Duke (which has seen declining interest), but is still at arm’s length from other peer schools if we do a hypothetical cross-admit scenario.

Even though Bill Gates’ son may have picked UChicago over Harvard or Stanford, a decisive chunk of the moneyed class (be it old or new, American or international) still favors sending their children (many of whom also attended my child’s prep school) to the Ivies (Brown has remained a big favorite) with the exception of Cornell perhaps, as well as Stanford, Duke, (and to a lesser extent) Northwestern, and non-T-20 schools such as Georgetown (where David Booth’s daughter went to college), USC, and NYU. Chicago remains an outlier and the Rory Gates effect might be a bit overhyped.

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UChicago is at the bottom among the top schools when it comes to percentages of first-gen (9%) and pell grant receipients (11%) in 2018. For comparison, the percentage of pell grant recipients at Northwestern was 20% (they set that 20% goal a few years back). Maybe they just targeted and gave out more acceptances to the students in those schools? If they are really that popular, why are they still giving merit-based scholarships and having ED1 and ED2 on top of EA? With the rising income and wealth inequality, wealthy schools like UChicago should put more focus on recruiting the less-privileged students.

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They actually do, via Odyssey. Roughly 20-25% of their incoming class hails from pretty low income families. They are just not Pells. 2019 saw a 25% increase (IIRC) in that category btw, via Empower. It’s still smaller than most of the other peers, though.

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The Most Popular Colleges at the Top 20 Prep Schools in the U.S.

I was able to find specific enrollment figures for 15 of the 20 schools. Whenever possible I used figures for Class of 2020. If the school only released figures for multiple years (say, 2016-2020), I divided the total number enrolled for each school for the whole period divided by the number of years.

of students attending each school per year:

  1. UChicago 105.5
  2. NYU 84.9
  3. Harvard 82.9
  4. Georgetown 76.6
  5. Yale 70.5
  6. Columbia 64.3
  7. Brown 62.7
  8. Cornell 61.6
  9. Penn 57.1
  10. Princeton 52
  11. Stanford 49.8
  12. Dartmouth 42.9
  13. MIT 26.3
  14. Berkeley 21.7

Schools and years included:

Andover (Class of 2020)
Exeter (Classes of 2018-2020/3)
St. Mark’s (Class of 2020)
College Preparatory School (2016-2020/5)
Hotchkiss School (Class of 2020)
Harvard-Westlake (Class of 2020)
Choate Rosemary Hall (2016-2020/5)
Regis (Class of 2018)
Horace Mann (Class of 2020)
Collegiate School (Class of 2016-2020/5)
Brearley School (Class of 201652020/5)
Lawrenceville (2017-2019/3)
Groton (Class of 2020)
Nueva (Class of 2017-2019/3)
Noble and Greenough (Class of 2016-2010/5)

So we see UChicago has the best feeder school system at the top schools of any of the top schools in the country.

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So we can starting calling UChicago the preppiest college in America?

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90

So.many.things.wrong.with.this.analysis.

Look, I am a fan of UChcago. I have a kid at a top prep school right now. I would be delighted if he went to UChicago.

For this reason, I pay particular attention to how UChicago fares in admissions for his school every year, with a basic knowledge about the students’ qualifications for those who matriculate to it and the various schools it competes with. I have a data set of one school, so my conclusions can’t be anything more than anecdotal. (That being said, I am embarrassed to admit I have spent far too much time tracking matriculations of many of the schools on your list. I can confidently state it is a complete waste of time).

Yes, UChicago does well numerically, and gets some really great, interesting students from his school. BUT - and this is just my impression- the tippy top students in my kid’s school are going to the Ivies, elite LAC’s or stem schools, or Stanford. I don’t doubt there are some of the tippy tops whose first choice is UChicago instead, but they are the exception. Wouldn’t be surprised if my kid is one of them. Time will tell.

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It’s just a fact that UChicago will do better at some top prep schools than others. That’s why it’s important to provide more aggregated data, such as what @WRHarper has done. Since you claim there are “so many things wrong with this analysis” it would be helpful if you could provide the detail to support that statement.

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Details please. First, which school is this that you are intimately familiar with? It would be a good data point to know.

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Is that not obvious?

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Cate. Ergo my name. Boarding school California, total students =300. Its matriculation speaks well to the OP’s original premise about California schools. Its matriculation rates are comparable to the schools on OP’s list. I’ve looked.

Two main problems with the analysis are that it assumes all prep school students are equal in desirability, and all prep school students apply to all schools equally. Which is what I tried to illustrate.

