@jhs you seem like a wonderful and thoughtful person. But one would never know it from this rather scary picture you have as your user ID. What is this thing ???
Thank you @marlowe1 and @JHS for your insightful comments.
As a U of C alumnus from the 1980’s (albeit from GSB and not from the College), I can tell U of Chicago is going a sea of changes from my era. My recent visit to Hyde Park a couple of months ago completely opened my eyes. Campus North looks like a Mandarin Oriental on campus. Who would have thought U of C Administration would spend $150 million on a college dorm?
IMO the current U of C Administration is making the whole campus life much more user friendly (for the lack of better term). In the 1980’s I felt the whole student body was far more introvert: “if you don’t know about us, I don’t care to know about your opinion of us.” Zimmer and his cohort are certainly changing the environment.
It will be a great gamble to make U of C closer to the Ivy model. U of C may lose its unique intellectualism. Or it may find the Goldilock balance between quirkiness and prestige. I suspect we won’t find out the verdict until 5 or 7 years from now at the earliest.
I feel that the whole “no trigger warnings or safe spaces” positioning is an awfully clever branding exercise. Without really doing much or changing much, the University captured top dog status as an intellectual power House and paradise for higher learning.
Brilliant marketing move. Having come late to the game, Chicago has used it’s assets and strengths rather astutely
@FStratford you def have the wrong info…Booth itself has said that the gift should not be included in the endowment. Booth does not own that gift, it receives a payout from it every year which varies incredibly from year to year. btw it has actually been just one year that Booth has been ranked higher than Wharton on USNews (yeah soo long)… I guess that cancels in your mind the decades of Wharton being ranked ahead, the fact that Wharton has the top research output of any b-school and the fact that it has a stronger name. (fyi as recently as the in the 2016 rankings Wharton got a higher recruiter rank than Booth)…
@Penn95: Congratulations! You can rejoice again. Wharton bested Booth to tie with Harvard for #1 spot in the USNews ranking. Booth came in at #3, ahead of Stanford, which tied for 4th with MIT and Northwestern 
2018 ranking – Booth 3rd, Chicago Law School 4th … excellent ! Chicago medical school – 15 – bad!
Yes Penn95, Wharton is up after so long And it got there by essentially taking Stanford’s spot!
Booth in the same spot at #3. Okay, this top 3 configuration is harder for Booth because Stanford, despite ranking lower is still the most selective.
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-business-schools/mba-rankings?int=9dc208
@Fstratford not denying that Booth and Wharton are more or less peers, was just objecting to the claim that booth has something over Wharton because it was ranked higher once. There are bound to be variations each year it is expected.
What I don’t understand is the new USNews Econ ranking. How on earth is Yale above Chicago and NU at the same place as Chicagofor econ? That seems weird to me.
@Penn95 If you look at the absolute score, the top 6 is 5.0 and U of Chicago is 4.9 with Northwestern. That is .1 difference in a very subjective score.
This is simply beauty contest and prospective grad students should not take the ranking too seriously.
Discussions of whether X is better than Y are simply tedious.
@exlibris97 I don’t know, I personally like the extreme school spirit that @Chrchill shows. I think Chicago needs more of that and less of the “Eyore” kind of pessimism. Sometimes “Attitude” is everything.
Trash talking about one’s opponent is a grand American tradition whether it is in politics, sports or business. Universities even encourage it between houses in their dorms, where everybody always swears that their “house” is the best house on campus.
I specially like it that @Chrchill went to a different school and is excited that his kid is going to Chicago. I think the switch to ED/ED2 will bring more of such parents and kids to Chicago. Chicago could really use some irrational exuberance right now!!
@denydenzig It’s kinda useless to worry this much about one (particularly meaningless) measure of school worth. Ultimately there are plenty of studies that show that success later on in life is based on the student far more than the school, and there are better reasons to love Chicago than its rankings.
@Chrchill wrote:
If I go to Parchment.com (I’m not aware of a more reliable publicly-available source for this information) and look up what percentage of cross-admits choose HYPS over UoC, it’s 71%, 74%, 58% and 64% respectively, which makes Yale the leader in taking cross-admits from UoC. 51%, 58%, and 57% of UoC cross-admits choose Brown, Columbia and Penn. The only Ivy UoC beats is Dartmouth (58%/42%).
By the way, I don’t think this proves anything except that obsessing over rankings and cross-admits is a waste of time. I’m with @ljnsdkflx on this: UoC’s a terrific school, one of the best in the country. I don’t think there’s reliable evidence for any more precise statement than that.
^^^Sorry, missed one of the Ivies. UoC beats Cornell 59%/41%. To add another Ivy-plus name to the mix, MIT beats UoC 69%/31%.
