Why don't ppl want UChicago to surpass HYPSMC sometime?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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<p>The answer to that comes easily to anyone with a modicum of knowledge about enrollment policies and strategies who also understands the expectations and reactions of students to the various early admissions proposals. It is a balancing act. </p>

<p>Another avenue is to study the schools that have changed directions over the years. You could always ask you why certain schools are successful with certain programs and others could not implement changes without risks. </p>

<p>And finally one could see how the 800 lbs gorillas can use those restrictive policies as a weapon against friends and foes. Again a good start is to study the predatory tactics of the Harvard giant as it plays the war games with Princeton and Yale, and the domino effect it creates at lesser schools such as Duke.</p>

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<p>Your argument is not convincing at all because you have not cited any concrete data/numbers. I admit that I don’t have any “modicum knowledge about enrollment policies and strategies”, but I hope you were serious when you asked others to be respectful on another thread.</p>

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<p>xiggi knows a lot more about this than I, but my view is that ED is a little sleazy. ED boosts colleges’ yield – they admit a third to half the class with a 99-100% yield rate. But students whose families are price sensitive are often unwilling to apply ED, because they are afraid of being locked in to a bad financial deal. And that can definitely happen. Most ED colleges get comparatively few early applications for that reason, and those tend overwhelmingly to come from affluent, sophisticated applicants. It winds up looking a lot like affirmative action for the privileged – they compete only against each other in a special preliminary round where far more of them will get to win than if they competed against the whole applicant pool.</p>

<p>EA in any form is much more applicant-friendly, because it gives the applicant an early answer of sorts (even if the answer is “deferred”), while letting admitted students treat it like ED or apply elsewhere and compare financial aid offers, depending on what they want. For that reason, pretty much every EA college gets far more early applications than ED colleges. Back in the Dark Ages – four years ago, when this year’s college seniors were applying – the University of Chicago got about 13,600 applications overall (a big increase from its previous year), and most of the Ivies were getting mid-20s applications (except for Dartmouth at 18,000 and Cornell at 34,000). But Chicago got more early applications that year than any of the ED Ivies – 3,800. Only Penn and Cornell came close. Brown got almost twice as many overall applications as Chicago that year, but only about 2/3 the early applications. Other examples from that year – MIT had 15,500 applications overall, 4,600 of which were EA (so 60% of Brown’s applications, but 200% of Brown’s early applications). Georgetown got 18,000 applications overall, of which 6,000 were EA applications. Those are pretty stark numbers.</p>

<p>HYPS has generally had “single choice early action” – basically a rule that you couldn’t apply EA to one of them and apply early anywhere else. So that makes applying EA to one of them a little less attractive than applying EA to Chicago or MIT, which don’t restrict applicants at all. Still, SCEA brings in EA-type numbers of applications. So in my reference year of 4 years ago, Stanford had 30,000 applications overall, and 5,600 early applications (note: still fewer than Georgetown). SCEA also keeps applicants who aspire to one of the tippy-top schools from submitting ED applications to the just-under-tippy-top schools like Columbia, Brown, Penn, etc. For a while Harvard and Princeton had no early application procedure at all, but they found they were losing candidates to ED applications at other Ivy League colleges.</p>

<p>Chicago, MIT, and Caltech (and a few others) have completely unrestricted EA. Not only can you apply to other colleges EA simultaneously, you can also apply to an ED school. I think quite a number of Chicago EA applicants also apply to Columbia or Penn ED. That lack of restrictions clearly boosts EA application volume, but lowers EA yield, because some of the people accepted EA will also be accepted ED someplace else and immediately decline the EA acceptance. Georgetown, BC, and others have a somewhat restricted form of EA, where they don’t want you applying ED anyplace else at the same time, but it’s fine to apply non-binding EA to places like Chicago or MIT.</p>

<p>Here’s how I think this has worked for Chicago. It gets a bunch of EA applications from people who are applying ED to Columbia, Penn, Duke, Northwestern, and think “Why not?” and toss in an EA application to Chicago, or people who decide to apply to a range of EA schools like Georgetown, MIT, Tulane. If it accepts those people, and if the ED applicants are deferred or rejected (as most ED applicants to those colleges are), then Chicago has 3 months of opportunity to market relentlessly to get the already-accepted student to come. And many of them have come, or at least more of them than Chicago has gotten from its Regular Decision round of acceptances. If Chicago went to SCEA, like HYPS, it wouldn’t get any of those early applicants. They might or might not apply RD, but Chicago wouldn’t be able to identify them or to do precision marketing to them until April, when the marketing field gets very crowded and frenzied.</p>

<p>Hope that helps.</p>

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<p>REA/SCEA are used to see who is interested enough in just that school to block out other options. However, when a school goes this route, the application numbers drop but yield will go up from the early round.</p>

