In yesterday’s Maroon, Dean of the College Boyer stated that the near term goal is have about 1700 undergraduates in each class. He also stated that the College plans to reduce the size of Class of 2023 due to over-enrollment of the Class of 2022 and generally reduce the number of students accepted due to ever increasing yield. He stated that UChicago now has the 3rd highest yield in the country behind Stanford and Harvard which means acceptance rates will likely decline further:
"We had our largest incoming class this fall, 100 students over from what the University planned,” Boyer is paraphrased as saying in the minutes from a recent Maroon Key Society (MKS) meeting, which a source gave to The Maroon. “This had much to do with our yield rate; we were third in the country in terms of yield. The University’s goal is to bring next year’s incoming class size down. Overtime, the size of the college will end up about the same size as Harvard. The class size for each incoming class will be moving towards 1,700 and that’s where we will plateau for each class to create a population of 7,000 undergraduates.”
For the Class of 2021, the University admitted 2,419 students and reported a 72 percent yield. Harvard admitted 2,056 applicants, with a yield rate of 84 percent. For the Class of 2022, the College admitted 2,329 students with a yield rate of 78 percent. Harvard accepted 1,962 students, 82 percent of whom accepted their admission offers. As the yield rate for the University continues to trend upward, the number of accepted students is likely to decrease.
The minutes paraphrase Boyer as saying that the University is “looking to build back to the status and size of the college from before WWII. While we are comparing our size to Harvard, this has been a long historical trajectory that started decades ago and is coming to a close as we meet this goal.”
You can’t really compare yields between REA schools like HYPS and ED/ED2 schools like UChicago, though. A better number is to start with UChicago’s yield from the class of 2020 and move that up a bit.
UChicago will surely beat Harvard, or any other college in terms of yield, if it keeps its current trajectory and fill more and more of its class with ED1 and ED2. As a matter of fact, it can easily claim the yield crown by eliminating its pointless EA and RD programs altogether.
@sushiritto I’m new to UChicago discussions as I went to Williams (but my D chose Chicago over my alma mater which still smarts) so forgive me for opening this can of worms…I just thought the comments by Dean Boyer on the trajectory of the college were interesting.
It’s like a dart-throwing competition in which one contestant blindfolds the other contestants and then claims victory because the one without the blindfold came closest to hitting the bullseye. Let Chicago get rid of ED1/ED2 and let’s see how it does on yield compared to H and S.
@KnightsRidge If you’ve spent any time on this site, then you would know that, for whatever reason, the UChicago tends to bring out great emotions here. I have no idea why and I have zero interest in the University, other than these discussions can be fun reading.
The term that was coined here was the “UChicago Derangement Syndrome,” essentially the critics of the UChicago.
“I can’t wait for the classic “syndrome” (both sides) discussion to break out.”
Yes, I can’t wait for that one rabid dude who rants about how awful UChicago is for premeds to show up. Cuing the “Chicago is the North Korea of higher education” screeching in 3, 2, 1…
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Let’s move on from discussing how we are preparing the popcorn to watch the fireworks. If a civil discussion happens, that’s fine with me; if one like in the linked thread occurs, this thread will just get shut down like all the others.
Is is a secret that UC is gunning for the #2 spot now in US News rankings (and presumably #1 eventually)? Making it sound like you will be like Harvard (#2 in current ranking) if you are the same size seems like an obvious attempt to make people think you are a lot like Harvard, and this should be tied for #2 in some upcoming year. I’m not judging whether this will happen or not. But it is hard to avoid thinking this is the intent given changes in recent years in pursuit of the current #3 spot. Just a baby step, but I’d expect to see others.
Chicago seems to be trying hard to make “Ivy+” happen. The best thing it could do is form a league (of some sort - not an athletic league) with some other top schools. Really, Chicago should free-ride on the skyrocketing Stanford brand, MIT brand, etc…
10+ years ago, they were mentioning “we should have the same number of applicants as Columbia”
5+ years ago, they were saying academics is like Princeton
Now, its openly comparing to Harvard (granted its just class size and yield, nothing really big like brand awareness
Before you know it, there will be official pronouncements openly comparing to Stanford (the Stanford of D3?, endowment per student, Silicon Prairie, Sunny California weather )
Pipe dream: Yale level performance in endowment yield, darling of drama/arts/hollywood (stealing Northwestern;s thunder in the process).
Super Pipe dream: MIT/Caltech level name recall in new forms of engineering. The MIT of the Midwest? The Caltech of the Center?
I think UChicago can really become a power in CS. First, there is (it seems) an ever increasing need for computer scientists so there’s no danger of over-saturation. It is a power in a closely related field (Math), it’s super competitors are on the East Coast (MIT), West Coast (Cal Berkeley, Stanford), or a Mid-Atlantic regional city (Pittsburgh - CMU) so Chicago can become / claim the middle of the country it would seem.
@kaukauna - you’re absolutely right. Chicago has (wisely) looked toward computer science as a field where it can achieve eminence (and also has nuts and bolts in place to accelerate its rise on this front). See here:
More then engineering or sparking the medical plant (which would, probably, take around $750-$1B in investment, at least), Chicago can elevate their Comp Sci department at a fraction of the cost - and probably reap great rewards.
My S is a current 3rd year at UChicago and my D is a freshman at Harvard. There are obviously pros and cons to both colleges. But one area that UChicago clearly outshines Harvard is the programming for parents at Accepted Student days, Freshmen Orientation, and Family Weekend. UChicago rolls out the red carpet for all these events and they are wonderful. Harvard’s programming is kind of meh. In this particular area, I have to say that Nondorf knows what he is doing.