College counseling is a complex, highly calibrated/curated process at prep schools. Keep in mind they care deeply about their matriculation rates just as much as the colleges do. They point students toward colleges that fit the students academically and stylistically, and discourage students from applying to too many reach schools. Just because a comparatively high number of prep students matriculate (eg a single kid goes to Yale compared to 3 to UChicago in a given year) to UChicago, doesn’t give you any information about how many applied to either, or both, or how many were accepted or how many chose one over the other. Let alone WHY those students applied to one or another or got in to one or the other.

Too much noise in your data.

The mantra at prep schools these days is that they are no longer Ivy feeder schools, and you can’t count on them as a ticket to an Ivy-equivalent. The marginally higher raw matriculation numbers reported by OP reflect that trend. Most students at prep schools will never be accepted at Ivies. Many don’t even try for that reason. The secret sauce for prep school college counseling offices is managing the expectations of parents and pointing the kids to schools that they can get into and thrive at.

Looks to me UChicago is targeting a subset of kids - talented and interesting for sure, but not necessarily the ones for whom the Ivies are a realistic option. You can’t tell from UChicago v Ivy matriculation rates who applied to which schools and who got rejected. Or whether a merit award was a reason a kid chose UChicago over an Ivy, even if they did get into one.

In comparison, I am not sure you can say the Ivies do any active targeting at prep schools. They don’t have to. They do emphasize athletes, urms and legacies, though, which makes it harder to decipher trends of who gets in where and why at top prep schools.

I have an idea - if you all are really interested in knowing whether UChicogo is the favorite college at prep schools, ask the question in the prep school forum.

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@CateCAParent , we often hear it said impressionistically, as you frankly admit you are doing, that “the tippy-top students in my kid’s school are going to the ivies, elite LAC’s or stem schools, or Stanford.” That impression could be created by the fact that there is a large array of peer schools which collectively harvest most such students, no matter how many of them might find their way to any single institution. However, you seem to be saying more than this - that the quality of intake of any of these other schools, taken singly and put up against Chicago’s, would be superior in the quality of tippy-topness. That’s a very subjective judgment, of course, and we are all welcome to our impressions and judgments. However, given that this is so often said about Chicago, I want to challenge it a bit on grounds that are less impressionistic.

We actually have some data to work with in the figures Harvard made available in the Asian American case. We know, for example, that 43 percent of all kids admitted to Harvard are drawn from ALDC applicants - that is, those who are either recruited athletes or children of rich donors, alums, or faculty. One would have to assume that Harvard draws at least the same percentages from the elite prep schools. Indeed, a reasonable assumption would be that there must be more of them coming from the prep schools, likely a majority. We also know that Harvard places great emphasis on personality and leadership skills. Finally, we know that the ALDC cohort occupies predominantly the middle and lower levels of Harvard’s 10-category academic ranking of its applicants and that it rejects 87 percent of non-ALDC applicants in the very highest of the ten academic categories.

There is really only one non-impressionistic way to read these figures: Most of the kids Harvard would admit from any given prep school would not be the highest of its academic stars. Yes, of course, there will be some such stars, but they will not be in the majority. Most Harvard admitees will have other qualities; as well as being ALDC (or in addition to being that) they may have “personality” and be seen as leaders. I do not disparage them or their qualities, and I do not criticize Harvard for picking the class it wants, a class that will also include some academic superstars. I do question whether Harvard would excel Chicago in “tippy-topness” if the focus is placed on the highest of academic achievers. Chicago is a school that heavily privileges academic achievement, is relatively less burdened by ALDC baggage, and is notoriously uninfluenced by whatever is meant by “personality.” My suspicion is that the epithet “tippy-top” most often refers to some sort of Fitzgeraldian ideal of charisma and glamour. These are not the qualities of the “sombre city of Chicago” described by its native son Saul Bellow or the serious university at which he taught on the city’s southside.

I refer to the case of Harvard simply because we know Harvard’s statistics. I assume it to be somewhat representative of the other ivies and elite lacs, less so of Stanford, not at all of MIT. My thesis is that Chicago has a niche appeal that overlaps in different ways with the various ones of its peer schools. That appeal is defined by special and oft-described qualities (the other schools have their own special qualities). This makes it attractive to a certain kind of kid. I feel no desire to call that kid “tippy-top.” I’ll settle for “the Chicago type.”

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I agree with this. My son is at UChicago. He attended a top prep school in our region. He was told by counseling that his stats and profile were such that he could choose any school to apply to, that ED schools (including Ivy’s) would be more of a sure thing. They seemed to suggest that UChicago would be less of a sure thing than many of the Ivy’s. He chose UChicago as his top choice.

