Another major change is the geographical distribution of the class. The percent of Midwesterners has declined significantly in the past five years.
I’ve been following this thread so I’ll add my two cents.
Up until October (2015), I had NEVER heard of UChicago.
You say UChicago in MS, HI, or Germany, and the look you get is a total blank.
In another thread some ppl were talking about UChicago’s recruiting more students to drive the rate down. In Oct. I received a giant t-shirt and other promo stuff. Then I looked up the No Barriers program. It seemed legit, so I applied, knowing I wouldn’t have to fork over any babysitting/tutoring money for it.
Still, I think UChicago could do a better job recruiting to low-income and isolated areas.
School of 2000 students - I’m the only one who applied farther north than Alabama. From Hawaii, I’m the only one (that I know of) who applied farther west than California.
If you mention UChicago in downtown Honolulu or way out in Waianae, the reaction would be: “what the hell is that?”
Every once in awhile you come across a teacher or GC who actually knows what you’re talking about (but not for UChicago, sorry, it’s not famous enough), and the reaction is this: “don’t you think you’d be better off somewhere else?”
My GC has about 400-500 students, and she’s completely new to the Common App. Didn’t know how to use it, so we ended up mailing stuff the good old-fashioned way. 
The only schools I applied to that actually rang a bell were the Big Three:
Hades (Harvard)
Poseidon (Princeton)
Zeus (Yale)
And I only applied to one of those
almosttheremulan: I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of UChicago. I am an oldster with a student currently attending and even back in the dark ages (pre-internet) I knew about the University because of novels (Saul Bellow, Norman McClean), science (Fermi and first sustained atomic chain reaction), and the “Great Books” (Mortimer Adler), among other things.
@kaukauna Hahaha. I on the other hand, stubbornly refuse to remember anything prior to the 80’s in a vain attempt to look younger and cooler to my kid’s generation even at the risk of looking ill informed Doesn’t seem to work though. They just think I am a dimwitted old person!!
My parents, who grew up in Cleveland and graduated from HS in 1959 didn’t know of U of C (about 20 years later when I was applying to colleges). They did know Northwestern (“where the rich kids went”). My slightly older FIL who lived in NH knew of U of C at that point – not sure why. Might have been because he spent part of the Korean War stationed in Chicago. And/or read Saul Bellow. I think Chicago only hit my radar in grad school – the faculty I gravitated toward had all earned their PhDs there. Also, at about the same time, I knew (then future) BIL was at U of C as an undergrad, but only because he couldn’t get into an Ivy and that he was miserable there.
Pre-internet???
Lol, I actually didn’t have access to a computer when I was in Elem.
Before I could afford to buy books, I usu. just picked up the “latest” stack near the front desk and checked it out.
@VeryLuckyParent
I used to tell my mom that she was too old to use “Lol” in a text - she was 33 at the time, and not too happy.
at the school’s library
@almosttheremulan I don’t mean to be rude, but who really cares if they have heard of Chicago in Germany? I bet 99% of Americans cannot name a single German university. In the case of the UK, the Fulbright Commission did a survey. The best known universities other than Harvard where Ohio State, Michigan and Notre Dame. All because of football. (And none of them could pronounce Michigan either).
@exacademic I bet if you lived in Shaker Heights or Gates Mills, Ohio, or went to one of their private schools you would have heard of Chicago.
What I meant was that I lived there. I still have friends there (and across Europe). When you live in a diff. country and then come to the U.S. chances are you have not heard of many things…
Case in point: I had never heard of Michael Jackson until he died, and I didn’t know what 9/11 was until the 10th anniversary.
kaukauna was wondering how I had not heard of UChicago - that’s why.
Ivies are not accepting (getting ‘fed’) as many prep school students as before because of diversity initiatives. Those really smart kids there need somewhere to go to college and the academics (average GPA, SAT etc…) at UC are appealing. This fact also explains the rise in selectivity at BC, Tufts, and some other ‘second tier’ schools.
GCs at prep schools try really hard to dissuade most students (with the exception of the tippity top) from applying to Ivies + MIT and Stanford. Naviance shows how many students applied, and were subsequently rejected and those numbers will not be good because (as mentioned) the number of students accepted at Ivies from preps is either flat or lower than 10 years ago.
Also, 30% of prep school students are on scholarship - so UC and other top schools can pull from there and still fill athletic or diversity initiatives. These kids should not all be painted with “Rich/White/Snotty” brush.
Re Shaker Heights. Yes, I agree. That’s why I mentioned my parents’ “rich kids” comment re Northwestern. Class background (as well as geography, occupation, and maybe generation) affect(s) who knows what about which universities. We left Ohio when I was in 6th grade, so I went to junior high and HS in a relatively affluent SoCal university town and, while I assume some of my classmates who were professors’ kids must have known of U of C, I doubt our college counselors did and I’m pretty certain no one in my class (of 550) applied. Never heard it mentioned – and kids my year were applying to Northwestern, NYU, Yale, Harvard, and Brown, so it wasn’t a HS where everyone focused on the UCs or other CA schools. But it was the late 1970s, so U of C may not have looked like an appealing destination for undergrads, even to those in the know.
