chicago - northwestern

Pizzagirl
Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:54:55 +0000

“In other words, many accepted students last year chose Ivies or Stanford and just applied to NU in the first place just as a safety.”

You don’t know that. That’s total conjecture on your part that they all went to Ivies or Stanford. Hint: There’s more to the world than Ivies and Stanford. Maybe a prospective NU music student went to Juilliard instead.

What part of “the two student bodies have generally equal (and high) stats” aren’t you understanding?

Here’s another way of looking at it. Having great grades, ACT/SAT, and EC’s is in essence buying yourself a lottery ticket to get into elite schools of the caliber of NU and U Chicago. They turn away tons of qualified kids and they could easily create a new freshman class out of whole cloth if they had to.

The caliber of the ticket that you need to compete in either the NU lottery or the U of C lottery is very high. More people choose to ENTER the NU lottery because NU has a more typical college experience to offer (Greeks, Big 10, sports) and has additional programs such as journalism, music and drama, than choose to enter the U of C lottery because U of C has a more unique and self-selecting culture. But the caliber of the ticket itself is high, and the students who get in are uniformly of high quality. It is stupid and pointless to argue which one is “harder to get into” or which one has “smarter students.” U of C may have a higher admit rate, but you still had to punch the high caliber ticket to get in the game in the first place, so the higher admit rate does not translate into “less prepared.”

It is embarrassing that people who are associated with such fine universities have to pick at and downgrade the other. (It’s also embarrassing that people try to differentiate the Ivies into upper and lower, or try to distinguish between Stanford and NU as if one’s worthwhile and the other isn’t, but whatever.) Truly smart people understand that all the top 30 or so USN&WR schools attract the cream of the crop, offer fine educations, and the distinctions are ones of personal preference and fit.