<p>Oh wow, this is just great…</p>
<p>A truly stunning one-year increase. The result of a confluence of factors building over a number of years. I was always surprised that a university with a very high percentage of professional school students marketed itself as non-careerist on the undergraduate level. Very much different today.
The ham-handedness of the old admissions office was breathtaking, most famously trumpeting the second largest police force in the State of Illinois.
It’s a new day.</p>
<p>This is not cool. Not at all.</p>
<p>^agreed :(</p>
<p>30% of RDers should just cowboy up and withdraw your application and make it easier for the rest of us :)</p>
<p>It is great for U of Chicago, not so great news for the applicants. When I was a graduate student there many years ago, I recall being so surprised at how serious and hard working undergraduate students were compared to the East Coast schools including many Ivy’s except for MIT. </p>
<p>I know a GC who thinks that University of Chicago offers the best undergraduate education.</p>
<p>I know some financial firms in New York that will consider hiring undergraduates from Chicago and Wharton over Harvard, Yale & Princeton.</p>
<p>Good thing my D graduated HS 6 years ago. She’d probably be rejected this year. </p>
<p>Maybe the improving reputation will help her find a job when she finishes her Master’s degree in June! </p>
<p>It is amazing how much the south side of Chicago has changed the past decade. First the high rise public housing goes. Next the tough neighborhoods north of UofC gentrify. Then Hyde Park sends one of its own to the White House. Now UofC gets selective! </p>
<p>What next? Rejoin the Big 10? (you heard it here first. 
)</p>
<p>Here are some EA stats: [Early</a> Decision / Early Action Stats - Class of 2014 | InLikeMe](<a href=“http://www.inlikeme.com/early-decision-early-action-stats-class-2014.html]Early”>http://www.inlikeme.com/early-decision-early-action-stats-class-2014.html)</p>
<p>From that, the RD acceptance rate is 11.48% and the overall accept rate is 19.48% (assuming Chicago sticks to the 3700 applicants).</p>
<p>Well, I guess this is good for the EA admits, but not so good for my friend who was deferred, and my other friend who’s applying RD.</p>
<p>My high school senior daughter got more mailings from the University of Chicago than any other school even though she never expressed interest in attending. I wonder if it was an increase in mailings, along with the Common Application that did the job.</p>
<p>attending this school has singularly been one of the best decisions of my life. i’m glad more people are starting to realize the potential of this gem.</p>
<p>i really love it here. there is so much to appreciate around me.</p>
<p>JustaDad-- my son too. I think his 31 ACT score must have triggered it. He got a lot from NYU and Duke too. No interest shown in any of them.</p>
<p>Rejoin the Big Ten?
I love the blow up pictures at the Ratner Gym and Ida Noyes of the U of C stomping on Michigan as a matter of course. Leather helmets and no face masks, thank you very much. When men were men.
Back in the day, the “Monsters of the Midway” attracted people with no family history of college, or even high school, from Appleton, Peoria, St. Paul, the Quad cities, Detroit, Kalamazoo, Des Moines, and hundreds of other places within a 400 mile radius. Worth a bet for your uncommonly smart kid, often all of 16? Well, yeah. You’ve read about the U of C in the newspapers. I guess I will send her off to Chicago. Maybe not a bad bet.</p>
<p>Wow!! I honestly think its because Uchicago’s rank is in the top ten and it is the easiest to get in, so more people applied.</p>
<p>danas - I think the “ham-handedness” of the old administration very much had to do with the ever-lingering effects of the Hutchins era. Ever since Hutchins dramatically swerved the university in the direction of “ivory-tower academics above all else,” the University has been existing as more of a niche place. Along that line, you’re right, there are strong professional schools at Chicago, but at least when I was there, you can’t avoid the fact that the professional schools are VERY SMALL, and the grad programs tend to be quite big for a school of Chicago’s size. The overall emphasis of the place always steered toward ivory tower academics, with the b-school being the sole exception (even the law school was seen as more “academic” amongst the top handful of law schools). </p>
<p>As a case in point, Chicago Law is one of the smallest law schools in the nation, Chicago’s Medical School is one of the smallest in the nation (now around 80-90 per class), and Chicago Booth is, at best, a mid-sized business school with about 450 per class. </p>