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<p>Oh, I’d have to agree, but for a different reason. There was no attempt to convince anyone or present an argument. My post was simply pointing the person who posed the question, even rhetorical, in the right direction. </p>

<p>In the same vein, the same person could wonder why the four most prestigious and most selective schools in the nation ALL rely on the restrictive EA model, after having exhausted different options in the past years. Unless one thinks the schools do NOT do what it is in their best interest, this should be a good indication that the policy yields the most benefits to the school. </p>

<p>The above could address why schools like it, and still leave the applicants’ position unadressed. So, for the applicants, the SCEA/REA model being an early admission allows the student to send a message of preference to the school, benefit from the resulting reaction and usually a higher percentage of admission, and still maintain the ability to apply to plenty of RD schools for that “comparing of finaid” lauded process. </p>

<p>In so many words, the SCEA is the compromise that appeals the most to the highly selective schools AND students. But a compromise it is, and that does not mean it is the best model as what students and schools would like are not necessarily aligned. </p>

<p>There is a bit more granularity to express through details, but that is both pointing in the right direction and offering a back of the napkin “argument.”</p>

<p>For data and concrete discussions, a good start would be google for the research of C. Avery, et al, and especially the most recent Avery and Levin. </p>

<p>HTH</p>

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<p>Xiggi,</p>

<p>Just curious, but where did you end up for college?</p>

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<p>A tiny college in Socal!</p>

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<p>Maybe it’s just me, but I find the thought of UChicago playing 2nd banana to any other university ridiculous. I’d say pound for pound it’s probably the most intellectual campus in the USA. If only they weren’t be so liberal…</p>

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<p>If only they weren’t be so liberal?</p>

<p>What?</p>

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<p>Exactly that hevydevy. It’s a joke having Axelrod on anything called “bi-partisan”.</p>

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<p>What? Chicago might be liberal but UChig isn’t, at least not if you consider their econ department.</p>

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<p>On the whole, American elite academics tend to be left of the American center, politically, although I think less so now than ten years ago, and less than a lot of people on the right imagine. The University of Chicago isn’t an exception to that. On the other hand, among American elite universities and colleges, the University of Chicago may well be the LEAST left of center, the one with conservative viewpoints best represented. (Not all conservative viewpoints, necessarily, but certainly libertarianism and free-market economics.) The University of Chicago also has a very strong culture of civil debate, of evidence- and reason-based arguments, of willingness to reconsider one’s premises, and of a general rejection of doctrinal purity on all sides, so that liberals and conservatives talk to each other, rather than past each other, more than any other place I know of.</p>

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<p>This is all great to hear.</p>

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<p>I wasn’t agreeing with you, franko. I had no idea what you were saying. </p>

<p>And the fact is, most academics are leftists–it comes with being smart enough to be an academic. :P</p>

<p>Edit: I should probably mention that I was joking…sorta.</p>

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<p>If by leftist you mean adhering to scientific method and rational discourse (the latter being a big catchphrase when I was a grad student there in the 1970s). How else do we account for belief in anthropogenic climate change being labeled as leftist? More fringe is the idea that evolution and the Big Bang are scientifically questionable, and some kind of liberal/leftist conspiracy to corrupt American youth. </p>

<p>When I was there, people used to refer to it as the “greatest university in the world,” but that may have been rooting for the home team, and living off the remnants of Hutchins’ fame and notoriety. </p>

<p>That said, when you get to the level of HYPMS, and if you have a particular interest going in, you look at more than general notions of prestige. There are specifics that draw your attention. My son, for example, is seriously looking at Chicago because of its math department. It has Honors Analysis, second only to Harvard’s Math 55, in terms of math prestige. Similar considerations might pertain to anthropology or econ. But if you go in not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life, you might be more attracted to prestige alone. I feel that my son might be better served at Chicago because he’s temperamentally not very competitive, and Harvard strikes me as a hothouse versus a more laid back and nurturing Chicago. His mother–a Williams grad–simply wants him to appy there ED, and be done with it. That’s even more nurturing, and has the reputation of having the best LAC math in the country, but he says it’s in the middle of nowhere. </p>

<p>When it comes to name recognition, Chicago isn’t the only one with a problem. I mentioned my wife went to Williams to a co-worker and she said, “Oh, how did she like Rhode Island?”–thinking of Roger Williams. So much for being the No. 1 LAC in the land. </p>

<p>We live near Yale, and for math types it is definitely below Chicago. I wouldn’t mind if he went there, close to home. And he jokes, “I guess I could settle on Yale. It does have a top ten department.” I’d be happy if he did have the opportunity to settle on Yale–or Chicago.</p>