UChicago is a great school. Why is this endless obsession to compare with other great schools? For these comparisons to be valid and make sense, it should get rid of ED and ED2 to start with. If it wants students who would truly choose UChicago over all others and it is confident of its superiory, shouldn’t it demonstrate it by giving them the freedom of choice (at least like HYPS, or better yet like MIT/Caltech)? If it doesn’t, it can only be compared with other schools that don’t give applicants that choice.
3 Likes
Um, schools are probably better judged by the quality of students admitted, the matriculation and retention data, and the exit outcomes. The admission plan only helps support the applicant’s own level of commitment. It’s 100% choice.
ED and SCEA are both restrictive, just at different ends. These debates have gone 'round the track a few times already. Defining what HYPS does as the “standard” is simply asserting a religious viewpoint in lieu of data.
D1 athletes in the Ivy League are indeed committed to academics relative to many other athletes at many other D1 schools. Again, evidence is important in this discussion. This academic year, a good number of athletes at Harvard opted to take the year off and train/tend to injuries/volunteer/do internships, etc. rather than devote the year to a focused intellectual pursuit at the greatest university in the world. The reason is simple: The Ivy League and many other leagues cancelled the season. Harvard’s own rules discourage athletes even from putting academics on par with athletics; if you spend that year in focused intellectual pursuit, that’s one fewer year you can play ball at Harvard. So while many of them come in with stellar GPA’s and ok-to-good test scores, they aren’t necessarily the same kind of kids that wish to matriculate at UChicago. That makes sense; Harvard College has a distinct mission from UChicago and employs its athletic program to support that particular mission. They are, of course, very different schools from one another even if offering the same concentrations or quality of lecture.
Inferiority complex. It’s the only school on CC that sees these types of posts and with such frequency. It’s a shame, really.
3 Likes
1NJ, The “endless obsession” is in your mind. Especially because you have shown an irrational bias against UChicago in the past.
This analytical digging into the data/logic, questioning the data/logic, and then looking at it again some more, may be annoying to you and people like you who would simply want to confirm their biases, but this is typical UChicago talk. It is done in threads about Covid, crime, literature, nobels, etc. But since this is a website dedicated to college applications, it cant be helped that bits and pieces of admissions news from all over the country is shared and dug into more often.
ItsGettingReal21 if you are going to denigrate a group of people who like to read good bits of news about UChicago and show positive reception of those good bits and pieces of news, then don’t go to this board. (I mean, isn’t that what boards are for, to share news and discuss?)
Unexamined biases are really not a good match for this audience. At UChicago, we strive to think better, together.
The shame is that some view the competition for the best undergraduates as unnecessary. Such an attitude leads to mediocrity; if “School X” can do no wrong, then “School X” can pretty much decide what it wants even at the expense of its stakeholders. We saw such examples in the fall when pretty much every other top private directed a whole lot of undergraduates to stay home rather than come to campus to share in the intellectual vibrancy that supposedly exists at institutions of higher learning. One gets the impression that perhaps the top brass at most universities don’t think undergrads are capable of such meaningful participation - or perhaps they view them as merely a source of revenue. Sad as it is that “maverick” or “thinking outside the box” has come to mean inviting everyone back to campus for their learning, that’s again how UChicago has distinguished itself among its peers by offering a better alternative for serious students. And it succeeded: the over-subscription this year is a direct result of far fewer gap years than what occurred at peer schools.
Yes, and a little bit of delusion as well.
1 Like
The sample size is too small to mean anything. Harvard having a 100% yield means nothing except that one person accepted to Harvard did not end up attending.
A UC booster/poster above stated that recruited athletes are accepted at Harvard “without stellar academic chops.” Well, when you’ve received a concussion or had surgery for an ACL tear, it’s sometimes a little bit tough to completely focus on your studies when you’re recovering from headaches, taking a pain killer after surgery, walking on crutches, as examples.
As for Stanford, well, that’s an elite D1 student-athlete. That’s a entirely different level of student-athlete.
I agree with the above posters. You just don’t see these type of rah-rah posts from HYPS here. For disclosure purposes, I do have a close relative attending graduate school at UC.
Athletes (and some non-athletes) are accepted at many schools without stellar academic chops (however one might define that), including UChicago.
My evidence for that statement is working with student athletes looking to be recruited, and specifically wrt Chicago, the class of 2024 which shows the following ranges of admitted student test scores: ACT 20-36, SAT 1020-1600.