<p>Compare this to some of Chicago’s peers - Columbia has a massive law school (about 500 per class), a med school that’s nearly double Chicago’s current size (about 150 per class), and a business school that’s about 40% bigger than Chicago’s. </p>
<p>For an urban school with a strong basis in research, Chicago’s professional schools, while certainly strong in impact and stature, are literally smaller in terms of footprint than the schools at Chicago’s peers. On the other hand, Chicago has a BIG grad school - lots and lots and lots of PhD students and MA students. </p>
<p>Anyways, I think now, Chicago is shaking off the more overbearing portions of Hutchins’ legacy, and very much emerging into a new era. This was done because, as I’ve said before, the Hutchins’ approach has FAILED, and makes for a weak institution. A university, to thrive, MUST be about much more than the academics it offers. So, Chicago began to make a change in the mid-late 90s, and I think it will take at least another decade before Chicago’s new identity really becomes defined. I hope the identity resembles a “rigorous, but balanced” approach to the College, but we’ll see.</p>
<p>Collegestress - Eh, Chicago’s been ranked in the top ten for the past 4-5 years, and applications never increased THIS much for the past 4-5 years. So I don’t think the ranking was nearly as big a factor as the adoption of the Common App and the very aggressive marketing/recruiting.</p>
<p>One other random point, I think it’s completely in Chicago’s interest to become D1 in SOME sports. Similar to how a Williams or Amherst have some D1 programs (Williams has a D1 squash program, for example), Chicago may be well served by adopting a couple D1 sports. </p>
<p>I’m not advocating anything drastic, but maybe Chicago should start a D1 women’s lacrosse program, or go D1 in tennis or something. A lesser known sport, where it could then re-establish rivalries with various schools. Given the type of student spirit at Chicago, I’m sure kids would come out to watch the Chicago vs. Harvard women’s lax match, or watch Chicago take on Stanford in Tennis. </p>
<p>On that note, we have a superb pool facility now at Chicago, why not go D1 in swimming? Elevates student moral a bit, gives kids something to do during the cold winter months, you get to see some exciting races, etc.</p>
<p>The Chicago MBA program has 1100 full time students. In addition to the Law and Medical schools, there are the Public Policy and Social Service Administration schools. It would take some digging, but at one time I determined that the U of C, along with Columbia, had among the highest percentage of professional school students of the elites.
If the U of C is comparing itself to Columbia, it is partly on these grounds, as well as being an urban school with core studies, and with undergraduate schools that are a relatively small part of the whole.
PS…Chicago is nowhere near being a DI school in any sport.
There was a time when the super smart were the offspring of every economic level of society, less so today. A very big discussion as to whether that is a good thing. But it helped the U of C a hundred years ago to attract the brightest from “uneducated” backgrounds.</p>
<p>Notre Dame is quaking in its boots at the thought of UofC returning to the Big Ten (so is Michigan State but for different reasons). Chicago is the only school in the nation to have gone unbeaten against Notre Dame.</p>
<p>Add the School of Social Service Administration to the list of important professional graduate schools at the University.</p>
<p>This is the Obama effect. Everyone wants to be be in Hyde Park next to the Summer WHite House.</p>
<p>By taking out the star athletes and legacies (the only add’l info asked by UofC other than the essays in the Supplement is whether an applicant’s family has ties with the U), RD could be below 10%. Great stats for a new admissions dean, who raised hopes by indiscriminately asking students to apply as long as they think their intellectuals work in their essays, only to dash them later. This seems equivalent to a scam which tells people to expect a 20-27% chance of success while is only less than 10% in reality.</p>
<p>With the surge and more applicants to choose from, it would be interesting to see how the dean and his staff balance their claim of de-emphasized SAT scores etc (they keep telling students they don’t look at the scores that much, but their personalities in the essays) and their pride of uncommon essays, which could be something of “utter seriousness,” in the form of a love letter,or in-between, is the distinctive feature of UofC, and something many applicants pour their hearts out for with a hope of acceptance.</p>
<p>In some ways, it seems that the UofC has already been steered from a unique, self-selective institution to the common game of rankings and numbers on which the success of admissions officers are often based.</p>