The Office of Institutional Analysis published the completed CDS on its website in December 2022. The University plans to complete CDS annually from now on.
You can find the first CDS in this PDF.
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Hmmm… do you think the massive amount of recurrent mailings to kids that were in no way qualified to be admitted to UC had anything to do with the increase in their applications? Funny how it occurred the year they decided to publish their CDS.
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In the weighting of academic factors in admissions it was interesting that rigorous courses are categorized as “very important,” whereas gpa, test scores and class rank are neither “very important” nor even “important,” but just “considered.” That’s surprising at first blush, but it really shouldn’t be: they are looking for applicants with a track record of learning hard things in many subject areas, not the mere racking up of high scores and grades by any means possible. Perhaps they take the latter for granted, but it’s the former that gets their attention. At this school intellectual curiosity and a penchant for learning hard things are going to be necessary. They are looking to see a demonstration of those qualities.
The high importance placed on the essay is hardly surprising. It has been the royal road to acceptance at Chicago forever. I suspect they assume a certain level of good grammar and construction, and this better be shown; but it’s more than mechanical skills they’re looking for - it’s mental dexterity, the ability to think, not simply to lay out information.
The third of the “very important” factors is recommendations. I suspect they’re looking here not for just any sort of positive assessment but rather for a convincing portrait of a kid with the aforesaid qualities, the ones evidenced by taking rigorous courses and writing a thoughtful essay.
So on the academic side of admissions it all adds up. But as to how these factors weigh in the balance with the non-academic ones - that’s not so clear.
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this cds is so empty bruh
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No data
UChicago has been doing that for as long as I can remember. I graduated from the College ~10 years ago.
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No.
Not only were the “massive amount of recurrent mailings” in evidence when I was in HS a decade ago, it was also in practice when my dad was in HS.
A few numbers in the Common Data Set I find super interesting:
- 49% of freshmen submitted SAT, 35% submitted ACT (meaning 16% submitted neither).
- Of the 2053 full-time freshmen, only 1007 applied for financial aid and only 754 received financial aid.
- Average high school GPA of all freshmen is 4.33, but only 66.29% submitted a GPA.
- 99% are in top 10% of high school graduating class, but only 48% submitted a high school rank.
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Some students may have submitted both.
We have no idea how institutional reporting calculated this number, clearly they didn’t recalculate matriculant GPA data on an unweighted basis (there are no CDS guidelines on how institutions should calculate GPA, many schools leave this field blank). So…this number is meaningless, because a given student/potential applicant would have no idea how their GPA compares.
As someone who reads many CDSs, this is actually a high proportion of students submitting rank. Last I saw data, only about 1/3 of high schools rank anymore.
Said differently, 63% of the incoming class is full pay. The more relevant/interesting numbers would be how many applicants were full pay vs need FA. Raise your hand if you believe U Chicago is need blind through the entire admission process.
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Good point. This could mean that potentially even higher % of freshmen submitted neither SAT nor ACT.
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When I was there ~10 years ago, ~60% of students were full pay so seems like the needle hasn’t moved much after a decade. UChicago could still promise need-blind admissions but simply recruit/admit more students from private high schools or with legacies. I’d be interested to see admissions rate for private high schools vs public high schools and students with legacy vs without legacy.
I believe I saw somewhere that all other elite universities have % full pay in the 40s or 50s. Very few, if any, have % full pay in the 60s.
Some more interesting numbers:
- Fewer men than women (17513 vs 20445) apply for UChicago, but more men than woman are admitted (1254 vs 1206) and enrolled (1067 vs 986).
- Transfer admit rate is >10% (145 admitted out of 1065).
@Mwfan1921 seems to believe that full-pay applicants are being preferred to FA applicants for cynical financial reasons. If that were so it would be a gross violation of a policy of many years, going back at least to the sixties, when I benefitted from it. But suppose for argument’s sake that the Administration would want to do this if they could get away with it. If only for prudential reasons they wouldn’t dare do it. That would be running a terrible risk of exposure, and they would know it. It would take more than the machinations of a Jim Nondorf to carry out such a scheme; a whole army of idealistic AO’s would have to be pressed in to service or at least have knowledge of what was going on. Raise your hand if you believe a plain manilla envelope would not quickly find its way over the transom of the Maroon offices. More likely even than that would be a full-scale revolt. That was what happened several years ago in a much more doubtful instance of favoritism accorded to full-payers in the dispensing of good-paying summer jobs. That was a much more ambiguous and really a quite trivial matter, but when principle is at stake emotions run high, especially at this university. An administrator was scandalized by the little breach of principle to such an extent that she not only publicly blew the whistle on it but, if I recall correctly, resigned her position. There were letters of outrage in the Maroon. One can only imagine how much greater would be the fireworks if the very foundational principle of admission to the University were being surreptitiously compromiised.
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Do you believe that the applicant and/or admitted student pool had a similar full pay/have financial need distribution? Just hypothetical as of course we don’t know what that split was for the either of those pools.
Yes, I agree it does seem unlikely that 63 percent of all applicants are full pay. Assuming it’s a lesser percentage, I don’t therefore draw the conclusion that the full-payers are being privileged. Correlation does not equal causation. More likely it’s that the kind of kids Chicago is seeking in its needs blind processes for purely meritorious reasons end up being disproportionately higher SES. That should be no surprise to anyone attending to the divides in attainment in American society. I speculate that the admitted class might be even higher than 63 percent full-pay if it were not for other factors in the holistic admissions spectrum that tend to mitigate the disproportion. Chicago probably doesn’t apply these other factors quite as liberally as most of its peers, and this may be why it has slightly higher percentages of full payers than they do. My own view is that the University should not be attempting to replicate in its student body the demographics of America writ large but should be focussed on finding the kids most capable of absorbing its brand of education, whatever their SES.
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They seem to be battling with Maryland for most useless GPA measure. As of now, MD wins with a 4.43.
So much better than Princeton”s 3.93 right?
The CDS consortium really need to standardize the definition. The fact that the maximum tier listed is “4.0” indicates it should be a 4.0 unweighted scale, IMO.
(Nice of them to provide the data hundreds of schools have been providing for 15 years)
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I don’t know why UChicago has avoided filling out CDS for so long, along with Columbia. There really isn’t any dirty laundry in here as far as I can see.
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They still did not provide the ED numbers. Unless there are there and did not see them.
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Correct. UChicago doesn’t seem to break down admissions data based on ED vs EA vs RD.
I don’t disagree with any of that. Bottom line U Chicago needs to do better in terms of enrolling Pell grant eligible and middle income students. Finally releasing a CDS is a step in the right direction towards more transparency.
I don’t think this will happen, for any number of reasons. One barrier is the fact that larger schools don’t have the resources to calculate unweighted GPAs for all matriculants. This would also cause extra work for schools that do recalculate GPA for admission purposes (so UF, U South Carolina, et al)…meaning they would have to recalculate GPA a second time in a completely different way (the CDS prescribed way).
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I would have thought that for admitted students, colleges might have worked off their unweighted GPAs in the first place - if anything calculating their own weighting? They would only need to attempt to “reverse calculate” for a subset of students where no unweighted GPA is provided (since HS weighting has to start with the unweighted grades, how likely is it that U/W GPA can possibly be unknown)?
I also suspect that by now, colleges have long been employing I/S systems to store key data, so “calculating” any number of applications in bulk is just a matter of button?