Totally agree with you @denydenzig…
Agree totally. HYP is all about every conceivable kind of racial, sexual or geographic diversity or first generation to go to college, and other non merit factors, They don’t care about pissing off legacies because they don’t need the money. The sad reality is that a non-diverse perfectly great kid with superb academics and tests has close to zero chance unless she already cured cancer.
My S17 who has stellar academic numbers and ECs (national awards) including leadership, but offers absolutely nothing from a diversity aspect was passed on by Brown ED, but happily accepted UChicago ED2, I feel for this exact circumstance. Oh…and he IS working to cure cancer (and was a 2017 Regeneron scholar related to his research)!!
Congrats!
@vandyeyes Examples like yours is probably why the administration introduced ED2 at Chicago. You must be so proud of your son. And Brown’s loss is Chicago’s gain. Maybe he will cure cancer and donate a big fat check to his alma mater 
It’s certainly true that HYPS reject many superbly academically-qualified candidates, which historically has been at least partly UChicago’s gain, but I think it’s less because HYPS are pursuing a “grand social engineering experiment” (except to the extent that HYPS are avowedly seeking to recruit and educate leaders in many areas) and more related to a perceived need to satisfy a lot of constituencies.
Some that come to mind are sports (each of HYPS recruits close to 200 athletes per year for their large D1 programs); legacies (who typically comprise something like 10 - 15% of each class and are generally highly qualified - every year, two-thirds to three-quarters of legacy applicants are denied); a few development cases and celebrity/other VIP admits; some number of Questbridge/first-gens; other institutional needs (e.g., tuba player for the orchestra, etc.). All of this is done in a way that achieves/maintains gender/racial/ethnic/geographic balance, and is need-blind. The way the admissions offices do it, from what I can tell, is to filter out those who can’t hack it academically and then evaluate everyone else based on what they bring to the party. While the vast majority of students are objectively very smart, I estimate that maybe a quarter are admitted for the primary reason that they’re absolute brainiacs, the film on the top of the cream of the academic crop.
But - take a look at the freshman class profiles for UChicago and Yale below. Based on the information in common, they look like they’re dealing with some of the same balancing acts in similar ways, and are more alike than you’d think:
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2020
https://admissions.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/class_profile_2020_8-29.pdf
In other words, I don’t think that UChicago is admitting all geniuses and HYPS are admitting Noah’s ark.
That said, HYPS skew somewhat wealthier than UChicago (see here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html?_r=0), but that may be a result of UChicago not having as many wealthy alumni in the US or around the world and historically not seeking to maximize endowment/donations. Based on what I’m reading on CC, it’s looking like that might be changing.
Clearly, some of the institutional needs mentioned above are less important to UChicago and are likely to remain so. I wonder, though, how different things really are, or will remain. A lot of those institutional needs are already present everywhere. Also, as UChicago seeks increasingly to compete head-to-head with HYPS, I wonder whether it will come increasingly to resemble them, in which case the admissions criteria might also converge. The differences might become more around the edges, about feel and tone - and maybe already are.
Class profiles tell us very little about applicant profile and that is where all the social engineering plays out. 15,000 Martians might apply to any one of the HYPS and 160 may make it through, while only 500 Martians might apply to Chicago and 160 make it through also. Looking at the 160 Martians that make it through both schools tells you nothing about which school favors Martians more. Also the profile of Martians rejected and the Martians accepted might be very different at both schools, compared to the “Venusians” rejected and accepted at these schools. The class profile sheds no light on any of this. That is the beauty of conducting all the social engineering behind closed doors.
"HYPS don’t have the lock on “Exceptional kids”
I have to agree with it.
You can have many exceptional kids contributing to society in different ways. HYPS have graduated many exceptional politicians and entrepreneurs and scholars, etc. Their alumni have had great impact on the society positively (most) and negatively.
