<p>What people don’t appreciate is that UofC administrators often compare themselves (favorably) to NU. They’re unhappy when NU ranks higher nationally or in news-grabbing locally, especially since UofC has far more nationally highly ranked academic programs than does NU.</p>
<p>My guess is that as they assess the impact of this year’s stepped up advertising and national awareness, the UofC admin will pay as much attention to growth in the quantity and quality of applicants in Chicago and in Illinois generally as they do to the national figures.</p>
<p>Yo, Prodigalson, I think it’s time for you to take a deep breath and re-asses your role in this discussion. You’re taking this way too personally and your comments are drifting into weird places.</p>
<p>You’re 18, you go to an awesome school. The world is your oyster. It seems kind of silly for you to get into a ****ing contest on the subjective merits of Grey Poupon vs. Heinz. You’ll have plenty of time for bull sessions on more important issues when you start classes in the fall.</p>
<p>I am curious why a kid who has nothing to do with U of C is spending this much time on this board fighting with people and putting down the school. A kid who is a freshman at one of the vaunted HYSPM schools, no less.</p>
<p>Is s/he afraid that indeed U Chicago is truly catching up to his/her school and doing a preemptive strike? </p>
<p>Do other CC folks, both parents and kids, spend this much time on a forum of a specific school that they or their kids are not likely to have anything to do with?</p>
<p>UChicago is far from the level of HYPSM at the undergraduate level. UChicago is not even on the level of Dartmouth, Columbia, and Brown at the undergraduate level yet. UChicago is more like Johns Hopkins than any other schools.</p>
<p>UChicago’s now using the commonapp, and it still expects to have a 19% admissions rate this year. It’s far from HYS and Columbia in the single digits, and from Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown in the low teens.</p>
<p>And what about after the students get there,after the WashU type hype, in al their glory of being at an HYPSM -like institution for wonderfully individual students, and they find out that grade deflation rather than inflation is the rule, and that they will be competing with 3.7s from HYPSM, when they have the equivalent 3.4? Which would YOU rather have?</p>
<p>IvyPbear - give U of C a couple years. Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth have all been recruiting pretty hard and pretty competitively for decades. U of C really just started a few years back, and then only really started pushing this year. </p>
<p>With that in mind, I’d say Chicago’s admissions trend has been quite impressive. Remember, ten years ago, Dartmouth was still only accepting maybe 20-25% of applications. Now, it’s accepting about 12%. In the same period of time, Chicago went from accepting about 73% of applicants to about 18-19%. </p>
<p>In a few years, I don’t think there will be much difference in selectivity between Chicago and Brown or Dartmouth or Columbia. B or C or D might be around 8-10% acceptance rate, and Chicago would be around 12-14%. </p>
<p>Combine all this with the fact that Chicago boasts significantly more resources than Brown and a better wealth of academic offerings, I’d think, Chicago would be in great standing. </p>
<p>Really, Chicago’s closest competitor is a place like Columbia. They’ve always been close on the academic and resources front, and I think the gap in admissions between the two colleges is closing quickly.</p>
<p>Finally, as others have noted, admissions selectivity only mean so much. Give me Chicago’s academic departments, location in a major american city, and general resources of the school over Brown or Dartmouth ANY day.</p>
<p>(To be fair, Dart is a bit of a different beast - it’s more of a LAC than a research univ, but the overall popularity of LACs has been dwindling of late. See Dart’s more modest admissions growth of the past few years, in comparison to Princeton or Brown or Yale).</p>
<p>Who cares about all this academic comparisons. Let’s get back to sports:</p>
<p>Mackinaw, Why are you so dead set against the Big 10? Div 1 sports? If Northwestern can compete in these circles (not to mention Stanford and such), why not UofC? Certainly you don’t think it is an engineering school that provides all those athletes? (ie the only thing NU and Stanford have that UofC does not?)</p>
<p>Besides, if the common app changes things, if a new dorm changes things, just think about how a football stadium would change things? Maybe they could expand the music program to include marching band, too? I realize that may be too “practical” for UofC, so maybe a focus on marching band theory would draw enough kids that they could put something respectable in the new stadium? </p>
<p>UofC doesn’t need to restrict its competition to intellectual competition. After all, they were once a football powerhouse. They could do it again. :)</p>
<p>That is a bunch of pretty ignorant generalizations.</p>