At his school, however, yes, top students prefer to apply to Ivy’s over UChicago. But that may be recognition bias. For our family, we have graduates from HYPSM and UChicago. We view them as being the same caliber.

We still hear the “where fun goes to die” mantra about UChicago and frankly it’s irritating. He is a freshman, but so far, my son has had a great time on campus, has plenty of time for clubs/activities, and has done extremely well academically.

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What I meant by “tippy-top” - a term I loathe and shouldn’t have used because of its lack of precise meaning - is the top 5-10% or so of the grading/rigor curve. I can’t strictly define what I mean, because of course there are kids at prep schools who are spectacular for reasons beyond grades. Colloquially, I mean the kids who can write their own ticket to whatever school they want based entirely on their own chops.

There are maybe 5 kids like that in each grade at my kid’s school. Sure, not all are a fit for UChicago. But my non-scientific observation (I don’t know their grades or scores, just their accolades) is they tend to go to Stanford and the Ivies. There are exceptions, of course.

Go down a notch, to the next 10-20% of grades/rigor/chops, and you get Stanford, Ivies, plus more idiosyncratic college choices. LACs, UCs, and the more specialty schools- including UChicago.

What makes matriculation hard to parse is, as you point out, those kids with hooks. Lots of legacy kids, urms and development kids and athletes attend prep schools- adding to the noise in the data.

What UChicago has figured out is the un-hooked prep school student in the second to third tier, who might need a little bit of financial help, make phenomenally well-prepared contributors to a college community. They may not be accepted at an Ivy - those spots are taken by the top 10% and legacies, etc. But they are great academics, often quirky, motivated, curious and interesting people. That is how they ended up in a prep school to begin with.

So, yeah, UChicago does well at prep schools because they target a specific subset of those students for whom UChicago is in their sweet spot admissions-wise. But that does not mean that the students wouldn’t choose an Ivy over it if the Ivy were a realistic option for acceptance. That said, of course there are students for whom UChicago is their first choice over Ivies, just like there are students for whom UCLA is their first choice. But they are outliers.

ETA: I agree that choosing an Ivy over UChicago is often a name recognition thing, not because of quality of education. This comes from parents as much as anything. There are a lot of kids who end up at prep schools, especially international kids, who are there because their parents want them to go to Harvard.

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My son was in a similar situation. My impression, however, is that UChicago is firmly within the scope of the “tippy top” students, at least at my son’s school. However, there are so many other factors at play in elite college admissions that having perfect test scores, straight A-s on your transcript, and a resume stacked with CVs nowadays don’t necessarily get you into a T10. At least in my son’s school, UChicago caters to the kind of top students without the necessary “hooks” to inch closer to the Ivy league or Stanford. The ones going to the ivies aren’t necessarily smarter than the kids going to Chicago, I have to confess, based on the cases I’ve known. Since it’s a top prep school located in a major East Coast city, competition is rather intense and lots of kids at my son’s school are from affluent families with double, triple legacies at ivies. Kids are admitted to UChicago mainly based on stats as opposed to who’s having the most productive relationships with university coaches or the development office.

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It’s interesting that a school like Nueva is on the list, but not Harker. I live near both.

Nueva has a reputation of being an “independent study, make your own education plan,” whereas Harker is STEM focused. And UoC is not a very popular choice at Harker. Their website has their matriculations.

Also, top schools like University and Lick Wilmerding in SF aren’t on the list either.

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I think the biggest issue is calling it “The Most Popular Colleges at…” As others have noted, largest number of matriculations is not the same as “most popular.” For example, suppose you have a 100 students in a theoretical graduating class. Fictional College A is the first choice among every student in the class by a wide margin. All 100 students in the class apply to College A, 5 students are admitted, and all 5 of them attend for a 100% yield. College B is less popular among students in the class. 30 students apply, 15 are admitted, and 7 attend for a 47% yield. College A is clearly more popular by a wide margin; yet it does not get the most matriculations. You don’t recognize that college A is more popular if you look at a list of matriculations alone. To even attempt to estimate popularity, you need to look at additional factors such as how many students applied and were admitted.

Unfortunately “top prep schools” rarely publish this information. The HS looks better to parents if they present the image of being a reliable pipeline to “elite” colleges, such that students at that HS can expect to attend the “elite” college of their choice. Stats showing that the overwhelming portion of students form the HS who apply to HYPSM… are rejected conflicts with that image and may result in negative repercussions for the HS So the HS looks much better, if they instead just list matriculations.

