<p>People seem to get really hung up on the acceptance rate at Chicago. What difference does it make? </p>
<p>It is a well known and respected university among the business community and academia. The education is outstanding. </p>
<p>Of course most students would choose Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT or Stanford because of greater prestige and more exclusivity in the admissions process. But that does not make Chicago a lesser school, nor does it mean an inferior education.</p>
<p>Does anyone realize that the eight Ivy League schools only accepted about 22,000 students according to the latest USNWR survey. I don't know how many multiple acceptances there were, but that leaves out a lot of talented students. The top 16 schools only accepted 46,000, still pretty exclusive.</p>
<p>With a bow to idad for pointing us to the April 29, 2005 Wall Street Journal article, "A Flood of Crimson Ink", here's a quote from the article on the disproportionate influence of the University of Chicago versus Harvard on everyone's lives: </p>
<p>"Harvard is also a much less important intellectual hub than it once was. The University of Chicago, for one, has wielded much more influence in recent decades. It is no exaggeration to say that Chicago laid the intellectual foundation for the conservative ascendancy and nurtured the ideas that now drive the debate over economic policy, legal theory and foreign affairs. The key ideas of the so-called Reagan Revolution, including monetarism and deregulation, trace their origins back to the free-market theorizing of Chicago's economics department. (One striking measure of the department's clout: Of the 55 economists awarded the Nobel Prize since 1969, when economics was added to the roster, 10 have taught at Chicago and an additional 13 either trained at Chicago or had previously taught there. Harvard, by contrast, has had four faculty winners.)</p>
<p>One of those Chicago Nobel laureates, Ronald Coase, is acknowledged to be the godfather of law and economics, unquestionably the most influential branch of legal theory in the past quarter-century. (It applies economic reasoning to legal questions.) And while Harvard certainly has its superstars, when you look at the people who have taught at Chicago in the past 40 years or so -- Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Robert Lucas, Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Epstein, Leon Kass, Saul Bellow, Martha Nussbaum -- it is pretty clear which school has been giving off more heat."</p>
<p>And the heat and beat goes on. When I attended the University of Chicago (U of C) in the mid-70's, many remarked that U of C's heyday was behind it (peaking in the the 40's and 50's). That was wrong then (as the WSJ article can attest) and it is wrong now. The U of C continues to reinvent itself. There is no smugness and complacency over having arrived on a Park Avenue (as can occur in the Ivy League), but a continued hunger, grittiness and competition in the intellectual realm befitting a university in the "City of Big Shoulders", Chicago.</p>