<p>First off, lets exclude “M”, since it is a totally different kind of institution. For the majority of students at each of Chicago and MIT, the other isn’t nearly on the level they need. In the areas of overlap – economics, linguistics, math, physics, biological sciences, chemistry – each of them holds its own quite well (except perhaps for linguistics, where MIT’s undergraduate program is reportedly vestigial).</p>
<p>Then, what does IvyPBear mean by “on the undergraduate level”? At all of the colleges involved, undergraduates and graduate students often work and study side by side, and the quality of the graduate students is part of the undergraduate experience. It is downright silly to think that Chicago can be a peer of the other institutions named at the graduate level – as it absolutely, clearly is – and be “far below” them on the undergraduate level, given that the same faculty and the same graduate students are responsible for the “undergraduate level”.</p>
<p>What other metrics are we supposed to use to rank these colleges? Entry of bachelor’s recipients into highly-ranked PhD programs? There, I think Chicago beats everyone, significantly, and only Yale is close. However that is balanced by the fact that all of the others named send significantly more graduates to professional schools, and to highly-ranked professional schools. Faculty peer assessments? In terms of across-the-board strength, Chicago is slightly behind HYPS, and slightly (in some cases significantly) ahead of the others. Of course, no student, graduate or undergraduate, benefits from across-the-board faculty strength. Department by department, the ranking order varies, but you would have an awfully hard time finding a department where Dartmouth or Brown outranks Chicago, and no trouble at all finding departments where Chicago outranks or equals HYPS or Columbia. (And all of that is subjective, by the way. All of the colleges are plenty good enough across the board to satisfy the needs of practically any undergraduate. Hopkins is probably less strong across-the-board, although excellent in particular areas.)</p>
<p>Wealth? Chicago is not in HYPS’ league, but it is meaningfully better endowed than Dartmouth, Brown, or Hopkins, and on a par with Columbia.</p>
<p>The one area where Chicago clearly comes behind is popularity with 18-year-olds. Yay. There is some substance to that. All of the colleges named (with the exception of Hopkins, and possibly Columbia) have traditionally provided a superior non-academic experience to undergraduates. Chicago has made significant improvements in that over the past 20 years, and I’m not certain that it hasn’t at least caught up with the peloton, but I wouldn’t argue that it isn’t still somewhat below the level of HYPS, Brown, and Dartmouth (all of which do a fantastic job in this regard, of which they are justly proud).</p>
<p>As for Chicago being “most like Hopkins”, that seems a little off. Hopkins is a great university, too, with some very strong areas, but it is nowhere near as broad as Chicago, and even where it is strong it seems to be seriously under appreciated by students interested in anything other than eventually going to medical school. Hopkins and Chicago are most similar in being well-regarded non-Ivy research universities that are not Stanford, but that’s not a heck of a lot of similarity. I wonder if they even attract a significant number of cross-applicants.</p>
<p>(1) It takes more than one person to tango;</p>
<p>(2) Since when does stating the obvious truth that Chicago is not as prestigious and/or selective as HYPSM count as “putting down the school”? Chicago is no different than any other non-HYPSM school.</p>
<p>Nice to see that you’ve rejoined the discussion. But as usual, your projections re: Chicago are overly optimistic and you tend to underestimate Chicago’s peers.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that Brown and Columbia are already around 8-10% acceptance rate, with Dartmouth not far behind. Chicago has a long way to go to reach 12-14%, if ever…</p>
<p>You seem to assume that this is not a one-time anomaly and the beginning of a long-term trend. All I can say is, don’t expect Chicago’s WashU-style marketing to keep yielding dividends indefinitely. It certainly hasn’t even for WashU:</p>
<p>prodigalson and ivybear are somewhat akin to ■■■■■■. I don’t see a need to respond to their assertions after a while - they keep making the same points, these points are answered, they don’t accept the answers, and the fight starts all over again. They have very little business criticizing a university they’re hardly aware of, and are probably offended by the fact that Chicago’s acceptance rate is dipping and feel a need to protect their territory. Did anyone see prodigalson on Chicago’s forums before the dip?</p>
<p>^ I was going to say the same thing, actually, except in the vein that they’re even worse ■■■■■■ than IHateUofC, who at the very least knows what he’s talking about.</p>
<p>This isn’t even a debate. It’s a full-on argument, and there’s absolutely no point whatsoever in wasting energy to try to convince people who’re so set against listening to the other side. At this point, they’re arguing for the sake of arguing, and disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing. Whatever.</p>
