UChicago More Popular Than Harvard, Stanford, Ivys at Beverly Hills High School

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
43

A trend is that unemployment claims were up in 36 out of 50 states last week (for the purposes of illustration). It’s too early to tell if this represents an overall increase in unemployment nationally due to Covid, because it’s December and there are many seasonal industries which lay employees off in December due to lack of demand, and because unemployment claims don’t track actual unemployment exactly- since an employee who got a generous severance package in August couldn’t file (yet) until their severance ran out. So you couldn’t state categorically that unemployment due to Covid is increasing rapidly (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t).

That’s a trend.

The fact that out of a tiny number of kids applying to U Chicago from one, non-representative HS in the LA Metro area, there was a small increase over a three year (or whatever) period is NOT a trend. And certainly doesn’t mean that Chicago “owns” California- since we don’t have comparable numbers for SF, or Sacramento, (maybe their application numbers and yield went down, canceling out the Owning coming out of Beverly Hills?)

That’s why statistics needs to be taught. To learn what an outlier is, to learn why arguing off of poor or incomplete data means your argument can easily be refuted, and to learn how to accurately describe what is going on without resorting to strange and bizarre claims.

But if you have evidence that the entire state of Massachusetts is about to fall into the ocean I’d love to see that data.

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This is thread is hilarious. U Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford are all reach schools for the best. The really humor is for the pathetic stats for a Beverly Hills High School. We can walk there (although not attend) and I had no idea that they were so pathetic.

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blossom, you keep on insisting on this years observation at Beverly Hills… Of course, that is not a trend, since you pretty much narrowed down the timeline and the data set. The trend I am referring to is UChicago’s noted geographic gains that has been rolling out for years now.

THAT is a trend.

Perhaps you need to review prior threads about UChicago.

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Beverley Hills High is a non-selective public HS. They don’t have an especially high concentration of students who are well qualified for HYPSM… type highly selective colleges. For example, the school profile lists an an average ACT of 26.7 and 3 NMSs. Both are well above state averages, but pale in comparison to selective HSs. Being a non-selective public, they also probably have far fewer applicants to selective privates than students attending selective private HSs.

Given the relatively lower concentration of well qualified students and likely relatively lower concentration of applicants, I think the number of matriculating students to highly selective private colleges is certainly not “pathetic.” Instead it’s far higher than the vast majority of other non-selective public HSs… far higher than the local public HSs in my area of CA. This may partially relate to a higher concentration of hooked students.

47

I am grateful to Mr Harper for providing the stats for one high school that he clearly has inside dope on. This is interesting in its own right. Blake told us we can see the world in a grain of sand. That was also hyperbole.

There must be more than a few grains in the sneakers of those Beverly Hills High kids. Once upon a time hardly any of them made their way to the south side of Chicago. Is the present migration from the California beaches entirely disconnected from the stampede from the prickly-pear scrub lands of west Texas and the woody hills and dales of New England? This poster gave us chapter and verse on a multitude of instances in a prior post. Put that information all together and interpret it as you wish: for those with eyes to see it indicates, as Stratford says, an unignorable trend.

The trend doesn’t merely favor higher SES demographics, though that is one of the effects of an enhanced profile. The place is hotter in general to smart kids from all demographics. So said a UChicago first-gen 2020 grad who was in the Odyssey Scholarship Program. This young black man from Flint Michigan especially praised the counselling he received from a sympathetic adviser right from the outset. They crafted a “career plan,” he got in to the Kimpton work program and the Maroon Scholar program, got not only a great education but a good Chicago job after graduation and was accepted into the business school a year thereafter. That guy was all set to conquer the world! Just one grain of sand, of course. But, as Saul Bellow told us, it all adds up.

The recent grad told us of his experience in a skyped event with Dean Boyer and others. We learned not only about the Odyssey program but got a few other tidbits about student life. A couple of interesting takeaways: Not a single covid case has been traced to person-to-person transmission in a dorm or classroom. And not a single Odyssey grad failed to find a job or be admitted to a grad school this past year. Boyer himself spoke more generally, describing the evolving ethos of the College and asserting that the educational experience is what it has always been - “the gold standard”. But to this purely acadlemic education has been added a transformation of the life students live outside the classroom and the attention given to linking up that education to a career.

