The saltiness of your post aside, my “comfort level” for both Econ and the b schools comes from the data that is available to me, and from my lucky position of being connected to some knowledgeable admins at Wharton and booth.
If you look at traditional metrics (donor dollars, student outcomes, news articles (like the one I posted) investigating the matter, and I combine that with what I know, I reach my conclusion re b school - that Booth isn’t what people here are representing it to be.
I’m not giving away any proprietary info when I say that Booth admins/admissions staff will internally note that, when it comes to cross-admits with H and S, the booth folks say “those schools still take our lunch and eat it too.”
With Econ, my assertion is less pointed - it’s one of the best, but if you look at where the top PhD students go, I don’t think the unilateral direction is Chicago any more. S and H (and mit) are big draws.
BUT, maybe I’m missing something here? Your salty post implies you have knowledge on the subject that greatly exceeds most others. Educate us.
@Cue7 No doubt Harvard and Stanford win on cross admits for business, law and medicine. They are the top two universities the world. Booth is right up there with Wharton and ahead of all the rest in business and it is the clear fourth now in law. That to me is quite fabulous. Moreover, the college is at its highest ever and so are Booth and the Law school . Why all the negativity ?
I don’t think it’s a big secret that Harvard, Stanford and even Wharton win the cross admit game with Booth. In the same way that it is no surprise that Harvard and Stanford win the cross admit game with Wharton, but at this level a person’s success is primarily dependent on their work ethic, determination and perseverance not which school they went to. The school name is just for bragging rights.
Curriculum wise Booth has done a terrific job and is a perennial favorite among corporate recruiters with excellent placement statistics. A lot has actually been written about how Stanford’s MBA curriculum had a lot of problems with it and had to be completely revamped by Rajan, who is now coming as Dean to Chicago.
So just looking at the cross admit wins which is essentially a beauty contest does not do justice to many good schools.
1.) The University’s continued lack of transparency and propaganda surrounding its stats. Why obfuscate and blur the data - why not just tell us how many students, for example, were accepted and then matriculated to top medical and law schools? Why, instead, create a glossy brochure that contains misleading info and half-truths? (Look at the thread on placement - one of the posters confused acceptances with matriculants, and Chicago’s info on PhD placement is misleading.)
2.) The unabashed, harmful ambition of the University: as @JHS has noted, Chicago has gone quickly from being the most applicant-friendly college to the LEAST applicant-friendly college. As @JHS also noted, the move and use of ED and ED2 has been reprehensible - all to boost yield a little and create a misleading indication of its desirability. ED is already a questionable practice, and Chicago, after holding out for so long, has now embraced it even more than any other school (even Penn)!
3.) [Unrelated to these threads] the University’s continued missteps with the surrounding community - see the long, strained battle for a trauma center, that only resolved after the U received a sweetheart deal from the state, or the inroads with community centers/neighborhoods that’s only just beginning. Many urban Us are to fault here but, as a Chicago alum, I follow this narrative more closely than others.
Finally, the U has made lots of progress, and its strongly positioned in many areas - there’s no doubt about that. The three issues I identify above, however, really get my goat.
@Cue7, as to 2), above, it will be interesting to see if UChicago drops EA next year. I believe the consensus from other threads is that the EA was not a viable, student-friendly option for most applicants this cycle. The applicants that were deferred felt pressure (real or imagined) to change their applications to EDII and were overwhelming rewarded for doing so. Seems like UChicago did not plan on allowing deferred EAs to apply EDII, but did so at the request of deferred EA applicants. Other EA applicants may be left out in the cold come the regular decision round. I will reserve judgment on “2)” above until we see how the deferred EA applicants are treated in the regular round. If high stat, impact applicants were deferred in large numbers only to be denied in the RD round, I might tend to agree with you. Also, will UChicago drop EA next year? Doing so may seem to be less student friendly, but moving to ED/EDII only would at least make the process more understandable to the average applicant.
The unabashed ambition is a wonderful thing! Strongly disagree with your assessment on College admissions. ED is not questionable. In fact even EA or non binding EA as in the case of Harvard or Princeton has de facto the same effect as Ed because most top prep schools and high schools do not allow anyone to pursue alternatives.
EA for HYPS, MIT and CalTech really is ED as most of those accepted will attend that college, as stated above. So in essence, all of the HYPS, the rest of the Ivies, MIT and CALTECH, and many other good schools participate in what really or actually is an ED program. In the case of UChicago, admissions realized that EA is not good fit for UChicago because a good portion of those students don’t matriculate if they subsequently get accepted RD to a HYPS school. The brilliant thing was ED2 as this allowed UChicago to pick up some very worthy applicants who couldn’t quite make the HYPS EA cut, but would have been very competitive for the HYPS RD cut. UChicago admissions is looking out for UChicago as they should!
After you read those, you really mean to tell me ED isn’t a questionable practice?
Finally, don’t forget, the top schools all fight hard to look more homogenous. Penn and Chicago, for example, have never looked more similar. It’s getting harder and harder to discern differences between schools, but it’s never been more important for high schoolers to declare, in October of their senior year, that yes, they have indeed found their one true college love. It’s a silly system at best and pernicious at worst.
EA at HYPS, MIT, Chicago (in the past), Caltech, Georgetown is only ED if you want it to be. There’s nothing wrong with that. I know a few kids, not a lot, who were accepted SCEA by one of HYPS and ultimately decided to go elsewhere, and quite a few more who applied elsewhere and thought hard before enrolling at the SCEA school. Many of the students with the goods to get early acceptances at these colleges are justifiably confident in their own abilities, and don’t feel a need to take the prestige option automatically.