Thinking back to my House at UC back in late 70’s, I’m shocked now to realize that of the maybe 100 residents over the course of 3 years I lived there (60 beds with some move in/out) there was one black girl, 3.5 asians, no hispanics, one who had some native american blood (whom we thought was ever so exotic). Wow.
Re private schools, my little corner of the house had kids who hailed from: Sidwell Friends, Haverford School and another top Philly school, Dalton (or Fieldston, can’t remember), Riverdale Country, Deerfield Academy, and a smattering of Labbies. There were more but I wasn’t close to them so didn’t really know what schools.
I have a question after reading this thread.
So if you are hell bent on sending your kid to a tippy top school, is it better to invest in a prep school education? If so for how many years, if you are trying to maximize the value. My kid went to a public school. A good one, but the numbers of kids going to these super elite colleges from my son’s school pales in comparison to what has been posted here. We send maybe 1% or 2% of our kids to the very tippy top schools. Just a handful.
These list make it look like these prep schools send a lot of kids to the super elites and the school makes quite a bit of difference, specially if you are targeting super selective schools. Now I know there is a raging debate on how to select schools and whether the super elites are really good fits for everybody and all that, so this question is not intended to go down that path again. I am just asking that IF you want to send your kids to one of these schools, is prep school the safer and surer way to go?
There’s some causation there, but also a fair bit of correlation. A lot of private schools have higher admissions standards, so the kids coming in are a fairly capable bunch. The prep schools are free not to accept kids who read at a 5th-grade level when they leave junior high, or have a criminal record at 15, or suffer from a debilitating mental illness. They can demand a lot of applicants, so most students are academically strong, and a few have “hooks” - like a sport - that’ll help them in a college application as well.
It’s indeniable that the prep schools offer benefits (smaller class size, GCs with a reasonable workload, a wider range of course offerings). Many admissions officers know that, if they have a spot to fill in the entering class, another kid from a prep school that sends 5-10 students a year is almost a sure thing. How much of prep schools’ success is due to the school environment, and how much is due to the students they’re working with, is hard to say.
It probably depends on location. Most parents do not want to send their kids away for boarding school, so the choice is between a local public and whatever local prep day school is within a reasonable commuting distance. In our area, the local public has better placement than the available privates, so it was an easy choice. Sidwell Friends is not an option for everyone.
Honestly, at the level of the “tippy top” colleges, I don’t think there’s really any significant difference between a prep school and a decent public school. It all has to do with the student. The prep schools have a greater concentration (but not anywhere near a greater absolute number) of bona fide candidates for tippy top schools, because some of things that help a student become a bona fide candidate correlate with going to a private school: family wealth, legacy status, parental educational achievement and educational culture, sophistication about college. But students with some or all of those qualities at good public schools do well, too.
My kids happened to attend both a top private school and an academic magnet public, and we knew both classes well. There was little or no difference between the people at the top of both classes in terms of academic ability or success in college admissions, and a lot less difference in demographics than you might think. Where differences came in: The private school kids applied to a much wider range of colleges, with lots of kids applying to top LACs, or prestigious colleges that weren’t Harvard or MIT that were more than a couple hours from their homes. So they weren’t competing against each other quite so much. And below the top of each class, the middle of the class at private schools went to much more selective colleges than the equivalent public school students, although finances affected those outcomes a lot.
"My kids happened to attend both a top private school and an academic magnet public, and we knew both classes well. There was little or no difference between the people at the top of both classes in terms of academic ability or success in college admissions’
@jhs, was that academic magnet public selective in its enrollment through applications and/or testing? If so, I’d say it is self selecting as well and not truly representative of a typical public school drawing from all children in a certain geographic area.
Yes, sort of. The median SAT (1400 scale) at the school was around 1100 – it covered a wide, wide range of students. But everyone there wanted to be there. At the time, in Philadelphia, there were a very limited number of public high schools that sent students to four-year colleges, and an even more limited number of public high schools – four, specifically – that ever sent more than one or two students to any sort of selective college. Literally, every student in the city public system who intended to go to a four-year college that was not part of the former teachers’ college system was at one of those schools. (It’s a little different now.)
But what’s your point? I would have said exactly the same thing comparing my kids’ great private school with a good suburban public school that drew all children in its district. Around here, the top students in those schools compete pretty successfully with the equivalent students in private schools, and the middle-bottom students in those schools don’t.
“Too precious” seemed to be the consensus among DC’s friends re Princeton. Scale and affluence both played into that assessment, which was of the town as much as the university. I was a grad student at Princeton and am skeptical of the grade deflation claim. But I was happily surprised to see some significant demographic changes in the student body and a really interesting integrated science program. To me, it looks like a much better place to be an undergrad now than it was then.