1 Like
It’s just that we have those egregious numbers that Harvard was forced to make available with respect to its recruited athletes and we also know it has a very large number of such athletes. I too woud like to know what the Chicago numbers are. Certainly I would expect recruited athletes to be given special consideration. It’s just that there aren’t as many of them, and it’s obvious that sports is not nearly the big deal at Chicago as at Harvard. There would be less reason to give athletes coming to Chicago the same enormous advantage. Everything in the culture militates against that. Being an athlete would be a hook like any other hook. And general SAT/ACT ranges are meaningless without knowing which hooks and how many in each category occupy the lowest ranges or otherwise trump the unhooked. There is no reason to suppose that they are exclusively or even primarily composed of recruited athletes.
This is elementary logic. Here’s another piece of logic: Though there is grumbling about the much higher numbers of kids that Chicago is netting these days from the boarding schools and elite privates there is general agreement that this is happening because HYP are taking ever fewer of the highest academic performers from that source (remember that Harvard takes only 15 percent non-ALDC from even its very highest academic decile). That must be because Chicago, uniquely among its peers, is not being weighed down by the magnitude of those preferences. Unhooked high performers have an edge at Chicago that they lack at HYP. Many have noticed this.
2 Likes
This is a great point, and accurate from my perspective as a college counselor.
2 Likes
One of the issues I see here is that institutions of higher learning might be more that just “life of the mind” pursuits and you will see the Harvard’s, MITs, and Stanford’s of the world treat the role of their institution a little differently. For example, MIT might pride itself on innovation and creativity while University of Chicago might focus more focus on intellectualism. Both fantastic institutions of higher learning but a distinct and separate inquiry for the 18 to 21 year old. There is a certain student profile that would thrive at UoC but might be a fish out of water at Harvard or Princeton.
At the end of the day we should let Chicago have their own identify and not have to always be comparing themselves to the ivy league colleges.
1 Like
That speaks to whether college is the correct environment for these athletes. Not being able to focus on your studies is typically a deal killer for most other applicants.
Actually, I was referring to student-athletes in high schools selecting which top college (HYPS, UC, Stanford, etc.) to attend as a recruited athlete.
High school student athletes must not only study long hours but also spend long hours in gyms, on the field, doctors offices, training rooms, ER visits, surgeries, etc. before they even apply to college.
And maybe their grades and SAT scores aren’t the same as the unhooked applicant.
The 25th percentile scores are listed as 34 ACT and 1510 ACT. The minimum score of 20/1020 only indicates that at least one admitted student at a test optional college had an ACT/SAT of 20/1020. I see no reason to assume that one kid was a recruited athlete. It’s certainly not good evidence that recruited athletes don’t have great academic chops.
Unfortunately Chicago doesn’t publish CDS type admission stats that breakdown the portion in different groups. If you trust the CollegeData website figures, then Chicago has historically had very few <30 ACT students… significantly fewer <30 ACT students than Harvard and Stanford before going test optional. However, that may have changed in the more recent years since going test optional.
Chicago doesn’t seem to publish as much detail about admission stats as various other peers, which prevents a detailed analysis. Instead it’s mostly guessing. I agree with some of the posters above that being a Div III school, they likely don’t give as much preference to recruited athletes as Stanford, Duke, Ivies, and other selective privates that mostly compete in Div I.
There is a preponderance of cases here in CC that points to this phenomenon.
2 Likes
I think you meant 1 person accepted ended up attending?
Really, the point is to either look at a longer time horizon and/or to look at a wider geographic population.
1 Like
Yes, I understood. Let me explain in a bit more detail:
HS grades and test scores are the standard metrics for college preparation and predicted degree of academic success. Colleges proudly tout these metrics as part of their class profile every year. Why, then, would a world-class university be willing to accept any candidate who submits sub-par metrics? That’s completely contrary (or should be contrary) to the institution’s own academic mission, and it waters down the the intellectual culture of the community. By having different entrance standards for athletes, universities are saying that they are not expected to participate as fully in collegiate life as other students and, perhaps, are exempt from that degree of exercise and training of the mind because training of the body has taken up so much of their time. College isn’t supposed to be about substituting braun for brain. At least, that’s the understanding upon which the University of Chicago’s undergraduate program was founded.
So, to return to the question: If college is supposedly about brains more than braun, then why are these highly dedicated athletes in college?