University of Chicago Admit Rate and SAT relative to Ivy/Competitive Set

The admit rate and SAT rank below have been elite for about a decade; they created a demonstrable correlation to the outstanding outcomes upon graduation for U Chicago seniors.

Placement into the top Law/MBA/Medical/Graduate schools are at record levels and the breakout success of U Chicago seniors with the world’s top financial/consulting & tech firms as been off the charts.

When Goldman Sachs, Citadel, Dimensional, and McKinsey (the founder was a U Chicago alumni as well as faculty member), among others, are “going long” U Chicago graduates in the world’s battle for the best talent, we see a telling indication that Nondorf and Zimmer have “broken the code.”

The “Texas Plan” reported in another thread is in the early days. The real jump will be seen in the next several years.

• Northwestern 9.0%
• Hopkins 8.8%
• Dartmouth 8.8%
• Penn 8.1%
• Duke 7.7%
• MIT 7.3%
• Brown 6.9%
• Yale 6.6%
• Cal Tech 6.4%
• U Chicago 6.2%
• Columbia 6.1%
• Princeton 5.6%
• Harvard 4.9%
• Stanford TBD—assumed at/around Harvard

Chicago 1518 SAT is 2nd highest to Caltech.

BronxBorn, these current admit rate data are very illuminating and I suspect that most of these schools will have final admit rates at least 0.5 to 1.0 % higher when they have to post their final Fall numbers given the uncertainty and flux created by COVID-19. A metric perhaps more telling than the raw admit rate will be the yield rate, as this indicates how desirable a school is relative to its competition when choices have to be made. And to be clear, that choice happens not only in the decision to pick one school over another when one has multiple acceptances, but also in the choice to apply ED or ED2 or RD to school X vs school Y because that is also a choice with potential consequences and outcomes.

Despite the uncertainty due to COVID-19, I feel confident that Chicago will have a very high yield close to 80% when final Fall numbers are posted, at that this yield has a good chance to be top 3 along with Harvard and Stanford. I am also predicting that Yale’s yield will be slightly less than 70% and below MIT. Princeton, and Columbia.

Regarding U Chicago’s 1518 SAT average being the second highest of any college; don’t you think that has a lot to do with being test optional now (i.e. students with lower test scores will choose not to submit them) which artificially raises the average test scores of admitted students?

It depends on who they are admitting TO. If these were merely candidates who would have been admitted in another year despite their sub-par test score, then TO helps to raise the average. If, instead, TO has been used to attract an applicant to UChicago who wouldn’t have otherwise applied given the high test scores in the past, then TO doesn’t impact the average in the least.

UChicago’s scores have been creeping up the last few years anyway. Here is the mid-50th range since they revised the SAT:

Class of '21: 1460 - 1550; 32 - 35
Class of '22: 1490 - 1560; 33 - 35
Class of '23: 1500 - 1560; 33 - 35 (first year of TO)

Last year’s average SAT was about 1518 as well. So if TO had any positive impact on average scores, it didn’t seem to make a difference this year over last.

What percentage of those admitted didn’t submit scores, I wonder?

Is the test optional strategy helping them admit highly qualified students who don’t happen to test well? Or is it a strategy that is meant to merely reduce the overall acceptance rate by increasing the number of applications?

^ To answer the first question: last year’s applicant pool included 10-15% who didn’t submit test scores and the admitted class consisted of a similar portion. Too early to know the proportion of applicants and accepteds who were TO but early applicant pool consisted of 20% TO.

To answer the second: last year was the first year of TO and the applicant pool increased about 7%, IIRC. In comparison, most elite schools saw record levels of applicants with growth numbers in the double digits. This year’s application numbers for UChicago stayed pretty much the same; seemed to decline by about 300. In contrast, most other elite schools saw notable declines in their application numbers: http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/22712245/#Comment_22712245

It’s hard to draw many conclusions from all of that except maybe to say that it doesn’t appear TO is has a big impact on UChicago application numbers.

The purpose of TO was to encourage highly qualified applicants who wouldn’t normally have applied to UChicago due to the relatively high test scores. It was offered in the context of the Empower initiative which was designed to reach more under-represented groups, particularly students from rural areas, children of police officers and fire fighters, and military vets. However, any student can apply TO.

No. UChicago has historically had the 2nd best SAT. Second only to Caltech

Also according to this list from 2016:

https://www.insider.com/the-50-smartest-colleges-in-america-2016-10

UChicago seems to appeal much more to graduates of Northeastern boarding schools than it had in the past. For example, it places ahead of all of the Ivies in its density of Groton alumni:

Colleges Listed by Concentration of Groton Graduates (2015–2019, 5 or more matriculants)

  1. Scripps
  2. Hamilton
  3. Bowdoin
  4. UChicago
  5. Georgetown
  6. Harvard
  7. Dartmouth
  8. Brown
  9. Williams
  10. Middlebury
  11. Trinity
  12. Princeton
  13. Yale
  14. Tufts
  15. Columbia
  16. Northwestern
  17. MIT
  18. St. Andrews
  19. Boston College
  20. Duke
  21. Stanford
  22. NYU
  23. UNC–CH
  24. UVA
  25. Cornell

Raw matriculation data from Phillips-Exeter:

2016-18: UChicago 14.

