<p>I’d be cautious about being TOO optimistic, since those international rankings are skewed toward graduate school. And what happens if other top universities start marketing the way UofC does? What about UofC’s lack of engineering programs?</p>
<p>I hate to be the bear here, but I think everyone has grown way too optimistic about UofC, though only time will tell. This year’s yield rate and USNWR ranking will tell us more.</p>
<p>I don’t think UofC will surpass HYPSM anytime soon, but Columbia, sure.</p>
<p>@TheBanker,
Just to be clear, I don’t think that UChicago will be surpassing HYPSM anytime soon either (I was thinking more along the lines of just entering the elite group, which probably wont happen within the decade at the very least). </p>
<p>
While I wouldn’t award them as much importance as the international rankings allegedly do, graduate school strength is a good indication of overall scholarly quality of an institution. </p>
<p>
Some have. Regardless, the marketing would be largely ineffective for HYPS and M. These schools have reached a sort of popularity saturation point and are all frequently referenced in popular media to become household names. Chicago, however, had the “advantage” of having been generally unknown, and I’ve heard of several students who hadn’t heard of the school until receiving mailings from them…</p>
<p>
This is a genuine concern. While I couldn’t care less about this (massive) omittance (I may even prefer it, personally), I can see how the absence of an engineering school can hurt the universities future prospects…</p>
<p>Chicago’s improving yield is indeed impressive, but it is unlikely to have been at Stanford’s expense. See [Stanford</a> Daily | University braces for large incoming class<a href=“%22Stanford%C2%92s%20yield%20rate%20has%20been%20consistently%20increasing%20from%2064%20percent%20in%202002%20to%20%5Bthe%20class%20of%202016’s%5D%2073%20percent%20rate.%22”>/url</a> It’s likely to go up again this year. So there’s just not many students turning down Stanford for any other school these days, let alone Chicago.</p>
<p>And the top college rankings haven’t really changed over time. Only USN&WR’s methodology has. If you look at academic peer rank Stanford and Harvard have always been at the top, followed closely by Yale, Princeton and MIT (not necessarily in that order). When USN&WR first started their list, they used peer rank as their sole criteria. But it doesn’t sell magazines if you get the same results every year, so they added (and then kept changing) all these other factors. The results then started to diverge, sometimes drastically and illogically, from academic peer rank. For a comparison of peer ranking to the magazine’s ranking for this year see: [url=<a href=“TaxProf Blog”>TaxProf Blog]TaxProf</a> Blog: U.S. News College Rankings: Peer v. Overall](<a href=“http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/14/university-braces-for-large-incoming-class/]Stanford”>http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/05/14/university-braces-for-large-incoming-class/)</p>
<p>Again, that is not to say Chicago is not great. It has been a great university for a long time. But cracking that final tier will be a continued challenge.</p>
<p>I think that ~5 years from, nobody will question UChicago having the same or higher USNWR ranking as MIT or Stanford. Then maybe by the 2020s, UChicago will be in a place to be in the HYP echelon.</p>
<p>I have to admit I was more impressed by UChicago when it’s students were less engaged in ranking arguments and more engaged in academics and truly innovative thinking. </p>
<p>What happens at UChicago may depend on how the college responds to demographic trends in the US. If UChicago does what the Ivies have unfortunately done and tries to cap its Asian admit rate, then it will be playing the same game like the Ivies and may not do very well. If on the other hand, UChicago, bucks the Ivy trend and goes the way of Caltech and admits as many qualified Asians without any artificial caps, in 15-20 years, it would have snagged some of the best students at the expense of the Ivies and that will eventually start showing in the “alum success rates”, “endowments”, “prestige” and so on. </p>
<p>So the question is “Will UChicago, have the courage to let its Asian population rise to 40% or even 50% if the demographics and admission data demand it?” Or will it play the Harvard, Yale, Princeton game? I feel that the school that races ahead and embraces the new demographics in the US first, will reap huge rewards in 10-15 years</p>
<p>@SoCalPapa Stanfords increasing yield doesn’t mean its winning more cross-admit battles. It might just mean its accepting more restricted early who don’t apply anywhere else. I mean who’s gonna apply anywhere else after getting into stanford?</p>
<p>Agreed Chicago’s fortunes have been bolstered by its opennes to those who are capped/banned - an open and welcoming place for bright but socially undesirables: jewish professors, women law students, african american business students, Italians,… and in the past decades, free-marketers.</p>
<p>In the coming decades where world power shifts to the Pacific Rim, it should lead again in not banning/capping these “uppity” Asians to the fold. And it should do it early.</p>
<p>It may not be politically correct to say this, but even at HYP, I really believe that only those Asians who comfortably fit the introverted study-all-day stereotype get blocked out. Then again, so many Asian people fit that stereotype, so it’s really hard to know. I’m Asian and didn’t necessarily ace my SAT’s (2270) and still got in at UChicago, Dart, Duke, and Cornell…and at least managed to get at least waitlisted at Princeton. I really think that showing my passions without coming across as a grind helped me out. My experience has been that the cool, social types of Asians have the best outcomes in admissions.</p>
