The year before my D matriculated was the last year of just non-binding admissions. At that time, UChicago’s yield was at its all time high of just under 64%. Her year it jumped to around 72%, then 77% and, by the time my son matriculated, was at 81%. Some but not all of this increase was due to the introduction of ED. While that helped, it’s been calculated on this forum that had UChicago simply remained early admissions and RD they’d be looking at yield in the high 70’s. UChicago’s been an increasingly popular option regardless of admission plan.
Yep.
According to class profile data from the university, the number from Mid-Atlantic, New England and West for the class of '07 was about 40%. Class of '20 is actually 50% and Class of '24, as you point out, is 52%. “West” will include non-coastal states but that’s going to be a small number of matriculants. Class of '20 was the last class under non-binding so they were increasing in popularity from the coasts even prior to ED.
Some. Not all, as I explain in my response to @MWolf, UChicago’s yield has been increasing regardless. There’s probably a +9 point jump due to ED, and another 9 due to increasing overall popularity.
True. You have to apply non-binding (EA or RD) in order to be eligible. A few years ago they appeared to pivot away from a lot of merit to a lot of need-based for most of the student body. However, merit still does exist.
Rejected by most top schools, this student was accepted to Harvard. Very common these days. Harvard is a second choice school, as we’ve seen at Beverly Hills High. No one wants to go to Harvard if they can get into their top school. But if not, it’s makes a good second or third choice school.
I doubt that this is a serious post. Nevertheless, I’ll take the bait. The Harvard lawsuit found and freshman surveys both suggest that Harvard has a near 100% yield on SCEA, in spite of being non-binding. If we assume yield is ~100% on SCEA, and everyone is truthful about whether Harvard was their first choice in the freshman survey (I realize this is unlikely to be true), then it works out to roughly the following:
Among all HS Seniors in US:
~1% applied to Harvard. Even if you limit to just high achieving students who are somewhat qualified, only a small fraction apply to Harvard. I expect students are far more likely to apply to their flagship than Harvard in most states. I don’t see anything to suggest that Harvard is a first choice school for most high achieving students in US. It’s probably not a 2nd or 3rd choice either for typical high achieving students. Harvard is likely only first choice for a small fraction of high achieving students, and that small fraction is dramatically overrpresented among Harvard applicants.
I was in this not 1st/2nd/3rd choice group when I was a applying to colleges. I applied to Stanford, MIT, and other Ivies; but was not interested in Harvard, so I didn’t apply. Harvard wasn’t even among my top 100.
Among the Students Who Are Admitted To Harvard
~16% of admitted students choose other school, implying not first choice
~80% of students who enter Harvard say first choice, as listed in section below
So it’s estimated to be first choice for 80%*(1-16%) = 67% of admits.
Among the Entering Class at Harvard
~80% say Harvard Was Their First Choice – >96% of SCEA admits and ~60% of RD admits
Given that ~40% of RD admits say Harvard wasn’t their first choice, the kid in the article won’t be alone is his disappointment.
More likely that he was a better fit at H than at MIT. Both are top schools. He didn’t seem too unhappy to learn he had been admitted. It was actually nice of him to make that video. A good reminder that the application season isn’t over!
Most top students I know don’t apply to Harvard because they don’t think they’ll get in. For example, one of my DD’s classmates wanted to go to Princeton but chose to apply ED to Vandy to improve her odds of a top school. It worked. She’s now attending Vandy but rejected by Princeton. Would she have gone to Harvard over Vandy? Absolutely. Didn’t apply to Chicago. From TX.
On the other hand, most top students that I know don’t apply to Harvard because they had no real interest in attending Harvard. At my kid’s high school usually 20 or fewer apply to Harvard each year (from about 850), and most other Ivies have even fewer applicants (5-15). It isn’t because of the low chances of admissions since Stanford gets a good number of applications, as does Cornell, the exception among the Ivies. Of course, a good number apply to U Chicago, but the high school is in Chicagoland, so that’s not surprising.
Since the high school does not report its number of matriculations to popular colleges (the numbers of from Naviance), and the parents aren’t really into the whole “my kid was accepted to prestigious colleges” one-upmanship games, students are generally not pressured to throw in applications to reaches.
