<p>I don’t know where people are applying or who they are talking to, but it has been my experience that Chicago is just as recognized as any other of the so-called elites, and often has a better reputation. One hedge-fund partner, an Oxford and Stanford grad, told me that his only regret was that he didn’t attend Chicago. He said he never failed to be impressed with the level of education of Chicago grads. I have been involved in academia, business, and government. At no time have I encountered any school more respected than Chicago. I am always surprised when Chicago students concern themselves about this. Perhaps some really don’t know that many view Chicago as being in a class almost by itself. Chicago students should know this, other do, and act accordingly (confidently, not like a jerk).</p>
<p>So now it’s better than Harvard and Oxford? Not just as good? Interesting ;)</p>
<p>@curvyteen
Oxford, possibly, Harvard, not so much… The comment to which your amusing rejoinder is directed conveys as much.</p>
<p>It’s now an open secret that Stanford is better than Harvard. So the Harvard part was implied haha.</p>
<p>Not “now better,” always has been. ;)</p>
<p>I think this discussion is too geared toward admissions and yield. Chicago is an excellent school with a well-deserved reputation as an intellectual haven. In my opinion, the real issue for Chicago’s future depends on development of its academic priorities and offerings. While Chicago has a strong reputation in the humanities and social sciences and boasts top quality professional schools (law, business, Med schools), it is candidly not really a player in the major future academic disciplines --eg computer science, engineering, neuroscience, brain science, nanotechnology, applied math etc. It is way behind all the Ivies and Stanford, Duke and MIT in these emerging academic disciplines. This will limit the type of students who would be attracted to Univ of Chicago. I know that Chicago alums are very proud of the various Nobel Lauerates associated with the faculty in economics and history, but this is not the “future”. In my opinion, economics is a very discredited field of study --all theory and little predictive value. Chicago should spend less money on its economics faculty and invest in applied math, nueroscience, etc</p>
<p>^^I agree somewhat to what you are saying about engineering/computer science/technology but the rest about economics not so much…</p>
<p>See my thread about Chicago creating engineering school</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1449968-thoughts-about-chicago-creating-engineering-school.html[/url]”>www.talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1449968-thoughts-about-chicago-creating-engineering-school.html</a></p>
<p>Moreover, if I were Chicago I would not emulate any of the Ivies in THIS MATTER, including HYP, but rather, Stanford…Stanford is the GOLD STANDARD now and going into the future…all other schools are trying to FOLLOW them. Not only do they have TOP programs in humanities/liberal arts (like HYP) but TOP programs in engineering/computer science/technology fields (like MIT/Caltech) and TOP professional schools in law, business, medicine…it is a juggernaut combination that no other school can match now or in the foreseeable future…</p>
<p>Chicago needs to look out WEST…to Stanford…not EAST…that represents the past…except MIT…</p>
<p>Stanford = Harvard + MIT</p>
<p>Regardless of the recent ranking advancement of UofC in the academic world, Chicago is still lagging in name recognition and it has a long way to go for prominence such as HYP. A prime example is that few days ago, I had a dinner with distance family members and during the conversation, they asked us where my DD went to college. We told them that she is in Chicago. The immediate reaction was Ubana Champagne is a cold place to live. Now, these ppl are highly educated older generation with PHD’s from UVA and other East Coast schools. We had to explain that Chicago is a private college and now it is in the same ranking as Columbia.</p>
<p>^^Although I am a proud Chicago alum I would take the USNews rankings with a grain of salt…despite where Chicago is ranked…because the owner/publisher/editor-in-chief is Mortimer Zuckerman a Harvard law/Wharton Penn man. There are many in the “real” academic and working world who strongly believe as I do that the USNews rankings are rigged/manipulated to somehow always have HYP in the top tier which makes absolutely no sense. It would be more believable (if there could be such a thing) if in the past years Stanford and Harvard ranked number #1 and the other schools fighting for the remainder of the slots…letting the market forces determine where each school’s true ranking lies…</p>
<p>…if you ask any UNBIASED educated observer about which school carries more weight in ALL areas of academic/professional endeavor in the 21st century…they would say Stanford. TheBanker is correct: Stanford = Harvard + MIT</p>
<p>How highly educated could they have been if they didn’t know the difference between Chicago and Urbana-Champaign? I mean, I can understand confusing the University of Chicago with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) – although honestly stuck on the East Coast as I am I had never heard of UIC until my kids went to the University of Chicago. And I can understand confusing Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania, notwithstanding that they are in very different places. You have to know they are different to know that they are in different places. But how do you confuse the University of Chicago with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, back at the East Coast, as an educated person it was pretty hard to ignore an institution associated with such names as Robert Maynard Hutchins, Enrico Fermi, Milton Friedman, Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sagan, Richard Posner, Gary Becker, Cass Sunstein, Jane Addams, Eugene Fama, Richard Thaler, George Schultz, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, Studs Terkel, Mike Nichols . . . as well as important “schools” of Economics and Sociology. And that was before Barack Obama became a big name, not to mention Nate Silver. The University of Chicago casts a pretty big shadow on the intellectual landscape of the past hundred years. I really do question the education and culture of people who aren’t aware of it. Even PhDs.</p>
