<p>Perhaps Chicago’s challenge factor is overblown. Some classes, professors, students are more intellectually stimulating than others. Sure. Some of this lofty ivory tower stuff is a myth, the “Aims of Education” address and all, it sounds pretty, if gives the study of verb endings in Goethe a sense of purpose and meaning, but doesn’t always follow one’s real-life experiences here.</p>
<p>Warning: lame analogy follows.</p>
<p>If Harvard were a swimming pool, there would be a pretty big wading pool. In this wading pool would be concentrations like economics, government, and English, the concentrations which, according to my friends, the majority of classes are pointlessly easy, the classes are large, and students skate by unnoticed. Some of my friends at Harvard have stayed in the wading pool, for one reason or another. (My brother stayed in the wading pool at his Ivy, and did not know how to the library’s reference system after graduation). The wading pool would pretty dramatically slope down into a bottomless pit, though, after the wading pool at Harvard or any school. UMichigan would have that same bottomless pit option, but there would be a lot more in the 8-feet and 10-feet range. I have friends at H and friends at Michigan who have buried themselves under piles of books, have enlightened themselves and others, who have contributed to intellectual life in significant ways. Some of these people I know have gone on to pursue doctoral degree and post-docs at Chicago. Their verdict? Harvard was harder. For my friend who, as a sophomore, took grad-level physics at Michigan, Michigan was pretty rough, too.</p>
<p>At Chicago, there is no wading pool. One really has to get wet here. However, just like Harvard and just like Michigan, there’s a sliding scale of how deep you want to go. As Chicago, Harvard, and Michigan have large and prominent graduate schools that (at least at Chicago) encourage undergraduate crossover, one can go in deeper if he or she wants to.</p>
<p>Chicago students are forced to be more challenged than Harvard and Michigan students from the outset, but how much further do Chicago students venture simply because they want to? I don’t know the answer, and I’m not sure it matters that much. Every student I know has come here with the knowledge that there were other school that offered an easier routes to graduation, and that they chose the more rigorous option says a lot about them as people, if not their intellectual capacities and their earth-shattering observations about Marx and Weber.</p>