University of Chicago -- The Meteoric Rise

Google Nobel winners since 2000. UChicago is in top 5. Many US elites including Harvard are not even in the top ten. Your worry is misplaced. It’s not just the College that is skyrocketing. Same for Booth and the Law School. The one that has been sliding is Columbia – soon to be discussed separately.

Yes, kids who got admitted ED, especially those who got admitted ED2 after having submitted a prior SCEA (or ED) application that did not yield an early offer elsewhere, will think ED was a godsend that justly favored them. Doesn’t mean they’re right, doesn’t mean they speak for applicants generally, doesn’t mean they themselves would not have found a different system more humane.

From a systemic POV, the crucial question here is being begged – why create a process that pressures kids to make a major life decision/commitment at a moment when they are (temporarily) radically uncertain about their alternatives? There’s no benefit in that for the applicant. And no institutional necessity for UofC to adopt this approach.

Begging the question is a question that suggest its answer. It is circular reasoning. Your use of these terms is incorrect.

@There are 3 Clark Medalists on faculty right now. Matthew Gentzkow who got his 2014 and Steven Levitt (author, research in the tradition of Lucas) who got his in 2003 and Kevin M. Murphy from the 80s.

Richard Thaler and his coconspirators are changing UChicago Economics and Business right now (in the spirit of open debate and factual examination) vs the traditional Fama/Friedman UChicago school. The bench is deep and the envy of any school

http://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/17/

Chicago has been visibly advertising the kinds of speech that will be tolerated on campus, through the letter sent to incoming class of 2020, multiple interviews given by Zimmer, the report on disruptive conduct etc. They are loudly letting certain students know that Chicago is probably not a good fit for them. They are subtly telling these kids that they might be better off at Yale, Brown, Berkeley, Middlebury, Amherst, Wesleyan, even Northwestern

This new ED process is another way to make sure that the proportion of these kids who are more likely to disruptively agitate against “offensive speakers” goes down or is crowded out in the application process. Its like airline pricing policy. They set fares and let customers self select and reveal their preferences.

How does ED achieve this?

The kind of kids and families that would apply ED are probably richer, whiter, Asian, international etc. This demographic is probably more focused on post graduation success, less focused on social justice issues, will go after traditional “well paying” jobs and will contribute much more as alumni after their graduation. IN other words, they will just come to campus, get their degree and get out, instead of organizing protests where they compare Zimmer to Trump or sending him letters asking him to come explain himself to them. If you take more of the ED type kids, you are by definition taking less of the students who are more likely to protest.

Actually it benefits certain applicants tremendously and weakens others’ chances a lot. Also Chicago may be doing this to change the demographics of the incoming class. Admit and Yield rate benefits is just icing on the top.

BTW, even if you disagree that they are doing this purposely, it looks like it may achieve this goal by radically altering the “kinds of students” recruited.

I’m sorry but I find your theory pretty implausible, if not flat-out ridiculous. For starters, you’re implying that the issue of campus activism weighs so heavily on the minds of university administrators that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to subdue it. Next, you’re suggesting that they thought the best way to do so would be to introduce 3 different Early admissions schemes.

‘Richer’, ‘whiter’ students are no less likely to protest or make their voices heard, and ‘poorer’ minorities are just as likely to want to stay out of the limelight and focus on getting a high-paying job after graduation. U Chicago admissions officers can also just as easily alter the demographics of the student pool in the Regular round as they can in the Early Decisions round. Either way, the last time I checked, U Chicago was pretty much in favor of reasoned, vibrant intellectual discussion and I’m not sure they would suddenly like to muzzle that by accepting a homogeneous student body.

This isn’t rocket science. The Early Decisions program is a great way to attract potential HYPSM admits to apply to U Chicago instead, because they feel they might stand a higher chance with the binding admissions scheme. Admissions officers will also get to exert greater control over the makeup of the incoming class as you suggested, but this would be to ensure a more accurate spread of academic interests and other talents. And of course, as an added bonus Yield goes up, acceptance rate goes down.

@85bears46 U Chicago Economics isn’t as legendary as it once was, but it is still among the top 5 of economics departments overall behind Harvard and MIT.

