intparent -
My feeling exactly. My heart sank when I saw the number.
We were speaking to parents of a current sophmore. They said the last two classes were too large, so the school is cutting back acceptances this year.
Location: Xiggilandia where the ale trumps Westvleteren
Posts: 14,833
Quote:
This is wild. When my daughter applied eight years ago, Chicago didn't get 10,000 applications total, much less EA. EA applications were about 2,500, and the EA acceptance rate was almost 50%.
The **overall"" admission rates for the Classes of 2009 and 2010 were in the 38 and 40 percent range. For the Class of 2010, there were still fewer than 10,000 total applications. They surpassed the 10,000 applications in 2007 with the Class of 2011, and the EA admission rate was 40 percent with an overall admission rate of 35 percent.
As far as a reference, in 1995, Chicago was still admitting more than 70 percent of all applicants.
We have been watching this trend with dismay for the last few years. My D2 (HS senior this year) knew how she would answer the "uncommon app" essay prompts in seventh grade when we visited campus with her sister, and has been carrying a torch for U of C ever since. Sooooo frustrating that it has become so easy to apply just for the heck of it and so "trendy" just in time for her application.
wow... UChicago truly made a significant progress in its reputation and appeals to prospective students for the last decade. For people who feel unlucky of their university application year, I think competition for more prestigious and higher ranked school will become more and more competitive. So I just tell myself, well, now is much better than 5 years later.
Number of high school graduates hit all time high in 2009. Current competition is more or less same as several years ago, the difference is people apply to more schools than before.
Look for a 19.5 % rise in total number of applications too! It's likely there will be 30,000 applicants this year. How the U of C handles this remains to be seen, as yield will also jump from last year.
For some applicants, who are not obsessed with USNWR rankings, Reed College may be a sensible alternative.
^Why apply to Chicago then? "Any school" doesn't offer anything like Chicago's core or have a substantial majority students who are passionate about their studies.