<p>In the early 1970s, when I was thinking about applying to college, my favorite cousin, a recent Harvard AB and a PhD student at Princeton, told me there were seven universities with the resources and faculty to produce serious research in any academic field. The ones he named were HYP, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley and Stanford (but only because it had easy access to Berkeley’s library resources, too). He probably should have included Michigan, Cornell, and maybe Penn and Hopkins, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that if you knew American universities, 40, 50, 60 years ago, you knew that the University of Chicago was first-rank. The University of Chicago’s “recent advancement” has been in the high school world, not the academic world.</p>
<p>Chicago can’t catch Stanford so easily, but can certainly take steps that many of the Ivies have taken to bolster STEM.</p>
<p>^To be fair to your family friends, artloversplus, education is very domain-specific. Just the way most people who majored in computer science don’t necessarily learn how to design a website or fix a computer, some people have deep knowledge in some areas and shallow knowledge in others.</p>
<p>For example, one of the intellectual ideas that obsessed me as an undergraduate (and inspired the topic of my BA) has its origins at Vanderbilt. I don’t expect people to “know” that. :-)</p>
<p>Winning the Nobel Prize is much more prestigious and selective than getting into HYPS. What we do know is that UChicago grads win more Nobel Prizes per capita than HYPS students. In addition, according to Gramarly, UChicago students are better writers than HYPS students.</p>
<p>So, based on Nobel Prizes and writing, UChicago students are smarter than HYPS students:</p>
<p><a href=“U. of C. has the best writers, according to Grammarly survey”>U. of C. has the best writers, according to Grammarly survey;
<p>In addition, UChicago is rising faster than any school in the country and is more selective than half of the Ivy league schools.</p>
<p>Apparently you have never met a HYPS student if you are impressed by them. I pretty much assume, and am rarely wrong, that they spend more timing watching reality TV than reading any serious books. Moreover, the current generation of slackers at HYPS wouldn’t have been admitted to the top schools in the past.</p>
<p><a href=“http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf[/url]”>http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvardexam.pdf</a></p>
<p>I’m more impressed by the Great Books and Plato and Aristotle than HYP students.</p>
<p>By the way, the Parchment data is two years behind. It still lists UChicago as having 19,000 applicants. This year UChicago had more than 30,000 applicants. Even a single year makes a huge difference for UChicago’s stats because of its rapid rise.</p>
<p>[University</a> of Chicago Admissions Statistics and Chances | Parchment - College admissions predictions.](<a href=“University of Chicago Admissions Statistics and Chances | Parchment - College admissions predictions.”>University of Chicago Admissions Statistics and Chances | Parchment - College admissions predictions.)</p>
<p>Just a completely subjective perspective, without regard to cross-admit rates and yields: More than 20 years ago, I turned down Columbia to go to the U of C, but was turned down by Yale. So, for me, from one point of view, UChicago was an Ivy backup; but from another, it wasn’t.
I certainly would never have considered going to Penn, Cornell, or Brown over Chicago. Those places (correctly or not) didn’t strike me as serious. And I had no interest in applying to Princeton or Dartmouth, which struck me as waspy, anti-intellectual bastions.
My closest friend at the U of C was a mathematician – pure math. He never even considered applying to places like Brown or Dartmouth – only to Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and the U of C. And his preferences in descending order were MIT, Princeton, Chicago, and Harvard. He went on to do his PhD at MIT and then spent a stint at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
So why do I point this out? First, because it is too easy to ignore the fact that there is no universal, clear, unalloyed hierarchy of preferences for “Ivy” over “non-Ivy,” and everyone probably does have a different set of reasons for choosing a college or university. Generalizing about things like whether the U of C is an Ivy League back-up promotes silly stereotypes, and fails to do justice to the complexity of how and why college choices are made. But second, I also raise this because although things like Ivy League vs. non-Ivy, minute differences in the perception of prestige, difficulty, and exclusivity may seem like burning issues now, before you go to college, in all likelihood, they will be overshadowed by what you do in college and what you do after you graduate.</p>
<p>@JHS:<br>
“The University of Chicago’s “recent advancement” has been in the high school world, not the academic world.”
Bullseye. Though I would also add: “nor in the professional world, in areas such as business, finance, law and medicine.”</p>
<p>In the past 10 years, Medicine improved. Law and Business improved marginally if you consider the advancement in rankings from 5ish to top 3. Econ has always been tops.</p>
<p>There is a strong belief around Booth that the business school improved significantly under the old Dean, Edward Snyder’s, watch. Booth went from being a solid top 10 school to really pushing to the top of that second tier (behind Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford). </p>
<p>Law has probably remained consistent or, according to some circles, fallen off a bit. (Decades back, when the law and economics trend was in full swing, the law school was really at the top of its game. That’s perhaps cooled a bit.)</p>
<p>The Medical School has shrunk its class a bit from 10 years ago, and has benefited in the rankings as a result. Not sure if, in circles in the know, it is truly considered a top ten medical school yet (but these rankings - top 5, top 10, etc. mean much much less in the med world than they do, say, in law).</p>
<p>“There is a strong belief around Booth that the business school improved significantly under the old Dean, Edward Snyder’s, watch. Booth went from being a solid top 10 school to really pushing to the top of that second tier (behind Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford).”</p>
<p>Not certain what this supposed improvement means. GSB used to be #3 in the 70’s/80’s behind only Harvard and Stanford. Maybe the quality undergrads in the 90’s plagued the reputation of GSB and Law.</p>