@reuynshard It’s ok to disagree

@reuynshard I give you MIT. There is a point to be made there. But Harvard is not better than UChicago in Econ. Whether its econ embraced by Wall Street (market efficient), government (UChicago’s law and economics, vs MIT’s Keynesians favored by Democrats to justify government spending) or the emerging behavioral economics discipline.

If Chicago wants to be seen as a peer of Harvard and Yale – as it deserves to be – it ought to act like a peer of Harvard and Yale. Playing games with EA and ED II isn’t the way to do that. That’s the way to look like a peer of Tulane or Wake Forest.

Calling a spade a spade, for the past couple of decades part of Chicago’s strategy was to position itself as a HYP safety school. (That’s not entirely fair, because there were always plenty of people who for one reason or another preferred Chicago to HYP or Stanford, but it was certainly a strong streak.) That actually produced a strong student body. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of great students HYP does not accept every year, and they have traditionally looked for people with extensive ECs, so they accept a relatively small number of primarily intellectual kids who were perfect for Chicago. But the “mainstream” HYP rejects were great for Chicago, too, contributing to a real Renaissance of student life and student organizations there.

Of course, Chicago shouldn’t (and wouldn’t) be content with that as a long-term strategy. Eventually, it needs to compete for the best students straight-up – and win – vs. HYPS. But playing the ED game isn’t competing or winning straight-up. It looks weak, and it is weak. And I question whether it will produce any meaningful gain, for looking so tacky and putting so much pressure on applicants. Sure, offering deferred HYP SCEA applicants an EA II option may land Chicago a few kids who might have been accepted at HYP RD. But the cost of that is awarding a lot of places in the class to people who are neither (a) people for whom Chicago was really their first choice, nor (b) self-confident enough to avoid pulling a ripcord. And all of those ED acceptees are going to skew wealthy. The college can possibly make up for that with its RD acceptances, but eventually well-to-do applicants will figure out there’s no point in applying to Chicago other than ED. And less well-to-do, but not necessarily poor, applicants may think there’s no point in applying to Chicago, period. I think that will hurt Chicago, not help, in the long run.And I think the appearance of tackiness hurts it in the short run. So I am not a fan of the strategy.

One of the things that was great about EA was that it gave Chicago the ability to focus its recruitment efforts on kids it had already accepted, which is pretty efficient. With the new scheme, Chicago is going to have to convince people to commit to attending before they apply. That requires an awful lot of wasteful effort, although it’s not entirely wasted if it helps publicize Chicago’s good qualities to students who go elsewhere and their parents.

@JHS Columbia and Penn have ED only as do Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins… Saying that UChicago admissions ED makes it a peer of Tulane or Wake Forest is absurd.

As always, JHS makes a vigorous and cogent case. Underlying it, however, are some assumptions which stick in the craw of many of us old alums. We never saw the College in terms of being in a competition with Harvard and Yale. That wasn’t because we in any way thought it was inferior but rather because we saw our experience here as being essentially different from the ivy league experience. Thus when JHS talks about “the best students straight up” and the importance of garnering all those “mainstream HYP rejects” he is using language I don’t accept. That Chicago was the not-Ivy League was the very reason I and most of my friends wanted to go to it. We certainly never considered ivy leaguers better than us. In our intellectual snobbery we thought it was the other way round. I myself never ever considered applying to HYP. I had a deep-seated (admittedly callow and adolescent) scorn of all that mainstream Joe-College boolah-boolah stuff. We all felt a class difference operating in this as well. No, Chicago was seen by those of us who loved her as a more serious and challenging place, where you could find others attempting to work out the meaning of things and read and consider “the best that has been thought and said” without recourse to Saturday afternoon football games (when we’d be in the cheap seats at Orchestra Hall). I needn’t point out the pretentiousness of much of this, and of course there were always less serious types around, including some of those “mainstream rejects”. But that was the spirit in which kids used to think about the U. of C. and its peers. The recent obsession with competition and rankings seems simply alien to that spirit.