EA is not coercive, ED is. And I thought Chicago’s play this year really emphasized the coerciveness of ED – offering both, essentially deferring everyone who applied EA, then making it known that they were free to convert their applications to ED II, and between the two early rounds essentially accepting 2/3rds of its entering class ED. That last really shatters a bunch of informal taboos. No elite college, I believe, has ever take so high a percentage of its class ED. Most limited their early acceptances to 40% of the class or lower. Princeton used to get criticized snidely for keeping ED (when Harvard and Yale had gone to SCEA) and accepting half of its class that way, in order to keep its overall acceptance rate in the ballpark of Harvard and Yale. Chicago taking 2/3rds ED looks really tacky. It also makes you wonder whether they are really competing to get the best students, or just managing their numbers.
Unlike @Cue7 , this does not make me negative on the University as a whole. This isn’t the University of Chicago; it’s the University of Chicago’s undergraduate admissions department. It has been really successful under its current leadership, and that’s great, but this particular move this particular year looks like overstepping to me. We’ll see what they do in the future. We’ll see whether or not this portends any fundamental shift in values at Chicago. That, I would care a lot about.
My stance on the university is best characterized as ambivalence. I recognize that there a lot positive going on in Hyde Park.
On the other hand, the flowery picture of the school many seem to present (heck, this thread is called “UChicago: the meteoric rise”!) Is problematic to me.
Also, I differ in part from JHS - I view admissions as a fairly big part of the College’s makeup, and moves this year have been pretty awful. That then sours me a little more generally about that university, because admissions decisions tend to go through lots of admin channels before being approved. This change tells me many at Chicago don’t have their heads in the right place.
Finally, @CU123 - without ED, Chicago had a 8% accept rate and 60% yield. With those numbers, why did they have to play on the ED playing field?
UChicago taking 2/3rds ED is hardly tacky, after all, all of these kids are telling UChicago that there school is their first choice. If you realized how the hairline difference between kids admitted and denied then you would realize that its a bit of a crapshoot. Read an applicants application and tell me you really know this person…a few hundred words and a list of stuff they’ve done. This is the reality of admissions to top tier schools. UChicago wants to compete against the HYPS for the very best students and they are doing what is necessary to get that done. The question is what affect will this have on the HYPS schools as they see a few of these applicants (who they were going to admit) withdraw their applications from their schools because they where admitted ED2 to UChicago. Will they hold back and say “se la vie” or escalate? HYPS are still the big dogs in this process, but UChicago is probably becoming an irritant, nipping at their heels.
I don’t think the move to ED and ED2 was done primarily to boost yield or admit rates. Chicago already had pretty stellar admit rates and yield. I think it was done to shape the demographics of the entering class by increasing the percentage of wealthier students. The parents of these students are more likely to support the University with larger contributions and when these students graduate they will probably be more generous in their contribution thus building a stronger endowment.This strategy also allows UChicago to effectively do way with “merit awards”
Richer students today means higher probability of a bigger endowment tomorrow. Administrators love big endowments. It gives them more power and prestige.
Richer kids also come with another added bonus for the administration. They probably will not make as much noise about “thorny Social and equality” issues and probably lean right which would mean less friction with the administration. Look at the letter the Student Council sent Zimmer after his interview with the WSJ. Maybe he wants a friendlier student body? I feel like the administration and maybe even the faculty is rolling its collective eyes at all the “protests” on campus by students. Some students just compared Zimmer to Trump in once such protest
I do think you’re mostly right though about using ED to get richer students - though I don’t think that necessarily means they aren’t using it to boost yield and lower the acceptance rate.
I like it …but no. Way too complicated and anyone who has a family income of less than $60K is still going to have there costs covered (albeit they will still have to have a job during school) so they could apply ED without any worry of paying for college. It does affect the high middle income families though who may have to cough up 50-90% of the costs depending on a bunch of factors.
If you really want to conspire to do something like that you would simply have admissions look at the FA paperwork for financials and their essays/EC’s to determine there social agenda and then admit who you want…much easier. Both of which they claim they don’t do, which in this case, I believe them.
For me, if Chicago wants to be a big dog, it should act like a big dog. And, really, that’s what it has always done, up until this year. This year it decided to act like a Chihuahua pretending to be a big dog. I will be shocked if the big dogs do anything like coming down to the Chicagohuahua level.
The message Chicago is sending to the vast bulk of next year’s applicants is “Don’t even think about applying RD. As far as we are concerned, that’s about rounding out the class with URMs and a few high-need applicants. Everyone else, we are only taking ED. Go ahead, apply SCEA to [X] if you want, but when you get deferred you had better put in an ED II application if you want any hope of admission to Chicago.” That’s tacky. And I don’t think it’s likely to pull in a better class than the old system.
Ironically, it could wind up hurting Chicago’s selectivity numbers. Right now, in round numbers, they are getting 10,000 early applications and 20,000 regular applications, and apparently giving out around 2,000 acceptances. If next year they get 20,000 early applications but only 5,000 regular applications, the admission rate is likely to increase.
I doubt they will ever divulge the ED/RD split and acceptance rates. And not everybody reads CC or looks closely at the numbers to figure out what is happening. It is going to be very hard to figure out if they took 50% ED or 70% ED, unless you are paying very close attention and tracking trends very carefully. Plus if the applications numbers start slipping, they will just go to China and encourage more international kids to apply, or go the NYU route and make it easier to apply with all kinds of test credentials.
Given Nondorf, its location and its ranking, I don’t think Chicago is going to have any problems in the near future getting 30K+ apps every year
