But Rice really does have a bit of a “really hard school” rep, at least in Texas. An old high school classmate of mine left after first year for SMU because he couldn’t cut the mustard at Rice. He said the kids did nothing but study hard. Ugh. I don’t believe that can be said of Vandy, Emory, Notre Dame and the others you name. An easier or more fun school down the street wouldn’t draw off their typical applicants.
I am not reluctant to explain my own values, but you never asked for them. You asked why the ultra-rich didn’t value UChicago and I answered honestly. You then took the opportunity to be snarky about the values you assumed, without any type of proof, that I held.
In my family, we have an A/B comparison between Harvard and UChicago.
Harvard CAN BE demanding, and offers some classes that are known to be some of the hardest undergraduate classes anywhere, such as Math 55 and Physics 16. But these are all optional, and it’s quite easy to get through Harvard and get a high GPA with very little effort. Now, most Harvard students do choose to challenge themselves in their areas of interest, and take it easy elsewhere.
On the other hand, UChicago IS demanding. There is really no way to hide from the extensive core, and a comparison of curriculums revealed that UChicago often covers as much in a quarter as Harvard covers in a semester.
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This is outdated at least for banking. As of a few years ago, it was top-10 in this regard. All the major banks recruited on campus.
So I know there was a 2015 Niche study, picked up by Business Insider, that ranked Rice near the top of where students worked the hardest. However, I believe this has been contradicted by other information, like Princeton Review surveys on where students study the most, MyPlan self-reported scores on college competitiveness, and so on.
I guess what we really need is a survey of highly qualified HS students as to what they THINK will be the hardest school. What college students later report is less relevant for our present purposes.
I can only give a Bay Area perspective but SMU and TCU have become very popular for kids from wealthy families looking for ‘highly social’ schools. They are good schools but not schools being chosen for their academics.
Rice is an incredible place but UT will raise a lot more heads in the tech circles that I am familiar with.
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Reputations may be stickier than realities, @NiceUnparticularMan . It is certainly generally believed that Rice is a tough school, tougher than the other Texas options (notwithstanding that my own brother, a UT engineering grad, would claim this for his school). And people want to be among their own kind. Brainiacs scare many people, and hard work scares even more. And it must be admitted that they’re not entirely being scared by phantoms.
Yes, but Rice will likely raise more heads when it comes to people interested in medicine, as the world’s largest hospital complex is literally across the street from Rice.
These tables shows another significant difference between Chicago and its ivy-plus peers. If we pull out the data from Figure A.4 (Attendance rates) and place it beside the data from Figure A.6 (Application rates) for this highest category of the super-rich, we see that while all the schools boost these applicants by their admissions policies, Chicago does this least of all. To see the total picture requires putting the tables together.
School Apps Attendees Boost
Dartmouth 1.9x 3.3x 2.3x
Duke 1.5x 3.3x 2.2x
Penn 1.3x 3.2x 2.5x
Brown 1.4x 2.6x 1.9x
Yale 1.3x 2.9x 2.2x
Harvard 1.2x 2.3x 1.9x
Stanford 1.1x 3.4x 3.1x
Princeton 1.1x 1.9x 1.7x
Cornell 1.1x 1.7x 1.5x
Columbia 1.0x 2.3x 2.3x
MIT 0.7x 1.1x 1.6x
Chicago 0.8x 1.0x 1.25x
I conclude that you have to give the Chicago Admissions office some credit for not running after the super-rich. They are being admitted in roughly the proportion they deserve to be on the basis of their academic qualifications. My previous speculations about the lack of interest this demographic would have in Chicago are therefore only partly correct; it must be equally the case that the school itself isn’t interested in applicants just because they’re rich. Bravo, Jim Nondorf.
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I’d add/ask about the role of ED2. I believe Chicago is the only school in that group which offers that particular path. The most cynical read on this would be “the very richest get into one of the other schools” in ED(1)/REA and so don’t “need” to roll into ED2 at Chicago.
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Penn also has ED2 [see correction below]and yet the super-rich are represented there at 3.2 times the norm. And four of the colleges in the 2nd-tier group (Wustl, JHU, Emory and Vanderbilt) have ED2 and also have much greater representation than Chicago.
it’s hard for me to see how there could be much of a connection, but, if anything, you’d assume that the super-rich, being immune from financial pressures, would be more likely to take the ED option, either 1 or 2, wherever they can. Anyhow, that is a point always made in discussions of ED generally by those who don’t like it at Chicago. It has even been suggested that it’s a covert tool especially designed to capture wealthy kids. The plain figures above refute any such suggestion for Chicago, whatever the effects or motives may be elsewhere.
Correction: as pointed out below (thanks, @momofboiler1 ) there’s only ED1 at Penn. My mistake; it was included in a list purporting to show schools offering ED2. I believe the other schools named above do offer it.
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I don’t believe that is correct.
Application Dates & Deadlines
Early Decision: November 1, 2023
Regular Decision: January 5, 2024
Nope. Penn does not have ED2. And the other group is sufficiently lower in prestige across the board so as not to apply as comps. And you should take that as a compliment vis a vis Chicago.
Chicago does something very specific with ED2 that the other Ivy+ schools do not. You may not like it, but data for schools in that other group do not remotely persuade me otherwise.
It’s not a question of not liking your hypothesis, droids, at least for any reason other than that I don’t get the logic of it. Why would the existence of ED2 be such a turn-off, uniquely, for the super-rich? If they prefer ED1, Chicago’s got it. If they prefer EA or RA, Chicago’s got those. And, again, it has been often said that ED in general favours this demographic.
When was this study conducted? Early decision only became available at UChicago in 201x I believe. When I applied >10 years ago there were only Early Action and Regular Decision.
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Good point, @wealthofnations . On the first page the authors tell us that they “focus primarily on the entering classes 2010-2015.” I believe this was before the introduction of ED at Chicago, much less the two-part form of ED.
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Oh yeah, that’s before UChicago introduced Early Decision.
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Findings in this study are easy to explain. We’re talking about a period where UChicago was undergoing rapid transformation. Its undergrad acceptance rate was plummeting from nearly 30% to ~10% during that period. Its ranking was rising from #10 to #3, tying with Yale. UChicago’s desirability among the uber rich probably lagged behind these drastic changes.
As someone from abroad and aware of the college admissions landscape at our local international schools, I can tell you that USC and NYU were more popular than UChicago around that time for the uber rich, who didn’t even bother applying for the latter. Things are totally different now; UChicago is considered a super hot commodity in the past few cycles at these schools.
If you were to repeat this study for the 2018-2023 cohorts, the results would be totally different.
In terms of anecdotal evidence, I was at UChicago around the time this study pertains to, and I didn’t know anyone I’d consider uber rich in my social circle. Wealthy and not requiring financial aid, yes. But uber rich, no.