If you don’t limit top HSs to just private boarding school type HSs and include public options such as magnets, then you can find HSs that publish % applied, % admitted, and % yield type stats. For example, I’ve previously mentioned Thomas Jefferson HS in these threads. It is the highest rated HS in USNWR, probably has higher average test scores than any prep schools that are mentioned in this thread, and has a larger number of matriculations to the elite colleges listed on https://www.polarislist.com/ than any other HS. One could make a good argument for TJ being the top HS in the US, and is often called something similar in news stories. The more complete stats for TJ are repeated below:

If you look at just matriculations alone (2017-19), Chicago does quite well, with more matriculations than Stanford and all Ivies except Cornell. The list for highly selective colleges (not including VA tech, W&M, Pitt, etc.) is below. Harvard and Stanford are far outside of the top 10, and well below Chicago.

Most Matriculations

  1. UVA – 161
  2. Michigan – 42
  3. Cornell – 40
  4. CMU – 39
  5. UIUC – 31
  6. MIT - 23
  7. Chicago – 22
    … much lower…
    Harvard – 15
    …
    Stanford 11

However, if you try to estimate popularity by looking at % applied, admit rate and yield, then it presents a complete different story. One might rank the most popular highly selective colleges based on application rate, admit rate, and yield something like below. Chicago still does very well, but it’s not above Stanford + all Ivies except Cornell, like occurs on the highest matriculation list above.

Most Popular (based on % applied, % admitted, and % yield)
1 – Stanford: 28% applied, 6% admit rate, 83% yield, 1% attended
2 – Cornell: 37% applied, 16% admit rate, 52% yield, 3% attended
3 – MIT: 22% applied, 11% admit rate, 80% yield, 2% attended
4 – Princeton: 25% applied, 8% admit rate, 67% yield, 2% attended
5 – Harvard: 21% applied, 7% admit rate, 67% yield, 1% attended
6 – Duke: 23% applied, 13% admit rate, 54% yield, 2% attended
7 – Penn: 28% applied, 13% admit rate, 40% yield, 1% attended
8 – CMU: 32% applied, 26% admit rate, 42% yield, 3% attended
9 – Yale: 17% applied, 11% admit rate, 50% yield, 1% attended
10 – Chicago: 16% applied, 18% admit rate, 50% yield, 1% attended
?* – UVA: 79% applied, 56% admit rate, 32% yield, 14% attended
*Difficult to rank without knowing more information, but should be somewhere among top 10 most popular

It’s also worthwhile to note that TJ students have an extremely high concentration of well prepared, high achieving, high scoring kids… probably more so than any other HS mentioned in this thread, yet TJ students still have low admit rates to many selective colleges above. TJ kids only had a 6% and 7% admit rate to Stanford and Harvard… not that much higher than overall admit rate. The colleges do not appear to be competing to get as many students from TJ as possible, and the same is likely true for the prep schools mentioned in this thread.

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If you multiply the % applying * yield, the only changes to your ranking would be putting UVA at #1 (great middle class value) and CMU moves ahead of Duke and Penn. CMU has a strong 42% yield despite a higher admit rate.

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Even with the more detailed information published by TJ, it still can be difficult to estimate popularity with much precision, particularly when there is a large difference in admit rate. For example, stats for Penn and CMU are repeated below. CMU had slightly more applications than Penn and slightly higher yield. Does that mean it is more popular?

Penn: 28% applied, 13% admit rate, 40% yield, 1% attended
CMU: 32% applied, 26% admit rate, 42% yield, 3% attended

I instead ranked Penn above CMU because of the lower admit rate, thinking that Penn’s much lower admit rate suggests Penn applicants are likely to have a higher concentration of the top TJ students than CMU applicants. CMU applicants are more likely to include some who preferred Penn, but did not apply because they thought they’d have a better chance at the seemingly less selective CMU.

However, the reality is no doubt more complex. For example, you might find that among kids interested in CS, CMU SCS is far more popular than Penn CIS, and CS cross admits almost always choose CMU over Penn. And among kids interested in business/management Wharton at Penn might be far more popular than Tepper at CMU, and business/management cross admits might almost always choose Penn over CMU. There are also issues with the small sample size and ED/REA/SCEA influence on yield. It’s better than ranking by matriculations alone, which would put CMU very far above Penn, but still largely a matter of speculation.

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I’m not a defender of Harvard, and abhor ALDC preferences, but the claim that it would therefore have lower concentration of academic superstars (than UChicago) isn’t based on facts. ALDC applicants and academic superstars aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, there’s likely a higher concentration of acadmeic superstars among the “L”, and particularly the “C”, applicants. Harvard’s issue is in the other two buckets, which broadens the academic quality.distribution of its student body at the lower end but doesn’t affect the higher end. Indeed, many more academic superstars from everywhere have chosen, and will continue to choose, Harvard (over UChicago), not just for its “glamour”.