Cross admits reflect preferences for a certain undergraduate experience. No doubt, if one seeks the usual party or quasi party environment as proferred by the ivies, then Chicago is not the right place. Cheers.
@DeepBlue86 Those cross admit numbers are kind of meaningless, because a number of those students may have applied ED to one of the ivies and EA to Chicago so they are required to take the ED admission if offered. To do a true apples to apples comparison you would need to only compare RD cross admits, which is not possible right now.
I think comparing to HYPSM makes sense, because there is no binding commtiment to these schools and it is well known that Chicago is not winning the cross admit race with those schools yet.
I think these numbers will change now that Chicago has introduced its own ED program, but unless the EA program is eliminated, we cannot get a good sense of cross admits wins/losses. Also remember that these numbers are cumulative, so it is not a single year picture, but an ongoing view, so until the old data is eclipsed by new data, it will be hard to get a really good picture.
@denydenzig - I don’t disagree that the cross-admit numbers are imperfect, but they’re backed by a substantial amount of data from real people and they contradict the assertions I quoted, which is why I referred to them.
I think what you’re saying only strengthens my point, though, because if you applied ED somewhere, knowing you’d have to accept the offer, you’ve effectively decided at the outset that you’d take that school over UoC and it’s therefore appropriate to show the ED school winning the cross-admit. In any case, I would guess the number of students who were admitted EA to UoC and also admitted ED somewhere else is probably pretty small. If UoC deferred or denied those students, they’d fall out of the sample because they’d never be admitted to UoC.
Going forward, given that UoC now has EDI/EDII, I would guess the UoC EA option will wither on the vine. If UoC’s your first choice, you’re going to apply EDI because your chances are likely to be much better (although I’ll be surprised if UoC discloses detailed data). You can’t apply EA to UoC if you apply SCEA to HYPS, which many of the strongest applicants will do because it’s the smart play to maximize their chances at one of them - and if they defer or deny you, you can apply EDII to UoC. I think the applicants most likely to apply EA to UoC in the future will be ones who applied ED to another school (and therefore prefer that other school, since UoC now has an ED option) or strongly believe they need to be able to compare financial aid offers.
That said, what I’d read into the Parchment info is that UoC applicants strongly prefer cities (to suburbs/country), also strongly prefer HYPS, and have a marginal preference for Ivies over non-Ivies. Whether one agrees with these preferences or not, I doubt many people would find them shocking. If there’s any evidence, as seems to be being suggested, that significant numbers of students are choosing UoC over its peers based on the UoC administration’s position on political correctness, I’d be interested to hear it. I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that academically UoC is one of the top universities in the country, and it’s clearly become highly selective; I think the more relevant question is whether UoC will ever become so strong, selective and otherwise attractive relative to, say, Penn and Columbia, that it trumps their Ivy “prestigiosity” and starts to beat them handily on cross-admits.
I don’t think “prestige” the issue. UChicaho is more prestigious than Penn and Columbia if you go by the rankings. Penn has a reputation of a party school with a very social vibe. Many kids prefer that. Columbia is similar to UChicago in rigor and core. But for many it comes down to NY vs, Chicago. Especially for international students, NY wins. Conversely, many NY high school kids want a change and want out of NY and prefer Chicago over NY .
However HYPS prevail over Chicago due to prestige perception.
I don’t hold any animosity or ill will towards any of the other Ivies at all, but I don’t think it strengthens your point at all. Since UChicago did not have ED in those cases, students couldn’t apply ED to Chicago, so you cannot assume that these same students would still apply ED to those Ivies if they could apply ED to Chicago. You may be right, but we just don’t know. They may not. I am sure, some won’t now.
This I agree with. EA’s days are numbered at Chicago. I expect them to discontinue this, because in the end students will figure out that it offers no advantage to them at all.
Why would you think that? I have seen no data to suggest this. In fact, I think this number would be quite large, specially for Penn and Columbia. It could be several hundred students every year. I personally know several that took this approach.
The way you have framed this question, seems to suggest your answer is Never, which makes no sense. In fact the data we have from Parchment actually suggests otherwise. Even with ED at both Penn and Columbia, the cross admit data compared to Chicago is statistically insignificant at the 95% confidence interval for both these schools and these include a large number of the ED/EA candidates. That should tell you something about where these schools stand in contrast to Chicago, compared to say MIT. My guess is once those students are either removed or self select into one or the other school with ED, you are going to get a very different cross admit number.
UChicago might very well might eliminate EA, but the option has appeal to those who want to shop around. If EA was not in place when my kids went through, they would have SCEA’d at HYPS instead of ED at UChicago.