<p>What if they wanted 1400 this year and predicted a yield of 42%? That is 1404.</p>
<p>I just calculated 46.8% of 3344 and it comes to be 1564. How did the number become 1525?</p>
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<p>They took into account of summer melt. It is an estimate.</p>
<p>So as of today, they have registered 1564? They won’t see much of a summer melt due to other waitlists clearing. There are no waitlists left for schools that people would choose over UC! :p</p>
<p>What’s funny is that the summer melt is also likely overstated. Summer melt this year will be nothing like in previous years where the total yield would drop a point or two. It seems the adcom thinks the yield’s going to drop 1.2% over the summer. Did they not take into account the fact that almost no university is going to their waitlist this year? I think the University would be fortunate if fewer than 1550 kids showed up.</p>
<p>You know, with all the amazing talent in the UChicago Econ, Math, and Stat programs, you’d think they’d have some guys around who could do some of these elementary calculations.</p>
<p>Texaspg said: “What if they wanted 1400 this year and predicted a yield of 42%? That is 1404.”</p>
<p>Texaspg, that’s EXACTLY the problem. No one is really sure WHAT the administration wants, and they might not even be too sure themselves. As the Class of 2015 is at around 1450 students, and each class is only supposed to be ~1350 (according to what the admin has said in the past), why would the admin WANT another class of 1400+? UChicago’s current physical plant is only really meant to have ~1300 students per class. Once classes get bigger, you see students spilling into International House and New Grad Dorms. That’s exactly what happened this past year, and it will occur with more force for the class of 2016.</p>
<p>UChicago is doing a fair number of students a disservice by pushing them into I-House and New Grad Dorms, and, what’s worse, they are marketing this like it’s some sort of banner year for college admissions. There’s no reason to celebrate an over-enrolled class where ~200 kids will have a subpar experience.</p>
<p>Also, Phuriku - regarding summer melt, you’re exactly right. I’d be shocked if 1.2% of the students decided to go elsewhere this summer, when no other schools are using waitlists. UChicago’s Class of 2016 will likely be ~1550 students - which is literally about 200 students too many. </p>
<p>Maybe before expanding the college again, UChicago should think about replacing Pierce, expanding Ida Noyes or the student clubs office in Reynolds Club (as I don’t think these offices will be moving to Logan), and renovating facilities like the old gym (I imagine Ratner is already at capacity). </p>
<p>UChicago purports to be one of the top 5 or so universities in the country. It’s time to start planning like one.</p>
<p>Maybe this is all part of Nondorf’s scheme. Maybe he plans on overenrolling two years in a row and making the acceptance rate dip below 10% in the next admissions cycle. This would create a “leapfrog” year for the University, waging into the sub-10% league (because remember, they are demolishing Pierce during the summer of next year)! They will probably be aiming for a class of 1100 next year. </p>
<p>Haha just some random thoughts. They seem plausible though.</p>
<p>I think Chicago will admit a class the size of the graduating class for next year, but just for fun:</p>
<p>If Chicago aims for a class of 1100 next year and gets a 50% yield, it will admit 2200 students. Now assume that Chicago gets another monster application rise with a 20% jump. This would put Chicago’s admit rate at 7% ~ 2200/30000, 3rd lowest acceptance rate in the nation behind Harvard and Stanford. That would mean jumping from 70% admit rate in the 90s to a 7% admit rate in 2013; now THAT would be something.</p>
<p>I would hold back your comments about the admins demolishing Pierce by next summer. Admins have said countless times that it takes them 5 years to build a new dorm and they really only started having this conversation a year ago. I wouldn’t expect a new dorm to be ready until Fall 2016. They could maybe push it to Fall 2015, but that isn’t how the UofC admins have worked in the past.</p>
<p>The UofC will have to enter their next campaign in the next 6 months to bring in the money to build things like new dorms (and grad facilities + the new health center that Lickerman has been pushing for). Consider donating if you agree the university needs to fix these things.</p>
<p>It’s quite plausible that Nondorf and his allies are following a combination of these strategies in order to put pressure on the UChicago board to release more funding for the College. He could point to both the competitive acceptance rates as well as the “housing/facilities crunch” (manufactured as it may have been) to make his case for more money and a buildup of infrastructure.</p>
<p>I am not big on conspiracy theories. I believe that the over enrollment is a result of the admin office vastly underestimating the yield. </p>
<p>What I am really curious is, how they made such an error.</p>
<p>I heard that that usually, the admin office get a pretty good sneak preview regarding the level of “enthusiasm” (read: yield) by the early responses from the EA admits. So, the plausible explanation for how the admin office got caught totally off guard is that the explosion of the yield was mostly among the RD. I highly doubt it. I think they should have been able to foresee a significant growth in yield (OK, not the actual 8%!!! growth, but at least half of it), and then lower the admit rate and with a plan to pick top students from the wait list. </p>
