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

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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Last time I checked, the Principles of Micro at MIT and Econ 100 at UChicago had the same content. One runs for a semester, the other for a quarter. Things might be a bit different on the STEM side but it’s not at all unusual for the non-STEM to be faster paced at UChicago.

Incidentally, just looked into what was allowed for the Hass concentration in economics and you can take Principles of Micro (no pre-req), Principles of Macro (no pre-req) and Micro Theory (pre-req = Calc II and Principles of Micro). That’s pretty standard and it will typically take three semesters. The same content will be taught at UChicago in three quarters, just as an FYI, but of course not as a general (frankly, not as a major either; UChicago doesn’t count “Principles” in the major although they highly recommend that you take it anyway). This isn’t to slam MIT which has one of the best (if not THE BEST) economics departments in the world. Just pointing out some of the aspects of the undergraduate version, which is pretty much like undergraduate Econ programs at all top schools (most of which run on semesters so are a bit slower-paced). This is also consistent with what I’ve heard from other MIT parents whose kids took an Econ course - and kids who took Econ at other top schools. They are all pretty much taught the same way. I do admit to being a tad surprised that MIT doesn’t start them by taking the partial derivative but maybe they do in more advanced courses.

And, as mentioned already, UChicago’s Sosc sequence doesn’t allow you to stray from the designated sequences, must be taken in order, and - along with six other courses mostly in mandated sequence - is writing intensive. So relatively inflexible compared to MIT’s HASS requirements.

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It is matter of debate whether three quarters shoehorns more content in to a year than two semesters. The consensus seems to be that it generally does, though that depends on the curriculum and the school. Certainly, there is a sense (one I myself remember well) that three ten-week quarters create a recurring tight treadmill of reading, preparation for exams, and writing of papers. Reading virtually all of Tolstoy in ten weeks and writing a paper thereon (merely one instance of this at Chicago) would almost certainliy have occupied at least a full semester at most schools.

The quarter system is either a part of the intensity about the place that you love or it is a source of its unique stress - or maybe it is both those things. Others have made that observation, and even Dean Boyer has floated the thought that a semester system is worth considering because it would take some of the pressures off Chicago undergrads. I would oppose this, but it tells you what one seasoned observer believes to be the effect of the system.

This is a live debate, but, typically, a Chicago detractor huffily dismisses it as but one more reason he so despises our Chicago threads - the ones that seemingly he cannot refrain from visiting.

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The university did indeed alter the academic calendar but they kept the quarter system and reduced the number of weeks in winter and spring quarter to 9 each. That freaked everyone out big time but the issue was soon knocked out of the campus consciousness by the Covid-shutdown and Remote Spring. It will re-surface beginning Fall of '21.

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If a quarter-long UChicago course were equivalent to a sememster-long MIT course, a UChicago student would have learned in a little over two and half years what an MIT student learns in four years. If this is not delusional, I don’t know what is.

Caltech, Stanford, Northwestern, etc. are also on a quarter system, I know of no one at those places make such a claim. UChicago is truly unique.

BTW, I have looked at curricula at many top schools. The UChicago curriculum would be a cakewalk for most Caltech or MIT students.

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Move on please. The quarter vs semester has been debated before, and I suspect by the same users.

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You’re a wise and perceptive person.

UChicago has developed the best feeder school system in the country. From New Hampshire to San Diego it gets the best students from the best schools.

I know many people at other schools feel scared and threatened by this.

Harvard has lost a lot of ground over the past ten years. It’s now a nice second choice school at Beverly Hills High School. 3 students of 7 how were accepted actually attended. Clearly, if you get your first choice, you don’t take Harvard.

The figures from the top prep schools show Stanford can’t get the top students from the schools outside California. And even in California it mostly takes from the second or third tier schools.

Great to see UChicago’s success, and I wouldn’t want the university to changes places with any other school. It’s the best positioned at the top high schools from coast to coast.

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7 students at a particular public HS in CA is not a good representative sample of the full US. I’m sure you can find plenty of other HSs in which Harvard, Stanford, or other colleges had a higher yield. If you use the full sample across all the thousands of admits, both Harvard and Stanford have a slightly higher yield than Chicago.