However Chicago (the College) has graduated a few greatest scientists in the history. Edwin Hubble first observed the universe expanding and founded the field of extragalactic astronomy. James Watson co-discovered the structure of DNA and pioneered the field of molecular biology. Their contributions to the human knowledge and society are beyond Nobel prize (Hubble was not even awarded). One thousand years from now people will still remember them but forget presidents and companies. In this regard I do not know any HYPS can say that so far.
So be proud of attending UChicago even it is not your first choice or second choice. You may appreciate it in the future. Good luck!
But…if the object of HYPS and UChicago is to produce classes with similar profiles, then aren’t they just doing similar social engineering experiments, with some variation in inputs (which, as UChicago comes to resemble HYPS more and more, and sends out more and more admissions marketing materials, are likely also to converge)? I guess I’m wondering why we care about the number and quality of the “Martian” and “Venusian” applicants each school gets when all the schools are looking to end up with the highest quality and similar numbers of Martians and Venusians in their classes. I feel like I’m missing some subtext here.
Because “highest quality” is in the eyes of the beholder. and unless you know how Martians and Venusians are being treated behind closed doors, you cannot really tell if one or the other is being discriminated against just to get to some “acceptable social goals”
Ah…I get it now. This is one of THOSE threads. I’m out.
I’m out too. I can go to Breitbart if I want to read this stuff.
I find it depressing that Chicago, which was always an intellectual school and never a rich kids’ school (a fact someone high up in the administration – Boyer? – pointed out proudly in the past year), wants to compete with Harvard by treating insecure, ratings-obsessed full-pay kids as high-priority admits. Difference in stats may be small but difference in class makeup/culture (motivation, diversity, values) could be significant. Same standards should govern early and regular admissions. UChicago, like MIT, made that work with EA.
The objectives of the policy changes aren’t hard to figure out. Improve yield and thereby selectivity of admissions to preserve/enhance USNWR ranking. Whether that’s a laudable goal at this point and what its cost will be strike me as the more important questions and questions whose potential answers probably account for many of the differences of opinions expressed in this thread.
The language of exceptionality was borrowed from CU123’s post and I used it because it made explicit what I think has been the underlying assumption here about the new system – that ED gives a significant edge to applicants (who need to be “qualified”/likable) compared to the applicants in the EA and RD pools (who need to be very/extremely “exceptional”). I just don’t see why not getting an offer from HYPS should give an applicant an edge on getting into Chicago. Far from believing Harvard has a lock on exceptional kids, I think that there are and will continue to be a critical mass of exceptional kids that Chicago could compete for and win in direct competition with HYPS. But those kids are actually more likely to be in the EA or RD pools than in ED2.
I’ll go back to one simple concept in all of this, applicants that apply ED1/2 really want to go to UChicago most likely because they feel it’s there best fit. Even when it may be their second choice in the case of ED2, that still means UChicago was in their top 2. Applying ED means something to the applicant and the college as it should and they should be given preferential treatment, as it appears they have. All the ED schools are clear that they give these applicants preference, or why have ED at all? In the end, the most important part is that the applicant should be a good fit for UChicago and UChicago should be a good fit for the applicant.
@vandyeyes. First congrats to your son – Chicago sounds like a great fit for him!
But if there were no ED, how/would the outcome have changed? Wouldn’t he have have applied RD to Chicago, gotten in, and accepted the offer? Or did Chicago become his second choice precisely because it had ED2 and otherwise he’d have applied to HYPS (and/or some other selective school(s) along with Chicago) in the RD round and have chosen one of the others over Chicago had they accepted him?
@exacademic S17 was deferred EA to UChicago before getting in ED2, so without action he indeed would have landed in the RD pool (with questionable likelihood for admission in my mind after the initial deferral…of course deferral EA this year was different than in years past.)
Yes, he was invested heavily into UChicago as his school of choice (albeit second) having visited campus twice, attended a class, met a coach, and had an on-campus interview. He was fully ready to commit to the school when he did so, and opted for ED2 to let the school understand that, as well as to put the whole process in the rear view mirror, so to speak. He had RD apps in to Stanford, MIT, some Ivies (although not HYP), and a smattering of others (trawling for merit), but was in a position (with our consent) to forego and commit to UChicago where he was very excited to attend and felt it a great personal fit on a number of levels.