<p>When I saw the self reported admissions outcome, my totally unscientific impression was that there were some very high stat students who were put on the wait list. Perhaps some of high stat applicants were put on the wait list because U Chicago thought that they did not show any real interest in U Chicago. It could be that some of these were actually very interested, but did not come across right. In such a case, having some room for these applicants through the demonstrated interest after they are put on the wait list would have been a great idea. Alas, they admitted way too many students, so any opportunity to salvage some great kids is all gone. shame. </p>
<p>It will be really interesting to see what happens next year. Will their experience this year be translated into a lower admit rate? Or, will they repeat this year’s mistake?</p>
<p>Hyeonjlee:</p>
<p>To be fair, UChicago has now made this mistake two years in a row (last year’s class was significantly over-enrolled as well, albeit not as much as the Class of 2016). Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…</p>
<p>The fact is, UChicago is hosting classes of this size ~5 years before they actually have the capacity to accommodate these sorts of classes. </p>
<p>I wonder what Yale alumni would think if all of a sudden ~100 students formed a new college house in Yale’s Grad dorm because of overenrollment?</p>
<p>I don’t think conspiracy theories should percolate, but it’s so strange UChicago made the same “mistake” two years in a row.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Looks like U. of C. needs to order a fleet of 500-600 cheap bunk beds from IKEA. </p></li>
<li><p>There needs to be a change in teaching methods for both Calculus and Biology. Teach the effectively required core courses as is done in the Ivy League - lecture sections of 100+ w/ TA’s teachings discussions labs.</p></li>
<li><p>The U. of C. is plainly headed downhill with its excessive growth. The graduate Divisions, Business and Law school and their students will bear the brunt of the problems caused by The College. What happens to U. of C.'s supposed undergrad prestige when graduate students and young faculty start choosing Duke, Penn and Cornell over Chicago for graduate arts & sciences, business and law?</p></li>
<li><p>Word is bound to get out that the U. of C. undergraduate administration is screwing up both the college and the superior graduate portions of the University.</p></li>
<li><p>What happens when Pierce closes? Are a total of 600 grad students going to be displaced from university housing? (100 over enroll 2015 + 250 over enroll + 250 missing Pierce = 600)</p></li>
<li><p>The U. of C. could move to “Occupy the Regents Park” by leasing and furnishing (Ikea of course) 100+ apartments.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I’m a lot more worried about the classroom experience and resources…does Chicago have enough time to hire and prep all the professors, advisers, etc. that will be needed to maintain the same standards and not strain resources?</p>
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<p>I am not concerned about the classroom experience at all. The course catalog was designed to accommodate 10,000 students. </p>
<p>I had tons of classes each with three or four students and a lot more spots to spare.</p>
<p>So, assuming the ideal class size to be at around 1350, the admit rate this year should have been something like 12%. this is based on the conservative assumption that when you became more selective with higher caliber student, more of them would have equally/more palatable options. Hence, let’s assume the yield would have been 45% instead of 47% currently. Then they would have accepted around 3000 students. Hence, the acceptance rate in the vicinity of 12%. That’s 3.8% drop in one year when the admit rate is already pretty low (15.8% the year before). If we assume that with a lower admit rate, the yield would still have been about the same, the admit rate to create a class size of 1350 would have been something like 11.5%.</p>
<p>An interesting question is, in light of all this, where the admit stats for the next year will fall. If they are aiming for the “normal” class size of 1350, and if we assume 15% increase in application number, and the same yield as this year (47%: a conservative number given U Chicago’s trajectory: I don’t think it has hit the upper bound yet, so it has still head room), the acceptance rate falls below 10%!</p>
<p>Wow, when my third year son applied, the acceptance rate was something like 27%. I joke with him that a riffraff like him would not have been accepted if it had been like this when he applied :)</p>
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<p>Don’t know if this was mentioned elsewhere but the “plan” described in Post #18 above is from a letter that was sent to all incoming first years yesterday describing the overenrollment, describing I-House and Grad Dorm, and asking anyone interested to amend their housing choice form.</p>
<p>Who would want to amend their housing choice form to go to Grad Dorm?!</p>
<p>Yeah, huh? Maybe kids desperate for a private bath?</p>
<p>Wouldn’t subsidizing off campus housing be a relatively easy/quick solution to the overcrowding problem while new dorms are built? I’m sure many upperclassmen and grad students that remain on campus would gladly move off campus if it was economically feasible To give 100 students $2000 to entice them to move off campus would only amount to $200k/year which I’m sure is a drop in the bucket for the housing budget.</p>
<p>Well, actually the University has an absolutely horrendous policy on moving off-campus: they automatically deduct $2k from financial aid the minute you step outside University housing. This is based on a supposed estimate that off-campus housing costs $2k less than on-campus housing, but the obvious truth is that the University doesn’t want to lose the ridiculously-overpriced “housing tuition” by having students move off-campus.</p>
<p>By removing that policy, many more students would move off-campus, but the fact is that it would cost the University a lot of money.</p>