Regarding top prep schools, I didn’t read through all of your posts, but in the ones that I did see, you only posted about matriculations, not number of acceptances or number of applicants. If Chicago has more matriculations than Stanford that doesn’t mean " Stanford can’t get the top students from the schools outside California." It more likely means that Stanford is admitting fewer students from the selected “top prep schools” than Chicago.

The cross admit stats at Parchment are self reported and a biased sample, so they are not always reliable. However, they still can be meaningful to estimate rough trends… They list the following cross admit yields. Their results suggest that students who are admitted to both HYPSM and Chicago generally choose HYPSM. . However, students who are admitted to non-HYP ivies like Penn, Brown, or Dartmouth have a decent chance of choosing either school

Chicago vs Yale – 76% choose Yale
Chicago vs MIT – 75% choose MIT
Chicago vs Harvard – 70% choose Harvard
Chicago vs Stanford – 68% choose Stanford
Chicago vs Columbia – 61% choose Columbia
Chicago vs Princeton – 61% choose Princeton
Chicago vs Duke – 58% choose Duke
Chicago vs Penn – 57% choose Penn
Chicago vs Brown – 51% choose Brown

Chicago vs Dartmouth – 47% choose Dartmouth
Chicago vs WUSTL – 44% choose WUSTL
Chicago vs Cornell – 40% choose Cornell
Chicago vs Northwesetern – 37% choose Northwestern
Chicago vs Johns Hopkins – 32% choose Johns Hopkins
Chicago vs UCLA/UCB – 20% choose UCLA/UCB

–Note that the college links above are autogenerated by the forum software. I do not suggest following them.

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Parchment is the most worthless site as it is all self reported and totally unreliable. I would expect you know that @Data10, personally I would never use data like this for any point I was trying to make.

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Note that my post included the qualifier “The cross admit stats at Parchment are self reported and a biased sample, so they are not always reliable. However, they still can be meaningful to estimate rough trends,” It’s true that a small minority of Parchment self reports appear to be obviously fake. For example, someone’s Parchment account might show a student with a 3.0 GPA and 1000 SAT had admits to directional states, community colleges, and Harvard. And they choose the directional state over Harvard This seeming fake Harvard acceptance would hurt Harvard’s cross admit stats between that directional state, but wouldn’t impact Harvard’s other cross admit stats. In general, the more samples, the more reliable the cross admit stats are, and the less likely a minority of fake reports are to have a noteworthy impact on the overall average. This relates to why I didn’t list Chicago vs smaller colleges like Caltech or LACs for which there are few samples.

It’s certainly possible that there were also a minority of fake reports involving the listed Chicago vs selective college cross admits, but the general trend is still clear. It seems highly unlikely that there would be a large number of fake colleges acceptances in all the listed Chicago cross admits that almost always hurt Chicago’s cross admit stats, rather than HYPSM… That is the minority of fake reports always saying that they chose HYPSM… over Chicago, rather than saying that they chose Chicago over HYPSM. And that those fake reports that hurt Chicago consistently occur at nearly every highly selective private college with a large number of cross admits… every Ivy, Stanford, Duke, WUSTL, etc. If anyone has more reliable cross admit stats, I’d be happy to see them.

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Thats like saying I know I’m using bad data but I’m going to use it anyway. I hope you don’t do that in your real life as a peer review would laugh you right out of town.

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In nearly every field, data is not perfect. Rather than giving up and not studying the field, instead the imperfect data that is available is used, with qualification or discussion about its limitations. This method is used in many published studies with peer review, particularly in social sciences, where self reported data is more common.

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No not in this case, where we already know that false data has been entered. You can never make a case for using knowingly false data.

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I am assuming we are done debating data collection and analysis. :wink:

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Our high school (which is not listed here) is arguably the top high school in Northern California and we too sent more kids to U Chicago last year than any other high school. Why is that? A couple of reasons. Most importantly, everyone got in ED and had to go there. High schools are now directing kids who are unlikely to get into HYPSM to apply early to U Chicago as their best chance to get into an elite college. Does that make U Chicago more popular? Perhaps, in the sense that people want to apply there because it’s their most likely path to an elite college. But please, lets be real. If kids were given a choice between Harvard/Stanford and U Chicago, the vast majority would take Harvard/Stanford. U Chicago is a GREAT school! Can’t that be enough?