Yeah, hard to tell whether he was helped or hurt by ED overall (my guess is he would have been an EA admit last year), but ED2 was obviously the right move for him this year! Thanks for answering.
Responding to exacademic’s assertion that the introduction of ED makes Chicago a “a rich kids’ school”…
I don’t get it, even allowing for hyperbole. The “needs blind” admission policy won’t change. The putting together of a financial package based on the parental ability to pay the freight won’t change. The Odyssey scholarship commitment (that no student will be required to provide partial funding through part-time and/or summer work) won’t change. The only thing I can see changing is the ability of kids to pick and choose among different financial packages offered from different peer schools. No doubt there will be some differences. Perhaps a kid - or more likely the kid’s parents - will have some bargaining power to upgrade University A’s package if they can assert that Universities B and C have offered them a better deal than University A but that they would dearly dearly like the kid to go to A. (I’m not sure that this latter thing actually happens, but it sounds like it might.) Or else the kid who would like to go to A must go to B or C in order to shave a few bucks off the parental costs. Whereas the kid who’s in only at A under ED hasn’t got that leverage or power of choice.
If my analysis is correct I hardly see this as a game-changer. Sure, parents that are truly wealthy (not merely middle- or upper-middle class) don’t have to worry about the fine points here quite so much. Does that mean their kids will flock to the U. of C. via ED and kids of the middling sort will avoid it? That hardly seems likely. I doubt we are talking about very wide disparities of financial assistance in any event as between the deals the negotiating parents make and the deal offered by University A, especially if A is the University of Chicago, where the median income of parents has always been well below that of ivy parents.
I might add that a kid who really wants to go to the U. of C. and who feels that that choice is costing his parents more than another school ought to seriously consider making up the difference through part-time and summer work. Before the Odyssey program that commitment was required of all students receiving financial assistance, and it was a good thing for many reasons - not only through the sense it gave the student of having actual skin in the game and contributing one’s own bit to the family enterprise but through the experience of work itself, in counterpart with the somewhat unreal intensities of the academic life. It was a much better use of time than most extracurriculars without entirely ruling these out.
@denydenzig I think school spirit is fine but the post just seemed insecure, which is what I didn’t understand. I remain unconvinced that a university ranked “#1” is any better than one ranked “#10”.
@marlowe1 , I think your post #257 is somewhat naive.
Although I agree with much of what you say in theory, both the data and what I learn from posters all the time here on CC tell me that lower and middle income (and pretty far into upper middle income) families are extremely reluctant to have their kids apply ED anywhere. Also that the differences in financial aid among various need-blind, meet-full-need colleges can be really substantial, $10,000 - $15,000 per year, which is a lot if you are already maxed out and borrowing against the future. Odyssey aside, the University of Chicago has traditionally taken a much harsher view than many competitors of how much home equity and retirement savings ought to be available for college costs, and what small, closely held businesses are likely worth.
I do think more lower and middle income kids should take advantage of ED, and things like Questbridge and Odyssey absolutely help some kids. But you are lying to yourself if you fail to acknowledge that ED tilts the playing field even more towards the rich than the “normal” world of RD (where it was already plenty tilted).
And, again, you have your head in the sand if you think students don’t have plenty of skin in the game. Even with Odyssey, and especially with kids whose families earn more than the Odyssey limit but a lot less than is necessary to afford the University of Chicago comfortably – it goes without saying that the kids are working summers and part-time during the school year. Only very affluent kids can even think about avoiding that, and maybe a handful of kids with branded full-ride scholarships somewhere. Odyssey doesn’t make kids work to pay tuition, but it doesn’t buy them clothes or CTA fares, or the fees kids have to chip in to play club sports. There’s no chance to make up the difference between Chicago and Acme Off-Brand University with student earnings; they are spoken for already.