<p>Slipper - I disagree. Many schools (the ivies, stanford, duke, etc.) tend to want the same sort of students, and another group (Chicago, LACs like Swarthmore, Reed, Oberlin, etc.), have divergent goals. </p>
<p>Now, there can be tremendous overlap in the types of students schools want, but lets compare, say, Chicago and Dartmouth because these two schools have about the same number of students. Right off the bat, Dartmouth fields around 34 sports teams, Chicago fields about 17. Despite having the same number of students, Dartmouth will need about twice the number of skilled athletes on campus to maintain its sports program. Dartmouth will need squash players and skiers and people able to ride horses for the equestrian team. These requirements simply aren’t present at Chicago. The more sports teams you have, especially ones that compete in competitive sports (in the ivy league, squash, crew, soccer, lacrosse, etc. tend to be very competitive), you will then produce more alums with a vested interest in these sports. As another example, Princeton is about the same size as Chicago or Dartmouth, but fields nearly 40 competitive D1 sports teams. Again, this will lead to tangible differences in the student bodies at a Chicago or Princeton. </p>
<p>So if teams do badly, their will be more vocal alum protest about this. Dartmouth also has more pressure to admit legacies, if for nothing else, because Dartmouth used to be larger than the U of C (especially when the U of C was constricting in the 60s and 70s), and there are simply more legacies that want to gain admittance to Dartmouth. In short, read Jerome Karabel’s “the chosen” for more info on how ivy league schools now look to fill their classes. Since Chicago doesn’t have the same constituent groups, they don’t face the same pressures - at least not to the same extent.</p>
<p>What does this mean overall? Chicago will continue to field a higher proportion of the “eggheaded” types than will see the light of day at other schools, mainly because Chicago does not have to answer to all the needs that its peers schools must respond to on a yearly basis. Yes, Chicago - just like any other school - wants to diversify, but the difference IS OF EXTENT - at Princeton and Dartmouth, there is more direct pressure every year to appeal to the wide range of constituent groups than there is at Chicago.</p>
<p>At Dartmouth - if a student is intellectually curious, that’s great. If that student, though, is intellectually curious, great at squash, AND a legacy? Well, that’s what really excites D’s admission committee. At Chicago, the legacy factor would be nice, the squash is fine, and the intellectually curious bit is the BIG factor.</p>