With all the improvements of student life in recent years I nevertheless cherish the thought that kids with a special longing to be serious in that old way will get a break in the admissions process. If they see Chicago in that light they ought to be willing to make the choice that ED requires of them. And if they do make the choice, the University ought to give them that break. I haven’t heard anyone here say that ED applicants don’t get such a break. Of course, many of them might not need it. But in this new world of 8 percent acceptances, I would like to see these kids get in to a place which still seems to me to be specially suited to them. That some of the best of the mainstreamers tend to go elsewhere is just fine with me. Equally, if they choose to come to Chicago, as some always have, that’s also fine with me but not a thing for the University to go running after.

ED is a novelty here. If EA accomplishes the same thing - gives these uniquely motivated kids the same edge - then I would see no reason to prefer one over the other. Something makes me think, however, that an admissions officer looking at an ED application, with all its constraints on the applicant, will get a stronger message that he is dealing with real motivation and commitment. That ought to mean something.

As previously mentioned in other threads, there are three components to the application criteria:

1-5 : Academics
A-E : Personality - Extra Curricular, Essay responses, etc.
XYZ : UChicago fit - engagement

Highest rating is 1AX
Lowest rating is 5EZ

The ED should theoretically help with the UChicago fit - engagement.

I still believe SCEA is more harmful to the vast majority of applicants, more so than ED and certainly over EDII. An ED still allows the applicant to apply EA to any backup school of their choice.

Everything I am about to say is just my speculation, but in my opinion this is precisely what Chicago should not be doing. Chicago is not financially strong enough to play the Harvard, Yale game. If it does, it will lose. It needs to to have an insurgent strategy to win like we just found out in the US Presidential election.

Chicago’s insurgent strategy is quite clear. As HYPS try to become more egalitarian and court more first generation, poor and minority kids and enforce “speech codes” and establish “safe spaces” to protect their minority student bodies, Chicago is going the other way and courting the spurned “richer”, “prep school” students who are finding it harder to get into HYPS. They are also signalling that they are “prestigious enough” without “all the PCness” present at the other schools. They are telling these kids, “Hey you will feel comfortable here. Come here and give us your money!!”. Now Chicago will still take in “some poor, minority students” but they intend to squeeze out the “middle class” students in favor of rich kids, without actually changing their “need blind strategy”. With richer kids applying in both ED rounds, they don’t have to expend as much on financial aid, although saving a few million now is not the main reason they are going towards ED

So why do this?

First the richer parents will donate a lot of money to the school that their kids go to. Some may even be HYPS alums angry at how their Alma maters have treated their kids, and may choose to divert donations to Chicago from those schools.

Second this cohort has a better chance of being more financially successful and will likely contribute more to the endowment in 20-30 years. You could land up getting some “hundred million” donations from this cohort. As income inequality grows in the US and wealth becomes more concentrated, the more of these kids you admit, the better your chances of hitting the “several hundred million” donation jackpot in the future. Right now those are primarily going to HYPS. Chicago is not the strongest right now on this front and most of the big donations are coming from the “professional” alum cohort like Law, Business and to a smaller extent Medicine. They need some big donations from their Undergraduate cohort in a few decades to keep up with the big boys.

Lastly, kids who apply ED actually will feel proud to attend, since it will be their first or second choice school That will improve campus culture, cohesion and school pride.

I am happy to read your post, @marlowe1 , because it puts real flesh and bone on a point of view to which I only gave a parenthetical. That said, as someone who went to Yale, and who knows any number of people who went to Chicago, both as undergraduates and graduate/professional students, I would say that (a) we did see Chicago as intellectual competition, and (b) we did not consider our experience intellectually inferior to that available at Chicago just because we sometimes went to football games or parties and were often happy. When my children went to Chicago, my wife and I were thrilled about it, not because it was so different from Yale, but because it was so similar in the most important ways (which did not include football).

While acknowledging the experience your post reflects, I think it is accurate to say that, by the end of the 20th Century, it was apparent that the natural controlled experiment in approaches to elite university education had produced a fairly clear winner. The Ivy Model (to call it that), while not superior to the Chicago Model in every respect, fairly clearly worked better overall. And nowhere was that more clear than looking at fundraising: Chicago was not generating the kind of college alumni support that had shot the scholarship programs and endowments of its closest peers into the stratosphere, not only because its alumni were more ambivalent about their college experience, but also because its alumni had less capacity to give, and because the college was not producing the same number of alumni, in part because they weren’t getting enough applications from qualified applicants.