Some of that info must be getting out to the cool kids of Beverly Hills, the raw products of small-town Texas, and the elite schools nestled in New England villages. Every grain of sand is welcome, wherever it comes from - if it has the right stuff!

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48

Our HS had 11 accepted and 4 ultimately went to Chicago last year, but that was because Chicago offer more merit based scholarships. Those 7 would rather go to Austin or full ride Baylor pre-med.

Ivy schools are “reach” only because of low to nothing scholarship and high cost of living. Those who went there either got a lot of money from FAFSA or they got rare scholarships from those schools.

The yield data doesn’t mean the school is more “popular”.

49

Here are the figures for Beverly Hills High School matriculations for the top private schools for 2019 and 2020. Acceptance and attendance numbers. Except for Berkeley, I did not list any of the various California state or local schools or community colleges, which many students attended.

Beverly Hills High School Matriculations (Class of 2019)

UChicago
Accepted 2, Attended 1

Cornell
Accepted 3, Attended 2

Columbia
Accepted 1, Attended 0

Northwestern
Accepted 1, Attended 0

Berkeley
Accepted 22, Attended 14

Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Penn, MIT, Duke not listed

Beverly Hills High School Matriculations (Class of 2020)

UChicago
Accepted 3, Attended 2

Brown
Accepted 1, Attended 1

Cornell
Accepted 3, Attended 3

Duke
Accepted 2, Attended 0

Harvard
Accepted 1, Attended 1

Yale
Accepted 1, Attended 1

Penn
Accepted 2, Attended 2

Northwestern
Accepted 2, Attended 2

Rice
Accepted 2, Attended 0

Berkeley
Accepted 16, Attended 8

Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, MIT not listed

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The combined figures for 4 years for top private colleges. Not including various state or local California schools except Berkeley.

Beverly Hills High School Matriculations (Class of 2017-2020)

  1. UChicago
    Accepted 9, Attended 7

  2. Cornell
    Accepted 11, Attended 7

  3. Penn / Harvard
    Accepted 6, Attended 3

  4. Princeton / Yale
    Accepted 3, Attended 2

  5. Stanford
    Accepted 4, Attended 2

  6. Columbia
    Accepted 3, Attended 1

  7. Duke
    Accepted 6, Attended 1

  8. Brown
    Accepted 1, Attended 1

  9. Dartmouth
    Accepted 1, Attended 0

  10. Caltech
    Accepted 1, Attended 0

  11. MIT
    Not listed

  12. Berkeley
    Accepted, Attended
    64, 31

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Yield rate for top colleges at Beverly Hills High School (2017-2020):

  1. UChicago 77.8%
  2. Yale / Princeton 66.7%
  3. Cornell 63.6%
  4. Harvard / Stanford / Penn 50%
  5. Berkeley 48.4%
  6. Columbia 33.3%
  7. Duke 16.7%
  8. Dartmouth / Caltech 0%

The 1 student accepted to Brown attended but the other top few schools had more admittees and enrollees.

52

Riddle me this.

What schools do you think a majority of kids apply to in the following cities near or around me:

Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, Campbell, Woodside, Portola Valley, Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Saratoga, San Jose, etc.?

My neighbor’s kid had a fairly representative list:

Besides the CA public’s, CMC, GT, UMich, MIT, Cal Tech, HMC and Cornell.

So, isn’t this just a locale thing?

As far as the geographic increase in reach of UC, can’t many top colleges make the same boast?

53

@WRHarper you do realize that UofC has binding early decision I & II = 100% yield and HYP etc. DO NOT have a binding early decision options, which makes yield comparisons fairly useless.

Unless you can show that more applicants chose UoC over HYP when accepted to one or all of them than I can’t see the point of your argument.

Were you accepted to HYP and chose UoC or is that the only college of the 4 that you got an acceptance from?

