<p>Insidelane:</p>
<p>Although your overall commentary is certainly defensible, your last sentence is rubbish. Looking at yield rate together with the SATs of entering students gives you a good picture of how a school is faring. (Obviously, a school isn’t going to have high SAT scores if it’s not winning its cross-admits with other elite schools.) Not to mention that sites like parchment.com offer statistically significant cross-admit data, with Chicago jumping in cross-admit performance against its elite peers in the past couple of years. The 55% figure is very relevant, and is very good news for Chicago.</p>
<p>Also, $280,000 isn’t really that much money for an entire 30,000-strong pool of applicants. It’s also not accurate - a great many students were pardoned from the application fee due to their financial situation. Let’s also not forget that most applicants are from upper-class families where the admission fee is going to be trivial. Although there is a question of where to draw the line in marketing, all other elite colleges market to students who probably are not going to be admitted. It’s obviously impractical to market to only people who are likely to be admitted, especially in the case of schools like UChicago when you can’t tell who is going to be admitted from students’ SAT scores due to the holistic application process.</p>
<p>Most of the criticism leveled at UChicago just seems to be from people who don’t want Chicago to join the ranks of HYPSM anytime soon. I think Nondorf’s strategy is that once UChicago starts being mentioned in the same breath as HYPSM among the general public, this criticism will start being more and more discouraged. Leveling arguments against schools that are “obviously more prestigious” is much more difficult than leveling arguments against schools that only the elite know about.</p>