To be honest, though, the high school is not typical of similar high schools which serve populations of similar education and income.
There must also be a certain kind of kid who is actually turned off by the prestige factor. That was me long ago. I couldn’t imagine going through life dragging that baggage. Yes, being a Harvard grad will open many doors and impress many people high and low, but that’s actually the problem, isn’t it? It dominates the first impressions of you and possibly even your impression of yourself. It gets in the way of your becoming an authentic person.
Anyhow, that’s the way I once saw it, and it was the principal reason I, a venturesome kid from the sticks, never considered an ivy though I reckon I had a good enough chance of getting into one if I had wanted to.
We hear lots of talk on this board of the allure of the big names. There must be many who are immune or even phobic to those allures.
You hit the nail in the head @marlowe1. That is a market segment that is a great fit for UChicago. For the school to continue to expand its geographic reach, it need not exclusively compete for bright young minds with the Ivy+. It should also look to market itself to students who definitely do not have any of the other Ivy+ as first choice. I would argue that to do this geographic expansion right, it should make itself desirable to those who are UChicago life-of-the-mind type of kids but are more attracted to the special honors programs at state flagships or even LACs with similar liberal arts core.
This way, UChicago can expand its reach but preserve its distinguishing feature… and not become totally indistinguishable from other Ivy+ schools
I’m not sure how much they do compete with the Ivy+ outside of the RD round (where they go head to head with a lot of other top schools). The other rounds signal strong preferences for UChicago as first choice or perhaps a strong 2nd. That’s a whole lot of matriculants who really really like UChicago. Not sure anyone needs to choose between “life of the mind” and “prestige” - UChicago is considered extremely prestigious to the large majority of hopefuls who apply there every year, including the many “life of the minders” who are admitted. “Prestige” is a lot more than mere bragging rights for Mum these days! The experience, opportunities, and outcomes associated with attending a top university are just enormous. And there would be few applying to UChicago who don’t realize the key role that academics plays in shaping that experience and those outcomes. So the university’s “prestigious” reputation is distinct among much of the Ivy+, and everyone applying already knows that.
Yet, despite that fact, the College has had no problem admitting 3/4ths of the class either via a binding commitment or via Early Action (which has a high yield). The remaining fourth - even assuming the worst stereotypes - are not a critical enough number to change UChicago’s “distinguishing features” - one of them being that it’s known less for the type of student it takes in than for the type of graduate it produces.
I agree that Chicago is likely a first choice among typical ED applicants. However, EA is a different story. If a college offers both ED and EA and an applicant chooses EA, then that generally means either the school is not first choice or there is something else that prevents the student from wanting to make the ED commitment, such as wanting to compare FA offers. Chicago essentially says the same thing on their website, suggesting EA is for applicants who are not confident about Chicago being a first choice, as quoted below.
I expect you know a limited and biased sample among “top students.” There is no shortage of high achieving kids who actually don’t want to go to Harvard… not just don’t think they’d be accepted. A similar statement could be made for many other highly selective colleges. For example, the abstract of the study at https://www.nber.org/papers/w18586 begins:
“We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.”
At many HSs, few apply to highly selective colleges. It’s not just lower income areas, although there is a correlation. For example, one of my relatives grew up in a rural area in which literally nobody applied to highly selective colleges. It wasn’t that nobody thought they’d be accepted. It was more that wasn’t what people they knew did. Instead most people stayed in the general area after HS, usually working in the family farm. My relative was the first person in the history of her HS to ever apply to a highly selective college. She was accepted to Harvard, but chose to attend a highly selective LAC that was closer to home instead.
I attended a basic public HS, in upstate NY. It was almost in exactly the distance center of the 8 Ivies, so high achieving students were well aware of Ivies and usually knew multiple persons who attended one (mostly Cornell). Yet many high achieving students didn’t apply to highly selective colleges and instead chose SUNYs or other more local options, which would generally be more expensive than Harvard after FA. Among those who did apply to Ivy-type colleges, it was mostly Cornell. More students applied to Cornell than all of the other Ivies + Stanford + MIT + Chicago +… combined. This relates to the upstate NY location, knowing persons who attended Cornell, and perhaps the in-state tuition discount. Harvard didn’t have these benefits, so it received very few applications among top achieving kids. It wasn’t just a matter of Harvard being more selective.
