Apparently you don’t read the other threads. You’re right, listen to what your grandmother or neighbor told you. Not the actual school matriculation facts. Other colleges make the same claims in their CC threads; they simply haven’t got anything to back it up with.
My children went to two of the prep schools listed in your other thread. I already know well how UChicago is perceived there.
Look, UC is a top school. There is no need for this chip on your shoulder, and they certainly don’t need this type of hype man. Just go there and be happy.
They’ve been saying that about California since I was a kid. You know, the whole “next big one” is coming.
Two high schools in LaLa Land don’t represent the State of California.
Signed,
the SF Bay Area and Northern California.
This is a great site to consider yield.
Some interesting things:
There are 139 students at BH High that attend Santa Monica Community College?? Wow! My kid’s public HS has less than 1% that attend CC.
Why is there a negative perception of Pepperdine? Why does only one person in the class get in there? Meanwhile, LMU has 12 get in and only one attends.
These public OOS colleges do pretty poorly with yield. They should consider indications of interest from BH High. CU Boulder gets one out of 22. Arizona gets 3 out of 24. Indiana gets 4 out of 25 (not super far off their OOS yield).
While this string considers top privates, UCLA and Berkeley (world class in-state public Us) only get 12 enrollees.
1 Like
Yield is more important that admit rate. Even Harvard and Stanford know that once you get to single digit acceptance rate, it’s all a wash.
Facts are facts. You don’t impute “chip on the shoulder” to the messenger when you yourself react negatively to the facts (and make a claim that yield does not mean much)
I have to smile at the idea that these tiny sample sizes are generating evidence that any school is blowing another out of the water. 4 people here, 2 people there. Ha.
2 Likes
It’s a trend. Don’t look at it as a single year.
WRHARPER. Those are awesome stats. Last year we saw UChicago go big and wide in Texas. Now it’s California. It’s a great strategy for UChicago. Clearly those two states put UChicago right smack dab in the middle of the conversation. The UCDS crowd will soon run out of excuses when faced with data.
Let’s see what happens in the next years.
Over the past five admission cycles (Classes of '20-'24), UChicago has decreased the percentage from the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic and increased New England, South-West, and West. So the data do support that UChicago might be trying to go “big and wide” in certain key areas. But we also know that from conversations with parents from the respective areas as well.
I have the figures for Beverly Hills High School for 2016-2020. UChicago is back on top for 2019 and 2020.
If you have secret information about 2019 and 2020 that is not listed on the website, then why did you say 2017 was the latest year for which figures are available?
Regardless, let me make this clear–Harvard-Westlake is the number one school in California. UChicago blows Havard and Stanford out of the water there.
“Blows out of the water” by what measure. Do you mean that Harvard-Westlake had more kids who matriculated to Chicago than Harvard/Stanford? By that measure USC blows Chicago out of the water, and WUSTL also ranks above Chicago. To even attempt to draw meaningful conclusions you would need to know something about number of applications and the types of students who applied.
But here’s why it matters. New York, like Harvard, is on the decline. New York will soon fall into the ocean. Massachusetts, too. California is number one. Los Angeles, in particular. So the fact that UChicago owns California and Los Angeles means it is well positioned for the future.
You can’t draw sweeping conclusions based on 4 kids from a particular HS matriculating to UChicago in 2017. Is the assumption that those 4 kids preferred UChicago to Harvard/Stanford because a couple of the kids who were accepted to Harvard/Stanford that year chose to attend elsewhere? How do you know that the Harvard/Stanford acceptances did not choose to attend a local southern CA school, or another Ivy, or Johns Hopkins, which also had a 100% yield on the few kids who were admitted?
Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford all have an extraordinarily high yield on admits. The vast majority who are accepted to any of the 3 choose to attend, not just Chicago. In addition to selectivity, this has a lot to do with how much the schools rely on admitting from early pool, rather than RD. For example, the Harvard lawsuit data showed a 94% yield on REA admits vs 68% on RD admits. The lawsuit regression analysis found that applying REA offered a substantial boost in chance of admission among similarly qualified unhooked applicants, which boosts Harvard’s yield.
