<p>Penn95: Penn is a terrific institution. Hopefully they will teach you how to research you subjects before reaching conclusions. Your opinions regarding U Chicago yield management are seriously flawed. Going to the common application is among a few factors contributing to increased applications and yield. Yield exceeded historical data and admissions has had to make adjustments. There are only so many dorm rooms and the situation was exasperated by the closing of a dormitory that had outlived its utility. Your tin hat conspiracy theories are laughable. </p>
<p>@scrippieangel you are just regurgitating generalities whereas I am presenting facts. Plus your logic is very flawed. Please enlighten me why would joining the common app increase the yield so dramatically…Yield depends basically on how many of the admitted students chose Chicago over the other schools they were admitted to. If anything it should have increased to the number of applicants. However in fact apps decreased. <a href=“Architect Viñoly’s new GSB designed with eye to detail – Chicago Maroon”>Architect Viñoly’s new GSB designed with eye to detail – Chicago Maroon;
So I suggest you check your facts better before making statements.<br>
All I am saying is that maybe the yield increased a bit and there was a need to admit less but is very improbable that the yield increased by a whole 10 percentage points. School yields don’t jump up like that from year to year ( look at the data from every other top school). Prob Chicago admitted heavily from its wait list to reach the target class size (which doesn’t affect acceptance rate for the rankings) and of course rejected some qualified students over people it had already deferred. I don’t think I am making any groundbreaking statement here. It has been known that Chicago heavily manipulates the statistics to rise tin the rankings lately. </p>
<p>The bigger point of my post tho is that Chicago is as great today as it was back when it had a 50% + acceptance rate. It had its niche and is/was known as the school with badass academics and it was very self selective. Many alums( at least I know from my parents and their friends) feel that Chicago is desperately trying to fit into a mold instead of retaining its individuality. Try hards are never cool…</p>
<p>@Penn95 </p>
<p>Since we joined the common app a while ago, I’m not going to make any argument on the year-over-year change in yield rate with regards to it; however, I think we’re beginning to see a normalization of Chicago’s admit rates and yield as being at the level of our peers (specifically our closest competitor–Columbia). </p>
<p>Also, for the record, Chicago’s yield rate only increased from ~55% to ~60%. Quick, yes, but not unreasonably so.</p>
<p>Yield rates went up for a number of reasons:</p>
<p>1) The UofC has been targeting HS counselors, since they can have a large effect on student choice</p>
<p>2) Apparently, Fin. aid got better (though nowhere near as much as for this cycle)</p>
<p>3) Applications went down. This may seem like a bit of a paradox, but I suspect that there were a number of students who, due to the rapidly declining acceptance rate, self-selected away from the University. Even if most of these students wouldn’t have gotten in, it can be assumed that those who did would have then picked a different school</p>
<p>4) Niche programs, like the IME, are bringing in people who have very specific interests that our peers can’t provide</p>
<p>5) Cities are becoming generally more popular for young people to live and learn in</p>
<p>I don’t expect us to be going above 65% yield anytime soon (barring the creation of a D1 program), but I suspect that our acceptance rate will continue to drop to fall somewhere in the HYPS range, like Columbia (though, also like Columbia, I doubt we’re going to be included in the initialism. HYPSM3C? Unlikely).</p>
<p>I’ve seen a lot of people argue that UChicago was just as good at a 40% acceptance rate as an 8%. I’d like to argue that while this may be true on a purely academic basis, in terms of social life, local development, general student support, and professional placement, this is emphatically wrong. Fixing all of that, and advertising those fixes, made sure that we can compete with our peers. </p>
<p>Edit: Okay, hold up. Now I’m reading through the rest of your post and I have a few quibbles.</p>
<p>1) While I think I dealt with the yield increase in my last post, I really doubt that pulling lots of people from waitlists happened. Look at the CC waitlist thread from last year, and you’ll see that there were very few offers to join 2018–and only a handful for 2019</p>
<p>2) Waitlist admits do count as acceptances when counting the final rate, IIRC</p>
<p>3) “It has been known that Chicago heavily manipulates the statistics to rise tin the rankings lately.” Classic weasel words. By whom has it been known? But, since I’m dealing with this anyway, did we meet with USNWR’s editors to make sure we were putting our data in correctly? Yes. Is that evidence of statistics manipulation? Yes, but not more than our peers.</p>
<p>@Penn95 You keep saying things like, “All I am saying is that maybe the yield increased a bit and there was a need to admit less but is very improbable that the yield increased by a whole 10 percentage points. School yields don’t jump up like that from year to year ( look at the data from every other top school).” </p>
<p>But the yield increase and the resulting fewer acceptances arent things you should criticize. It was officially 60.3%. I said this last time too. Just google it. And no, there were very few wait list acceptances. The school over admitted several years in a row.</p>
