Anyone with any objective views about Chicago, please??

JHS
Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:56:02 +0000

It’s funny – I see the attitude ammarsfound described on CC from time to time, but not from any of the current Chicago students who post here. But I never get it from any of the current or recent Chicago students I know in the real world.

I think the following describes the attitude of my children fairly accurately: Both of them loved Chicago when they looked into it / visited it. They grew up in a context (school, relatives) where people respected Chicago a lot, so they always thought of it as an elite-type college. It wasn’t the absolute first choice of either – that would have been Yale in one case and Columbia in the other – but it was always in the “first choice group” for both: a school they would be thrilled to attend. They have absolutely no interest in saying that it’s superior to this or that Ivy or any other college. As with every college they looked at, they thought it was superior in some respects, equal in others, and inferior in others, depending on which school they compared it to. As a practical matter, both of them applied to Chicago and didn’t apply to a number of other highly-ranked schools for which they were perfectly good candidates, which reflected the fact that they would be thrilled to go to Chicago and would feel ambivalent about the others. In my daughter’s case, she cut off the application process at a bunch of schools when she was accepted EA at Chicago. So, they clearly think Chicago is better for them, on balance, than, say, Brown, or Penn, or Dartmouth. But they respect those schools plenty, and understand perfectly why this or that friend may prefer one of them to Chicago. Mainly, they’re just happy to have the chance to go to Chicago.