  • Behind Columbia (35), Yale (29), GU (26), MIT/CMU (24), Brown/UMich (22), Tufts (20), Dartmouth/Harvard (19), Princeton (17), Penn (16), Williams/Trinity (15).
  • Tied with NYU/Cornell.

2017-19: UChicago 34.

  • Behind Columbia by 1.
  • Ahead of Yale and everyone else by 6 or more.

Horace Mann (2017-2019) with at least 10 students matriculating:

  • Uchicago: 44
  • Cornell: 43
  • UPenn: 25
  • Brown: 21
  • Harvard: 20
  • Yale: 18
  • Columbia: 17

Not listed: Dartmouth, Princeton

Note that the HM class of 2017 had approximately 20 students at UChicago, meaning the following two years were lighter.

Raw matriculation data from Phillips Andover:

https://www.andover.edu/files/CCOProfile2016.pdf

https://www.andover.edu/files/PhillipsAcademySchoolProfile2017-2018.pdf

https://www.andover.edu/files/CCOProfileBrochure2018-2019.pdf

https://www.andover.edu/files/CCOProfile2019-2020.pdf

From 2016 - 2019 (4 years)

UChicago 54

Harvard 50

Tufts 43

Yale 41

UPenn 38

NYU 37

Cornell 35

Columbia 33

Brown 33

Princeton 31

MIT 29

Georgetown 28

U of Virginia 28

Stanford 27

For a change, let’s go west: Harvard Westlake

https://www.hw.com/about/HW-at-a-Glance/Matriculation

For a 5-year total

NYU 87

USC 83

WUSL 55

Harvard 51

U of Michigan 50

UChicago 46

UCB 45

UPenn 44

Stanford 36

Cornell 35

Brown 34

Columbia 33

I’ve posted about the prep school connection often before… A related angle: as Chicago has noticeably fewer students on financial aid in comparison to its higher-end peers (Harvard, Princeton Stanford have about 70% of students on aid, Chicago has around 58% on aid), is it safe to say Chicago is seeking a certain number of full-freight paying kids, to subsidize others?

If so, fancy private/boarding schools (which have lots of well, NOT highly-aided students) seem like a gold mine - lots of students with wealth, high SAT scores, familiarity with rigorous academic programs, etc.

It looks more and more like Chicago is “shaping a class” (as opposed to admitting as many brainiacs as possible - other factors be damned - and seeing how many show up).

IPEDS fall 2018, freshman % “grant or scholarship” aid," (% Pell), and avg grant:
Princeton 60% (22%) $51k
Harvard 55% (17%) $54k
UChicago 55% (11%) $43k
Stanford 54% (16%) $52k

Cue, you’re making a curious assumption - that brainiacs can’t be found in private schools. You’ve been reading too much schoolboy fiction of a bygone era. In the privates these days they’re not all “Dink Stover” types - football players and class presidents who move naturally from their elite privates to Yale and other ivies, where they continue their gridiron exploits, get tapped for Skull and Bones, do not bother their heads about classes, ideas or studies, and end up as captains of industry. Some of them still do that sort of thing, I reckon, but why do you assume they’re the ones who choose the U of C and whom the U of C chooses? Are the brainiacs any thinner on the ground at Phillips Exeter or Lawrenceville (Dink’s old school), than in your average suburban, small town or inner-city public school? Surely it is quite the contrary. On this board we have seen examples.

One can lament as a democrat that these inequalities in academic excellence exist in our society, I do lament it, and the U of C is doing its part in its Empowerment Initiative to combat that phenomenon. But this school if it is about anything is about the natural aristocracy of intellectual achievement. This can be found everywhere, including the private schools. That the U of C is now drawing from those schools doesn’t say anything about the type of kids they are drawing. It hardly says, though this is your fondest dream, that they are choosing Dink over a brainiac classmate of Dink’s. It is my own fondest hope that they are also harvesting some of the intellectual inheritors if not the actual progeny of Ari Schwarz. Ari may have departed the gloomier regions of Harper Stacks, but I thought I sighted him a time or two when I was last on campus.

Alternatively, read further. Though Amory Blaine described a marginally overlapping environment at Princeton, he manifested a greater depth of interests during and after his time there.

Not sure that admitting more from certain highly-selective private preps shows much if any information. Class size bumped up by an additional 200-250 beginning with Class of '21 so draws from top schools everywhere - public or private - should be higher. What we’d need to see is the proportion from highly-selective private preps relative to publics. How has that changed in recent years?

UChicago’s enrollment numbers and aid programs have been a moving target since the last time it posted a 70% proportion receiving aid (Fall 2013). Once enrollment capacity has been reached with the Class of '24, comparisons to other “higher end” elites will be more relevant. Showing data from academic year 2017-18 isn’t as relevant, since UChicago’s financial aid % was declining even before then. A lot can be explained by the push to increase class size, with the financial aid proportion “catching up” once they launched Empower. We don’t have that data yet.

@marlowe1 You are making a lot of assumptions about @Cue7 ‘s post that aren’t in his text.

Cue7 specifically mentioned high SAT scores and academic rigor as reasons why full pay kids from high end day and boarding schools are attractive to colleges like U of C.

With respect to this, UC appeared in a 1980 satirical publication, the Preppy Handbook, that placed it under an “Out of the League” heading, described as “a list of the ten least Preppy colleges—all of them superb institutions academically, but none of them up to the standards of Prep.”