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One doesn’t “have” to apply ED LOL. You choose to apply and abide by the process. Most likely they jumped at the chance and sure, not expecting to get into H or S (but what happened to P and Y?) might impact some of those decisions. But of course there was always ED2 if H or S was clearly the first choice, right? So if these kids applied ED1, that means they prefer UChicago as first. Actions reveal preferences, regardless of what pipe dreams might be shared (or speculated on by the parents).

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No, this is not like g=9.8 m/s^2. There is no rule in the universe that says Harvard is never to be challenged at the top. Or that people can not think that UChicago is the top school, for a population that is increasing in size and geographic breadth. Not too long ago Stanford did, and was successful. So, what is so wrong about thinking that S and H can be challenged? The answer is absolutely nothing. Your preconceived notions are all in your mind.

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Yup. The fact that more and more people are saying “Not HS” instead of “Not HYPS” is notable.

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College Prep indeed has Chicago on top with 32 enrollees over the last few years. That beats 18 at UCB, 16 at NYU, 12 at Harvard, etc. On Niche, College Prep gets A+ ratings in everything except athletics where it gets a B-.

Then there’s the larger Harker School:

It’s more of a STEM focused school. These schools have had 20+ enrollees over the last three years:
UCB 41
Stanford 23
CMU 21
Illinois 22
USC 23
Harvard 21
NYU 20

MIT at 15
Duke 14
Chapman 19
Chicago ties Penn and Santa Clara with 13
Columbia/Cornell 11 each

Is Chicago attracting more liberal arts types vs. STEM? Its class of 2024 stats show a middle 50% SAT range of 1510-1560 with a broad geographic representation. The transformation of Chicago’s entering classes has been phenomenal.

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Several of those schools including UIUC are tops in CS. UChicago’s CS is growing in reputation but not ranked at the same level. In terms of STEM representation on campus, it’s catching up with the historically dominant Social Sciences. Last spring, the College graduated about 795 social science majors and 721 majors from the physical and biological sciences. However, it should be pointed out that all, regardless of major, are “liberal arts types.”

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More compared to what? If you mean compared to Harvard/Stanford, then that’s probably true.

As has been mentioned in the thread, there is a good amount of overlap between liberal arts and STEM, such as the liberal arts fields of math and physical sciences. I’ll instead focus on more tech/professional fields, such as CS and Engineering. Percent of bachelor’s degrees in CS/Engineering is below, compared with economics. Chicago has by far the fewest tech majors, but by far the most economics majors.

Chicago – 7% CS+Engineering, 22% Economics
Harvard – 14% CS+Engineering, 13% Economics
Stanford – 38% CS+Engineering, 5% Economics

Planned field of study does no doubt influence choice of colleges. The 3 colleges are not all the same and interchangeable with each another. For example, a prospective EE major probably isn’t going to apply to Chicago where an EE major is not offered. However, it’s also not a rule that Chicago is underrepresnted among grads from high schools that emphasize STEM. For example, a list for TJ Science & Tech class of 2017-2019 is below, which is the highest rated HS in USNWR and probably has higher average test scores than any other HS that has been mentioned in this thread. Chicago had more matriculations from TJ than Stanford all Ivies except for Cornell.

UVA – 161
Virginia Tech – 96
William & Mary – 85
Pitt – 49
Michigan – 42
Cornell – 40
CMU – 39
UIUC – 31
MIT – 23
VCU – 23
Chicago – 22
…
Harvard – 15
…
Stanford – 11

However, one should be careful about reading into preferences by looking at matriculations alone. The listed colleges are not competing to get the most students from TJ. Instead the vast majority of applicants from TJ are rejected, with different acceptance rates for the different schools. The lower the acceptance rate for applicants from TJ, the fewer TJ students are expected to matriculate. The stress and pressure to get one of the few acceptances was so high that one TJ student created international news with her faked acceptances to Stanford and Harvard, as described at “Genius Girl” should spark conversation about academic pressure – tjTODAY . A quote is below:

"The student’s true motivation for falsifying admission may never be known, but her story sheds needed light on the pressures that many students face when applying to elite schools.

From the Class of 2015, six will attend Stanford, five to Yale, five to Princeton and three to Harvard. It is clear that admission into the nation’s top schools is more difficult than ever before. This means many parents who sent their children to Jefferson three or four years ago with the goal of getting them into an Ivy League school may end up disappointed. Many students are already aware of this fact, as well as the fact that they are constantly compared to their peers, and that comparison is often used to define success. "