<p>Motherbear:</p>
<p>Just to be clear, I don’t think of my time at UChicago as “the bad old days.” Do I need to convey my affinity for the school in some other way for you?</p>
<p>Of interest, Michael Behnke (an old admissions exec at UChicago), provided a pretty solid, one paragraph description of UChicago in the late 90s:</p>
<p>“It’s true, and alumni were right to complain, that there were significant lapses in attention to the needs of undergraduates outside the classroom. This is a culture that emphasizes intellectual life and is somewhat proud of not having a lot of the amenities other places have. But our surveys show that alums felt they were not well served by career guidance and placement, they didn’t develop socially as much as they would have liked, they didn’t have enough opportunities to participate. We’ve made significant improvements.”</p>
<p>Full interview here: [Welcome</a> to the University of Chicago College Report Online](<a href=“http://magazine.uchicago.edu/9810/CollegeReport/behnke.htm]Welcome”>Welcome to the University of Chicago College Report Online)</p>
<p>The MIT comparison, to me, seems very apt. It’s also interesting to see what a current student, neltharion, has to say about UChicago. I also would describe my time there as intense, and, at least academically, you just don’t hear that as much about many of UChicago’s peer schools. I don’t know if I would describe Penn or Wash U as academically intense places. There are certainly pockets of extreme academic intensity, but it’s not in the air the same way it is at UChicago, at least when I was there. Also, Interestingly, Behnke was dean of admissions at MIT before coming to UChicago, and he makes that comparison often.</p>
<p>I guess as an older alum, certainly one rooted in the days where UChicago was more comparable to MIT or Caltech (without the tech/engineering aspect), I do still think of comparing UChicago and WUSTL to apples and oranges. Times change, but that transition isn’t quite complete at UChicago.</p>