A few more points to add to JHS’s excellent summary. ED also favors families with earlier and better info about the school and, in UofC’s case, that skews UMC+. And, especially with an admissions process this complex, ED favors kids who go to schools that routinely send students to Chicago. These are not games most working and middle class families play.
As I’ve remarked before, in my area the early admits (under the EA system, which was more friendly to families who are not full pay) already skewed heavily toward private school kids (60% the year my D was admitted). To the extent that ED increases the percentage of the class admitted early (which it presumably will, certainly through higher yield and probably through an increased number of offers as well), then that changes the economic demographics of the class.
Finally, if part of the rationale for the new admissions system is UofC needs the money (to pay off all those construction loans, to keep doing things that maintain/boost its ranking, to build the endowment and keep up with HYPS), then that’s an implicit acknowledgement that these changes are designed to move UofC closer to a rich kids’ school model.
JHS and exacademic - you are both asserting that someone accepted ED will get less financial help from the University than someone who gets in otherwise. My simple question is, what is the mechanism that produces this result? You must be asserting that the University lowballs these kids because they are a sure thing. If that is your belief, are you simply making a wised-up guess or are there statistics that would support that conclusion?
Getting ready to get stoned online for saying this:) The more Harvard like UChicago becomes the better it is for its future, its finances and its students. The academic temple ascetic mentality simply does not work anymore.
@marlowe1 , Did you read what I wrote? I did not say that people accepted ED will get less financial help from the University than those accepted RD. (I’ll come back to that in a minute, though.) I said that people who are highly dependent on financial aid or discounts are much less willing to apply ED than people who aren’t. They may be mistaken, but it’s a very widespread opinion, and it is supported and aggressively promoted by public school guidance counselors from sea to shining sea. With or without justification, comparatively few people who depend on financial aid apply ED. So if you are selecting most of your class from the ED pool, there are lots of kids who aren’t there.
No ED college – even really popular, wealthy ones like Brown, Cornell, Duke, Penn – gets anywhere near the number of early applications that Chicago or MIT get EA. That’s a fact, not an opinion.
Also, for many families merit aid is important. In the past, Chicago has used merit aid aggressively to woo EA acceptees. We don’t know what it is doing this year with ED accepteees. It would not shock anyone if it turned out that Chicago is not applying its merit aid budget equally to ED vs. EA and RD acceptees. But whether or not Chicago actually does that, a huge swath of the world will assume that Chicago will do that, because that’s what lots of other (lower tier) colleges do. It’s practically axiomatic here: Don’t apply ED if you want merit aid.
Finally, as I said above, even among colleges that are need-blind and meet full need, there is often substantial variation in financial aid. The colleges may be acting completely in good faith, but a family would still want to compare financial aid offers from multiple colleges in order to make certain they are getting a good enough deal.
I take the point that there’s a general differential on the basis of wealth in the way the pool of all high school applicants divides as between the ED-using schools and others. I speculate that this might have a somewhat different effect for the U. of C. than for other schools. No doubt in the Chicago ED pool there will be found kids who stumble on to the place because they like the ranking in US News and, gasp, even its ivy-like prestige (hard as this is for me to grasp). Those kids could very well have wealthy enough parents not to have to fine tune the financial arrangements. Nobody here objects to the presence of such kids if accepted. If the University needs a sufficient number of fully or almost fully freight-paying parents, so much the better.
My tenderness, however, is reserved for the kids of the less wealthy who want to come to Chicago. Some of these might be motivated by the same ranking obsession as their wealthier cohorts. A significant number, I assert, will be the same sort of self-selecting kids Chicago has famously always attracted, who would come to the place no matter what the sacrifice. Such kids might have to do a lot of persuading of reluctant parents, to be sure. Perhaps some will be unsuccessful, and that will be a shame. However, if those Chicago-crazy kids of less-than-wealthy parents continue to self-select, using ED as the mechanism, my speculation is that the Chicago ED pool will not be nearly so skewed toward the very rich as that of other ED schools.
In my earlier advocacy of the desirability of kids working I never intended to suggest that this could significantly fund an education. JHS was not reading me sufficiently attentively. I was thinking again of the kid who really really wants to come to Chicago but who accepts (what I do not accept) the proposition that the ED way of getting there will diminish his/her financial package. I suggested that that kid make a commitment to work in order to counter that putative differential. I am happy to hear from JHS that there are still lots of part-time-working students at Chicago even in the era of the Odyssey program.
Although I’m definitely repeating myself (and growing ever more tedious in doing so) I state again that my only real interest in the ED argument is the extent to which it (a) boosts the chances of Chicago’s traditionally self-selecting students to get in the school, and (b) does not thereby lessen the financial assistance they would have received from the U. of C. (not just any other school) through other forms of application.
@Chrchill …your numbers completely sync with those from our local Admitted Student rendezvous yesterday, and yes, application number was slightly down from last year (28k from 30k).
Not really…only to say that the later (mid-summer) release of ED options may have created some hesitation or confusion perhaps (with both students and counselors); he predicted that EA would remain for this year, then perhaps disappear depending on how the numbers go. He definitely said yield was going up…
@DeepBlue86 “In other words, I don’t think that UChicago is admitting all geniuses and HYPS are admitting Noah’s ark.”
The truth is that UChicago and CalTec have the students with the highest test scores and GPA’s…Way higher than HPY. And that is bc HPY accept tons of students with less academic merits, but with super strong hooks that, in many cases, have nothing to do with their IQ’s.
Sorry to hijack this thread a little. The OP was under the impression that UChicago has been hitting all cylinders when he/she created this thread.
I don’t know anything about the arm race among the top schools. I just looked at the new USN rankings and saw a surprise - UChicago is ranked #7 in economics (#1 is a 6-way tie though). I also noticed some of its other rankings aren’t as high as I expected (I thought UChicago would be in the top-10 in pretty much every thing).
The OP also made the following comment:
NU now ties with UChicago in economics, computer science, and psychology and is ahead in chemistry (has been rising and now seems to be among the very best). Its research spending is higher even excluding engineering. Given that the comparison is less lopsided than, say, 10 years ago, it seems to me NU has been rising relative to UChicago in certain areas. Now you expand the comparison to other schools, I am not sure if “the meteoric rise” is really there, except for the college ranking.
These are just my rudimentary findings simply by looking up USN rankings and I am not trying to piss on the parade. The OP has spent more time on this and I am probably missing something. The collaboration and joint-research between NU and UChicago means it’s not a zero sum game anyway.
@IWannaHelp UChicago is ahead in College ranking, law school ranking, business school ranking, top in the country in English, top 5 in history, leader in sociology, anthropology and near eastern studie, physics, astronomy, math and statistics.
NU is nowhere near UChicago in any global ranking. But I will concede that NU is upward trending nicely. But so is UChicago.
I am looking at the USN rankings now. History and sociology are not top 5 (#6 and #8, respectively). Bio, chemistry, computer science, earth science, poli sci, psych, and med schools are outside of top-10. Do you know how they were ranked, say, 10 years ago?