<p>Also, everyone, please, stop taking swipes at WashU. It’s an amazing school, and I at least think it deserves what it gets. So what if it’s aggressive in marketing? How else can a school that’s not HYPSM get its name out there? Paying directors to throw them into films? I mean, seriously.</p>
<p>People who claim that UChicago is not anywhere up to Ivy League or MIT/Caltech or Stanford is just biased. UChicago has such a strong reputation on almost every fields. Particularly, the math department of UChicago in some fields is wayyyy better than any of Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, UPENN, Stanford and even MIT/ Caltech(of course HYP is not worth to be mentioned for math department at undergraduate level though Princeton has the institution IAS, which has many extremely reputable mathematicians in this century).UChicago has quite several Field Medalists, who are extremely open to do research with undergraduate/graduate students. The typical example is Vladimir Drinfield, who is one of the best mathematician in the field of Algebraic Geometry.In addition, the Field Medal is considered as the hardest award one can achieve(yes, much much harder than Nobel Prize), which makes UChicago Math Department that reputable. The chances to do math research immediately as an undergrad is offered quite a lot, and you even have chances to teach high school students through their VIRGE program or sth like that. Don’t just think of UChicago as crap because it is not ranked highly enough on the table. Any statistical ranking table has flaws in it, so judging how good it is based on that crap table is just unfair to the school itself.</p>
<p>But HYP is the absolute paradigm of academic quality and educational prestige in our nation. I do not think it is ironic in the sense that those of us who support Chicago are oblivious to our reaffirmation of HYP’s stature. In fact, I believe that we can all agree that Chicago does not have the same reputation among the public as these institutions despite having academic departments that equal or exceed those of HYPSM.</p>
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<p>Meritocracy is essentially a social system that provides opportunities and advantages to individuals based on their demonstrated abilities and achievements rather than qualities most often attained by virtue of birth. I do completely believe in recognizing the contextual effects of one’s merit, however. Socioeconomic status and other oppressing factors that are not conducive to individual success must be taken into consideration to evaluate the framework in which abilities are expressed and how achievements are attained. Athletic achievement is indeed a form of meritocracy, albeit one that is immaterial to education. Legacy and minority status, however, are not talents and diverge from the conventional foundations of the form of meritocracy that may be suitably practiced at universities. The latter two cannot be properly placed within one’s definition of meritocracy since the preferential treatment given to these applicants (in the event of the demonstration of lower qualifications) is simply a matter of policies directed towards public relations. In most of these instances, the demonstration of merit above a certain threshold may be irrelevant. </p>
<p><a href=“2”>quote</a> The term “discriminatory” is unnecessarily inflammatory (not to mention inappropriate to the argument at hand)
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<p>We were discussing admission criteria at one point which was mostly related to Chicago and its probable need to supply revisions to its evaluation process. But the perceived connotations of a word are really a matter of semantics. I used “discriminatory” to convey the notion of unfair treatment. “Biased” is synonymous with “discriminatory” but may perhaps not express the same sentiments since the former term is often used in more temperate situations. </p>
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<p>I do not agree with this. In terms of resources, endowments, and present selectivity I will agree that Chicago is not at the HYPSM standard. But considering individual academic departments, Chicago equals or exceeds many of these schools. I will agree that Chicago may be lacking in some of the attributes that contribute to the undergraduate experience but I believe that this is the key to preserving its own individuality and conserving its well-established scholastic focus rather than improperly depriving its students of opportunities. </p>
<p>JHS’ post #212 ghjk’s post #217 are very well-done remarks on this comment.</p>
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<p>:) Chicago did have the first Heisman Trophy winner after all. No, this is not an implicit insult against HYPS but rather a fact (even if it was 75 years ago).</p>
<p>Yeah, but with a 3.6 mean gpa, Brown offers the best grading policy outside of Cambridge and a certain Junior University located on a Farm in California. Brown also has a 8-year med program (as does Northwestern), which is attractive to many.</p>