I didn’t apply to Harvard because I was interested in engineering, and at the time Harvard was quite weak in engineering, even more so in the engineering subfields that I was especially interested in. There are many reasons why a high achieving student might not want to attend Harvard besides just thinking they wouldn’t be accepted.
I don’t disagree with @JBStillFlying : Chicago does have prestige of a special sort in the academic world, and it is even in the process of acquiring an increasing measure of more general prestige across a larger demographic spectrum. However, it can’t compare with the other elite schools in the latter department, which is the sort of glamour cum snob appeal I had in mind that might sway some young minds but be a turn-off to others. I was thinking impressionistically and anecdotally, but I expect this could be substantiated - and perhaps has been - by an NORC type sampling of general American opinion. Chicago seldom gets mentioned when people start naming off elite institutions.
It is quite true that for a bright kid open to it a Chicago education can be transformative. Such a kid doesn’t need to arrive on campus as a fully formed “Chicago type” replete with antinomian attitude toward glitz and glamour. I am simply making the point that some very bright kids don’t like this kind of thing. Some of them will be attracted to Chicago precisely because it lacks all that boring baggage and that snob appeal. I was like that once, others were too.
For UChicago, EA has remained a high yield admission round even with the introduction of ED1. Those who are admitted are very eager to join UChicago; many times they require merit aid which is why they applied EA. So yes, financial considerations are a factor but the preference is still with UChicago. Now, that’s not true for ALL EA applicants, of course. But it is generally true for those admitted that round. They can’t apply SCEA and they tend not to be applying ED to other Ivy+ schools (some we know have applied ED elsewhere - such as an LAC - but they weren’t admitted to UChicago). By the way, this all may change over time. However, when ED1 was first introduced many of us assumed that EA would end up with the highly price sensitive “take it or leave it” types and that hasn’t turned out to be the case. They may be price sensitive but they still have a very high preference for UChicago. Given that the essays usually are among the more labor-intensive, it makes sense that anyone willing to spend the time on them and get the application off early must really like the school.
@Data10 I enjoy your comments.
The “high achieving” people I was thinking of are upper middle to upper class with lots of classmates going out of state. I just asked my wife (a salutation in a class of 170) why she didn’t apply to Harvard or any other highly selective university. She first said “I didn’t think I had a ghost of a chance.” On further reflection, she said she didn’t know anyone that went to a college like that and only knew of Duke due to its Methodist ties. She wishes she’d applied to Duke and grew up regularly attending a Methodist church.
I applied to MIT but cancelled my interview after my dad told me that we couldn’t afford it and grad school is more important. I attended a public U two hours away.
My Pell grant eligible Hispanic niece in east TX was in the top 5% of her 450 person class and TCU was recruiting her pretty hard. She’d laugh at them due to perceived cost. She’s finishing up her RN at the local community college.
I agree that there are lots of reasons why people don’t apply to highly selective colleges. Among them are perceived chance of admission, distance from home, familiarity, perceived challenge in college, etc.
I agree with much of this. But I suspect it’s generational. My husband from the east coast hadn’t heard of the University of Chicago when he applied and was admitted to an Ivy+ back in the early 80’s. By the time his nieces and nephews were ready to look into selective schools, UChicago’s name recognition put the school on the same map as a whole lot of other elites. Part of that is the work that the school had done to improve its brand, and part of that was that higher demand for educational services made a whole lot of schools more selective and “prestigious.”
For sure. And I believe that Uchicago has structured its admission rounds the way that they have in order to identify those applicants more easily.
If Chicago has broken down yield rate by application type, rather just listing overall yield, I haven’t seen it. Regardless, yield only suggests first choice among the limited sample of colleges to which the student was accepted. It does not indicate first choice among all the colleges to which the student applied. It also doesn’t tell you anything about the students who applied EA and were rejected, which is the vast majority of EA applicants.
I’m sure some choose non-binding EA over binding ED because they aren’t confident about Chicago being a first choice, and some choose EA over ED in spite of being a first choice due to FA considerations or other factors. Chicago doesn’t provide enough information to guess at the portion in each group.