<p>Like, I have an Asian friend whose ACT score was 30 and got in at Dart and another Asian friend whose SAT score was 2090 and got in at Princeton. They resembled very social personalities, unlike some other introverted 2350+/35+ Asians who fared worse. As far as I know, neither had any significant connections.</p>
<p>I guess the point of the “Myth…” article is that given the demographic trend, it is really strange that given the percentage of Jewish college age kids, they represent such a high percentage of admits to the Ivies when they are not as highly represented in other “non discriminatory measures of high academic performance”, while as the Asian college age population surges along with total domination in such factors as “National Merit semi finalists”, the Ivies still have less than 20% of their class as Asian. Even if the caricature that “Asians are awkward nerds (insulting btw) and don’t have as much to contribute to a class” is true, I am sure that there are enough highly qualified Asians in the application pool to represent at least 30% of the matriculating class in most of the Ivies. That could mean 2000 or more Asians in the top 10 schools than there are now. </p>
<p>The point is that if one University systematically discriminates against a well qualified group and another admits based purely on merit and lets the chips fall where they might, what will eventually happen to the reputations of the said Universities in the long run in terms of outcomes, prestige, etc? Maybe nothing will happen, Maybe the reputation scores will eventually change in favor of the University that does not discriminate, Only time will tell.</p>
<p>I visited Harvard one time, and I can say for sure that more than 25% of the students I saw were Asian. I guess the “race unreported” stat has many Asian students who are scared to say their race due to the potentially negative effect it may have.</p>
<p>Based on recent figures, I think the statement “the Ivies still have less than 20% of their class as Asian” is significantly inaccurate. For recent classes, I think the figure is well above 20%. I know Harvard, Princeton, and Penn all reported that more than 20% of the enrolled students in their classes of 2016 had self-identified as Asian, and that doesn’t count the sizable number of ethnic Asian kids who refuse to identify themselves as such, or the half (at least) of international students from an ethnic Asian background. The real percentage of Asian students in those classes is probably somewhere between 25% and 30%.</p>
<p>At Berkeley and CalTech, as the number of Asians have increased markedly in society, the number of asians present at these schools have increased as well. At Harvard and Penn, at least, there has been a slight uptick (especially of late), but it really isn’t as dramatic. There does seem to be, with a bit of variation, a “cap” (self-imposed or otherwise) on the self-reports each year at around 20%.</p>
<p>Cue7, you are missing something. The “cap” alleged at those schools for years – and, unfortunately, supported by the evidence – was basically at 15%. That’s why it was meaningful when a couple years ago everyone started reporting numbers much higher than that for their freshman classes. </p>
<p>I forgot to include Columbia, which reports 29% self-identified Asian. It’s not entirely clear whether that includes international students; if not, the real Columbia figure is probably 40%.</p>
<p>Using Caltech and Berkeley as references is far from perfect, however, since the ethnic Asian population of California is much higher than it is anywhere else in the country. (With the possible exception of New York City; hence Columbia.)</p>
<p>JHS: Interesting. So, in response to this article and others, do you think the ivy+ schools proactively addressed the issue and eliminated the cap?</p>
<p>Short answer: yes. Long answer: I don’t actually believe they had a cap. I can’t imagine the process by which any of them would have adopted a cap and enforced it for any meaningful period of time (like, more than a week), without dozens of whistleblowers exposing them. But there was lots of evidence piling up that Asian applicants seemed to be at some sort of disadvantage relative to similarly situated peers, and I think that the colleges eventually took a hard look at how they were evaluating applicants and what sorts of bias might be getting reflected. At the same time, as the number of applications to elite colleges has zoomed, I suspect the elite colleges are getting more applications from what they consider “the right sort” of Asian, i.e., someone whose most important achievements to date are other than a perfect superscored SAT, a GPA that rounds up to the highest GPA theoretically possible at that high school, and a bunch of science-competition ribbons.</p>
<p>@PAGRok: that’s a good thought, but, unlike Harvard, Stanford hasn’t been increasing its # of early admits as of late. The # of early admits for each of the last four class years has been as follows:</p>
<p>On a completely separate point, I think Chicago historically has had the greatest disparity of any university between its quality and its name recognition. In a 2003 Gallup Poll asking people to name the best university in the United States, Chicago didn’t even register. That was true even among Midwest respondents. (By comparison, a material number of respondents from the South named Texas A&M as the nation’s top university.) See [2003</a> Gallup Poll](<a href=“Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public”>Harvard Number One University in Eyes of Public)</p>
<p>I think the marketing that Chicago has done recently has been so effective not just because it is voluminous and clever, but also because the product they are marketing (Chicago University) is so very good. Public perception is finally catching up with reality.</p>