You realize the numbers are that way because Chicago let’s in everyone ED. It’s similar at my sons’ NorCal school. And I love U Chicago; my niece attends. But if you think Chicago is as desired as Harvard and Stanford I suggest you watch college reaction videos on You Tube. Students and families go wild over two schools, Harvard and Stanford.
1 Like
Well, looking at Naviance for our local public HS, it’s very easy to tell, which top private school is the most desired, at least during the period of 2016-2020.
Stanford
Acceptances 44
Enrolled 39
Yield 89%
No other private school is even remotely close and the list contains all the big names.
You can view a more complete picture for the UC system by looking at the stats on the UC site at Admissions by source school | University of California . For example, in the most recent available year:
139 Kids Applied – Mean GPA = 3.87
21 Kids Accepted – Mean GPA = 4.20
7 Kids Attending (6 women) – Mean GPA = 4.23
I believe the senior class is ~350 students, so it looks like ~40% of the BH high school class applied to UCLA. That’s not as many oveall applicants as Santa Monica. >40% of students applied to Santa Monica, and ~40% of BH high students chose to attend Santa Monica. However, if you break it down by GPA, it appears that the clear majority of high achieving students at BH High applied to UCLA.
1 Like
Some here are taking the bait and solemnly rushing to refute the assertion that “New York is sinking in to the ocean” and to further assure us that on the basis of samples of three or four we should not be saying that UChicago “blows HYS out of the water.” To all who need reassurance on the subject I can confirm that, yes, Cambridge, MA is still on the map and, yes, the kids at Harvard are still half-focussed on getting an education.
U of C students and alums have always carried a certain chip on the shoulder. To the smooth and condescending grads of the big-branded eastern schools this passes as a critique. To them Chicago pretensions are ridiculous. They have told us so time and time again on this forum, demonstrating what some would call snobbery but others merely prestige-mongering. In this bland world of the received wisdom we are all supposed to know our place, and the place of the University of Chicago is, as everyone knows, decreed to be “worthy but dull, with absurd pretensions to ivy status.” Stay in your lane, you midwestern rubes!
Some on this board might be missing a certain puckishness of tone in this and the late President Harper’s posts. A proper University of Chicago education helps in the reading of gnomic texts.
2 Likes
This thread reinforces for me that teaching statistics needs to jump to the top of list of “Ed reform in high schools in America”. The Chicago-boosting posts pretty much summarize every single cautionary tale that a well-taught statistics class will review. Extrapolating from incomplete data, the importance of sample size, the plural of an anecdote is not “facts”, and of course- stating an opinion (Massachusetts is falling into the ocean- really?) as a vociferous fact and hoping that your readers will accept it as such.
Plus the strawman argument that U Chicago “owns” California? How to dispute something which is so illogical, hyperbolic and meaningless?
Take a stats class, kid!
4 Likes
I’m used to the self advertising by parents and graduates of private high schools, but at least those have very competitive admissions, albeit a competition in which wealthier and more connected families have an advantage. However, for a high school whose only requirement is that the parents are wealthy enough to afford living in that extremely expensive school district to do the same demonstrates a new level of privilege and elitism.
This looks like all of those articles in magazines on the theme of “these colleges are the best, because they have more students from wealthy and famous families!!”, which are usually written by gossip columnists pretending to be higher-ed journalists…
I am a lot more impressed by the number of low income and URM students attending a college than the number of rich kids who attend that college.
Yes Sushiritto. For this particular school yield proves that Stanford is highly desirable. No argument there.
Blossom. As you say it’s hyperbole. Take it for what it is.
They teach you in stats class to look for trends too and if you revie what’s been happening in the last 10 years with UChicago stats for California, New York and Texas you wouldn’t be saying that the data is not there.
But UChicago has also increased enrollment through Odyssey. And last year we knew from TX that the rural enrollment went up by a lot.
1 Like
I was thinking how cringeworthy most people from UC would find this post for these exact reasons. These claims also make it appear that the school has an inferiority complex which as far as I know, it does not, nor should it. That the 90210 school sends a few to UC every year proves little and for many is something to ignore rather than brag about.
2 Likes
Harper,
How about West Beverly? I want to know where this generation’s Brandon Walsh is going?!