<p>You’re hardly alone. I know people who got into Columbia, Yale, Brown, Penn, etc. who did not get into Chicago. In part, it’s due to the complete randomosity of college admissions, that there are so many qualified students applying and only so many spots so that admissions is hardly like the totem pole that USNWR pretends it is (a Yale/Princeton admit was WL at Columbia, Duke, Penn, and rejected at Amherst; a Harvard/Brown admit WL at Penn; a Penn reject accepted at Williams/Pomona, a Stanford/Yale admit rejected at Harvard, a Harvard/CalTech admit rejected at Yale/Stanford/MIT, I could go on and on).</p>
<p>As I mentioned before, Chicago has too many applicants and too many students who want to attend to accept all of the qualified students who apply. This is not reflected in the Chicago’s admissions percentage but rather in the profiles of students both on CC and in real life who do not get accepted, despite being highly qualified. Schools that I think tend to accept all or almost all of the qualified students who apply include LAC’s like Oberlin, Bryn Mawr, Colby, Bates, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, non-ivy elites like Emory, Vanderbilt, Tufts, Notre Dame and the flagship state schools like Berkeley/UCLA, UMich, UVA. I think one will find the admissions decisions at these schools much more predictable than at the very top schools.</p>