There was a whole McKinsey report about this. It was public at some point, but I can’t find it anymore.

A considered decision was reached, for that reason among others, that Chicago should recalibrate its college experience to make it more similar to the Ivy Model, while retaining some of its valuable differences. For better or worse, that is what has happened. And most people seem to think on balance it was for better. The college still has a unique intellectual seriousness and focus, but everyone – including alumni and faculty – is pretty happy with its popularity and resultant increased selectivity and general-public prestige, with its much-improved fundraising, with its more vibrant student culture and happier students. There is still some grumbling about dilution of the Core, but the Core still seems to do its job of producing students whose general education is impressive and reliable, and who can (and do) talk to one another across fields of special interest.

Anyway, the bottom line is that for years Chicago’s student body has included both people who think Chicago is better than the Ivy League and people who think that Chicago is a great Ivy League-type college. And it will (and should) continue to have both types. It would be weaker if it had just one or the other – and, ideally, by the end of four years you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them.

Nevertheless, if you care about Chicago’s general reputation among educated, sophisticated people (including employers), if you care about having really smart students who energize and inspire the faculty and vice versa, if you care about nurturing strong student organizations, and if you care about producing alumni who make an impact on their society . . . . then you don’t want a student body where no one ever wanted to go to Harvard or Stanford.

I know much less about UoC than many of the commenters on this thread, but, reading all this, it feels to me like there’s a long-term project underway, rightly or wrongly, to make UoC resemble HYPS in as many respects as possible. Success in this project requires great undergraduate and professional schools (check, and getting even better), high selectivity (very little room to improve, but ED will certainly help - although there are arguments against it), lots of money (making progress with this capital campaign but some way to go) and more wealthy alumni (will take many years, but this admissions policy will nudge things that way). The only thing missing: D1 sports, which are a major part of the scene at all the tippy-tops but MIT (and even they have more teams than almost any other D3 school). It wouldn’t be surprising to see UoC make a big push to upgrade its athletic facilities and programs next.

All of this might cause a lot of what historically has made UoC special fall by the wayside, I guess, and is likely to make for some soul-searching discussions if the school becomes less recognizable to its alumni and the other members of its community.

@denydenzig : Your “insurgent” strategy pretty much describes the University of Chicago of 15 years ago, not by choice, exactly, but by default. It didn’t have the money to compete for scholarship students, so it didn’t. It wanted to have richer alumni, so it was admitting richer applicants. It was chock full of preppies – in part because the preppies knew and appreciated how great it was, while the general public didn’t. It was like a preppie club with a secret handshake.

My kids spent many years at a private school with an excellent national reputation. In 2004, if you looked back over the previous 15 years, Chicago was the third most popular destination for its graduates, far behind Penn (which was local, and many faculty children attended this school), but wedged tightly between Harvard and Yale. My daughter’s fourth-grade classroom at that school had 24 kids (in a vertical 4-5). Six of them eventually went to college at the University of Chicago. It was very welcoming to them, and they were well prepared for it. People really appreciated that, if you were a good student, smart, and a “Chicago type,” admission wasn’t much of a barrier. Even if you had gotten a couple of Bs in 10th grade.

That wasn’t really an “insurgent” strategy; it was more of a complacent one.

The thing is, Chicago can compete with Harvard and Yale, in part because there are enough really good, motivated, intellectual students around to fill more slots than HYPS has available. You don’t have to win most, or even any head-to-head contests to benefit from the competition.

UChicago is definitely on the move. Cheers to the school administrators for all the hard work they have done. It was money well spent.

@JHS. couldn’t agree with you more, there is a sea change going on at UChicago admissions and with that will come quite a bit of angst.

We keep going around in circles. UChicago has pulled ahead of all ivies including Columbia, except Harvard and Princeton. Yale is not as hot as it used to be, but still ahead a touch in terms of cross admits. Stanford is on par with Harvard, and they remain the untoucheable holy grail. No matter how you slice it, however, UChicago is top five. Its current strategy will consolidate its position in the top 5. The ongoing and increasing prominence of its law and business schools will reinforce that position. Being top five in this insanely competitive market is a remarkable achievement.