Lastly, Harvard Westlake just over the hill from you is one of the top college prep HS’s in the country. The top colleges chosen by students over the last 5 years was NYU (92 students matriculated there); USC (70 students) and WashU (60 students).

What do all of these competitive colleges have in common? They are a little bit easier to get into than HYP.

btw - UoC had 53 basically tied with University of Michigan 52.

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54

Well, here are the factors that make Harvard easy to get in to: recruited athlete; legacy; development (i.e. parents make big contribution); child of faculty. Peter Arcidiacono’s study of the stats coming out of the Asian American action against Harvard calls this category of admits ALDC. Harvard assigns its applicants to one of ten deciles academically. In the very highest of these categories (10) Harvard admits only 15.27 percent of non-ALDC applicants; whereas it admits 57.07 percent of LDCs. (87.79 percent of athletes are admitted in aggregate from all categories and 100 percent from the top categories.) These wide margins in favor of ALDCs remain as you go down the academic achievement ladder (10.77 non-ALDC as against 56.94 LDC in category 9; and 7.55 as against 47.49 in category 8; and so on, with Athletes and LDC’s being admitted in even the lowest categories, long after no non-ALDCs at all are being admitted).

So, if you’re a non-hooked academically serious kid why would you waste your time on Harvard? You would get a better education at Chicago, would be surrounded by more of your own kind, and, yes, you’d have a better shot at getting in to a place that emphasizes academic excellence and ambition above all else. To the ivy crowd this seems like settling for the lesser option, but that just tells you where their values lie.

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55

Yep, all you have to be is a top Ivy League level recruited athlete. That’s easy enough.

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56

…or a legacy, or a child of faculty, or just born to very wealthy parents who really like Harvard…

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57

What’s the breakdown of each ALDC category? What % of these “easy” categories is recruited athlete at Harvard?

58

If you’re really interested, sushiritto, you should google “Peter Arcidiacono Harvard” and you can find the report and even a video of Arcidiacono presenting the data in a lecture.

I think you mistake my point, however. Let us say it’s easy, relatively, to get in to Harvard without stellar academic chops if you are ALDC, even if it is not that easy to be those non-academic other things that get you in - a recruited athlete or, for that matter, the child of an alum, a faculty member or a very rich donor. These are not in themselves categories of academic excellence, and yet the kids in them are hugely over-represented at Harvard. That must be the reason Steven Pinker complained so loudly a while back that his classes are only sparsely attended - something that could never happen at Chicago.

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Honestly, I don’t care about Beverly Hill HS, Harvard or Chicago.

But what I’m objecting to now, with the mentioned ALDC issue, at Harvard, is that a D1 level recruited athlete at Harvard (or even a D3 athlete at UC) doesn’t have “stellar academic chops.” I don’t think many here understand the talent and commitment in sport and academics that it takes to be a D1 level Harvard recruited athlete, with the exception of the “Academic Blues” scandal.

I’m familiar with the physical hours of practice, training and games year round AND then during the school year also getting to academics late at night after all those hours on the field, pitch, court, lifting weights, private training, injuries, surgeries, doctors appts., ER visits, etc.

I’d take a guess that the recruited athlete is a very large portion of those Harvard ALDC’s and it’s not an easy path, having both great academics and great athleticism, which someone would have to be at Harvard.

Easy path? Puh-leeze.

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60

Also curious as to why you think Chicago doesn’t also have recruited athletes, legacies etc. Another poster has written several times about Chicago issuing Likely Letters to recruited athletes – just like the Ivies do (and very few other D3s do)

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61

If you compare with the 2019 list at College Acceptance & Matriculation – College Center – Beverly Hills High School , you’ll see that they indicate some of the colleges had matriculating students for which your list said none occurred such as Columbia, Duke, and Northwestern.

Ignoring the differing information about matriculations on the BH website, this is a ridiculously small sample at a single high school. It’s certainly not a good indication of LA, CA, or the USA as a whole. According to the 2019-20 IPEDS, the 4-year colleges with the highest overall yield and a significant number of admits were as follows.