<p>The school over-admitted for several years in a row, had to convert buildings that had been used for graduate housing to dorms for first-years, and then on top of that had to close (and demolish) a dorm that housed about 130 first years. It is being replaced, but the replacement won’t be online for several years. About a third of the incoming students are being placed in housing that was not designed for them and does not meet the University’s standards for what undergraduate housing ought to be. It’s not terrible, or uninhabitable, but it’s not optimal, either. </p>
<p>So, yes, last year they couldn’t afford to over-admit again. So they under-admitted. I thought they were going to have 100+ wait-list admittances, but nothing like that happened, because once again they had under-estimated yield.</p>
<p>Back in the day, I thought it was almost impossible to change yields more than a percent or two from one year to the next. In the absence of some significant change in policy, like when Harvard and Princeton stopped early admissions, most colleges’ yields were effectively constants. And for the most part they still are. They get manipulated somewhat by increasing early admissions, and Chicago absolutely did that last year, or by admitting significant numbers of people from the waitlist. But Chicago’s yield increase over the past 6-7 years from ~40% (which was excellent for a college without ED) to ~60% is simply unprecedented, and was done by marketing to convince people it was a good choice, not by any kind of easy manipulation.</p>
<p>@JHS Of course, not just marketing, but also real, tangible academic, student life, and community advancements too!</p>
<p>That’s true – that was a crucial part of the marketing. The core of this administration has been re-designing the undergraduate experience at Chicago for more than 20 years to make it better and more attractive to the students they want, without abandoning the university’s key values. And they have done an excellent job of communicating those changes to the world.</p>
Going back to the title of the thread, have they figured out how to write the press release yet, or are they still busy posting pictures of cats on their social media?
The silence in Illinois is deafening!
There is a persistent rumor that early applications at Chicago did run about 40 percent below expectations with a record high number of early acceptances. The number should be confirmed in the Common Data Set TBD later.
^xiggi, why are you so interested and attached to anything about U of Chicago. If you think it’s a rumor, why bother spreading it. Where did you hear that to begin with? Please give us the source.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1721150-uchicago-ea-admit-rate-10-5-on-11-400-apps.html
At least the OP from this thread/link disclosed the source of the EA admit rate although the numbers are not official at this point.
Applications: 11,400
Admitted: ~1,200
Acceptance Rate: 10.5%
Just rattling the cage of the resident adcom who – visibly-- does not believe in transparency and sharing … meaningful numbers. But after all, this is Chicago!
40% seems a bit too precipitous over the course of one admissions cycle. I felt like xiggi just did that as a way to provoke posters.
Frankly, I think xiggi’s rhetoric is getting old.
If he fails to provide a source to spread such misinformation he himself even called it rumor, the credibility on this is absolutely in question, IMHO.
Report from the DC meetup today:
Over 30k applications
Avg. SAT CR+M 1520/ACT 34 for EA admits
Estimated acceptance rate: ~9%
Overall, it looks like UChicago admittance rates have stabilized somewhat.
I am a little perplexed with ~9% acceptance rate comment. Chicago admitted roughly 2,300 out of 27,499 applicants last year to have ~8.4% overall admit rate. With 30,000+ applications this year and let’s say if Chicago admits the same number of applicants, that would give us ~7.67% acceptance rate.
We already know Chicago admitted fewer students this year from EA compared with that of last year. The chances are such that the University will admit fewer applicants in the RD which should only mean a smaller number of total admit out of 30K+ students. I am not even factoring the possibility of higher yield expectation.
We should be looking at acceptance rate of low 7%.
Maybe I heard the rep wrong, or they’re low balling it.
Is it possible the ~9% acceptance rate was meant for EA admits, and not overall expected acceptance rate?
It is safe to say there is no way Chicago would admit 2700 (9% x 30,000) because with a yield of 60%, that would translate to 1,620 freshman. North Campus is not expected to open until 2016 and with Pierce being gone, I don’t think Chicago would increase an additional ~230 students just to meet fewer available beds.
@theluckystar You’re probably right; I was in the back and very well might have misheard the context for that comment.
Also, although @xiggi is rather overly zealous with his crusade against the university’s policies against releasing a CDS, why don’t we fill that out? It seems odd to me that we (and our most similar friends in Morningside Heights) don’t release the form. It isn’t that it causes people not to trust us (as it’s about the least important form I can imagine a university filling out), but it’s industry standard.
I am indeed overly zealous in this crusade! There are indeed few reasons to keeping the CDS away from prying eyes, and especially when the numbers are … pretty competitive. The latest salvo hurled here was really about the inability or unwillingness to share the most basic numbers. After all, Chicago does have a registered rep who has been on CC for many years --even before she became an admission officer.
Is really that hard to share that there were X numbers of applicants to the Class of 2019 and that Chicago accepted X from Y EA applicants? We all know that such numbers are estimates.
Not asking for state secrets! 