  1. USAFA – 99%
  2. Ozarks – 91%
  3. Randall – 88%
  4. Trinity Baptist – 88% (should say tie #3)
  5. USNA – 87%
  6. Florida College – 85% (the small religious college, not UF)
  7. Webb – 84%
  8. USMA – 83%
  9. Harvard – 82%
  10. Stanford – 82% (should say tie #9)
  11. BYU – 81%
  12. Chicago – 81% (should say tie #11)

The highest yield colleges are all unique ones for which there is not a good alternative such as military colleges and religious colleges. Most of the top yield colleges also have something especially unique about them beyond other religious/military colleges. For example, College of the Ozarks charges no-tuition and instead requires a work commitment.

Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford all do have a extremely high yield; but the overall yields for Harvard/Stanford across all admits are very different from the ~5 kids at Beverly High referenced above. Looking at the overall stats suggests completely different yield rates than looking at the ~5 kids at Beverly High, with Harvard/Stanford having slightly higher yields than Chicago.

In addition to being especially unique, as discussed above, 2 key factors in yield rates are selectivity and reliance on early admission policies. For example, one could make a strong case for UCLA being the most popular college among kids at Beverly High. In the most recent year at the UC site, ~40% of the class applied to UCLA, including the clear majority of high achieving kids in the class. I expect a larger portion of high achieving kids from Beverly High applied to UCLA than any other college.

However, UCLA is unlikely to have a higher overall yield than colleges that most students consider notably more selective than UCLA, such as Harvard/Stanford because kids rarely apply to notably more selective colleges as a backup. I’d expect the many BH High kids whose first choice is UCLA usually do not apply to Stanford as backup in case UCLA rejects them because Stanford is considered to be more selective, so the kids who prefer UCLA over Stanford generally don’t hurt Stanford’s yield. However, the BH High who prefer Stanford probably often apply to UCLA (or UCB) as backup in case Stanford rejects them because UCLA/UCB is considered less selective, so the kids who prefer Stanford do hurt UCLA/UCB’s yield. UCLA also doesn’t do restricted/binding early decision and makes it easy to simultaneously apply to UCLA and a key competitor at the same time – UCB. Both of these factors cost UCLA dearly in reduced yield.

Chicago does seem to have a higher yield than one would expect based on selectivity alone. This could partially relate to reliance on binding ED admission policies. Chicago doesn’t publish the portion of class admitted ED vs RD, making it a matter of speculation. Yield is not simply a function of popularity.

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Obviously Chicago has its own ALDC cohort, but it is nothing like the magnitude of Harvard’s. To speak only of athletes, Harvard must have at least twice as many teams. There was a reason why Chicago’s Director of Athletics, after something like fifteen years here, was thrilled to move to the same post at Harvard. Much bigger job, salary, and prestige within the institution.

Sushiritto, I am not a purist on the subject of college sports. I played one myself, and I have a lot of respect for the sort of discipline and other traits of character they foster. It’s a question of proportion and maintaining the emphasis on the essential mission of learning. Let Harvard be Harvard, let Stanford be Stanford. There are other paths.

Something similar applies to the other preferred admission categories. The children of Chicago alumni famously do not come to Chicago. This is usually accounted a terrible indictment of the place. I have never seen it that way. It is more a natural consequence of an institution very focussed on an ethos of learning and much less so on peripheral activities. An intense desire to learn is not so heritable in my experience, and anyhow prestige trumps everything with most kids. It takes a special type to buck that allure. Harvard is a ticket to ride; Chicago is a ticket to work. And “Fun comes to die here”, as we all know.

Though the times are changing, does anyone seriously believe that the Chicago brand and the tone of its student life are Harvard-like magnets for the children of the very wealthy? And as to those who do come here, there will surely be differences in academic aspiration as between them and their counterparts at other institutions. Young Mr. Gates came here when he could have gone anywhere. I know nothing about his character, but I have a hunch that he was not in it merely for the glamour of the ride.