Declining Rhodes Scholarship Production at Chicago?

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
1

A curious note, in light of 0 UChicago college students winning the Rhodes Scholarship this year:

Has Chicago’s Rhodes Scholarship production been declining even as the College’s class size has been increasing?

From 2003 - 2010, Chicago grads won 11 Rhodes Scholarships.

From 2011 - 2017, Chicago grads won 5 Rhodes, even though the college has grown considerably during this time.

Source: https://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/25/

I’m not being a grump here - I agree that Chicago’s College now is better than it was in the past, and students seem happier. Further, there are more supports for current Chicago college students, and just more stuff going on for the college community.

At the same time, the trend above seems puzzling. It’s hard to pin down patterns in Rhodes production (especially because the award is so hard to attain), but many top schools - Harvard, Yale, Williams, etc. - have been consistent over time.

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(One of the 2016 winners was a Chicago Law student - he did his undergrad at Yale, so I don’t count him as one of the Chicago College’s winners.)

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I remember reading sometime during that Rhodes-fertile period that the University, which had never previously made any efforts in that direction, decided to get serious about identifying, encouraging and assisting likely candidates to make Rhodes applications. That effort seems to have borne fruit during that period. In one of those years three Chicago students got Rhodes Scholarships in a single year. I wonder if the administrator responsible for that effort moved on or whether the University’s emphasis reverted away from cultivating such rare birds to making efforts more likely to benefit a greater number of talented kids. The ivy-leaguish glamor of the Rhodes - not to mention its association with athleticism - has never seemed like Chicago’s style. However, the precipitous decline does seem a bit of a mystery in that today’s more athletic and extracurricular-oriented students would seem to be more likely to have Rhodes-friendly c.v.'s than students of former years.

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@marlowe1 - yeah, exactly. I’d think that Chicago now - more than ever before - is more fertile ground for potential Rhodes winners. There are more NCAA champion types at Chicago now, and certainly more students who would ace the interview portions of the Rhodes application process.

At the same time, I wonder if Chicago had a bigger share of the “rare/odd but brilliant bird” types in the past, in comparison to now. Chicago still attracts those students though, so I’m not sure.

It’s puzzling all around. AND my initial count was off, from 2011-17, Chicago had 4 winners (a fifth was a law student, and didn’t go to Chicago’s college).

So:

2003 - 2010: 11 Winners
2011-2017: 4 Winners

Strange!

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Your count is still a little off, because one of your 11 2003 - 2010 winners actually won in 2011, although he graduated in 2010 (or, if you want to count him in 2010, then you shouldn’t count the 2003 winner, who was class of 2002). Either way, there were 10 winners 2003-2010. Also, I think it’s right to count the law student in 2016 – he was a third-year law student, and was nominated by and supported by the University of Chicago, not his undergraduate institution. That’s different from the first-year law student who applied as a Yalie, and for whom Chicago does not claim credit. (On the other hand, the other 2016 winner, a 2016 College AB, did not win a Rhodes in the U.S.; she won her scholarship in her own country, Zimbabwe.)

So I think the score is 10 for 8 years vs. 6 for 7. If you went 8 years to 8 years, 2010 - 2017, and 2002 - 2009, it would be 9 - 7. That’s a pretty small base and a pretty small difference, so I don’t know how statistically significant it is.

Of course, if you really want to construct a point, you could compare four-year frames: 2005 - 2008 (8), 2009 - 2012 (4), and 2013 - 2016 (2 from the College, 1 from the law school), and 2017 - 2020 (0, so far).

What really seems to be the case is there is a definite swing to students at public universities, and not just perennials like Michigan (which did get one this year), Berkeley (0 this year), CUNY (one this year), and the service academies (one for each of the major ones this year). This year saw scholarships given to students from academic prestige hotspots like the University of Alaska - Anchorage, Temple, and UMBC.

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But @JHS - your analysis doesn’t account for the considerable growth of the college since 2010 (or so). The college is now about 30% bigger, but the Rhodes production has - any way you cut it - declined. How does that work?

Further, this growth has been billed as growing the pie. As @marlowe1 suggested, there should be many more Rhodes types walking around Chicago now than ever before.

(Btw despite the swing in interest to public universities, Harvard and Stanford still had four winners EACH this year. It looks like interest in a select handful of private schools has not waned.)

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Well it seems that Stanford and Harvard will lead the pack for the foreseeable future as they tend to attract and enroll those with fairly unique characteristics (read the Rhodes scholar profiles to see what they are looking for) which is fertile ground for future Rhodes scholars. The rest of the schools are usually one off schools (which UChicago resides in).

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@CU123 - yes I’ve read thru a bunch of the profiles, and they all seem like the types of students that Chicago is (supposedly) attracting more and more - diverse, academically excellent and invested in a particular area of research, involved in all sorts of clubs, look like they interview well, etc.

Frankly, these students look more like Chicago type students now than ever before. But, the rhodes placement has gone down while class size had increased markedly.

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The college isn’t 30% bigger since 2010. My daughter was class of 2009, and her class had about 1,350 in it. They crept up to around 1,500 over the next few years, and of course almost 1,700 last year, but those kids are just first-years now. In terms of graduating classes, maybe it’s 15-20% bigger right now than it was eight years ago.

The university can only nominate and promote a limited number of kids. I doubt strongly that class size has much correlation at all with success.

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@JHS - you’re nitpicking here. I said “about 30% bigger.” Also, I didn’t specify the times I was comparing, but here you go (from the Registrar’s enrollment files):

In August 2005, Chicago had 4642 degree-seeking college students

In August 2016, Chicago had 5971 degree-seeking college students.

That’s a 28.6% increase in 11 years. We’re also told that the quality of the class has increased across multiple dimensions.

(Aside: If we go back just a little farther, by the way - to 2001, the College had an enrollment of 4064. So, in about 15 years, the College has grown by about 50% - that’s astonishing, maybe even worrying, growth speed.)

Back to the main point: So, shouldn’t the pool of qualified students that Chicago can nominate have increased markedly? But, we haven’t seen output that matches the growth or the increase in student quality.

I understand that the Rhodes is an uber-selective, fickle award. At the same time, if the argument is that the pie has grown - we now have even more students, at even higher levels of quality - achieved at a rate that outpaces our peers, the lack of production is puzzling. If you have a class of 1100 students in the Class of 2005 who are all good (with an accept rate of around 40%, and a yield of maybe 33%), and they do super-well in the Rhodes process, and you then have a class of 1600 (or so) students (with an accept rate of ~10% and a yield of 60%), wouldn’t you expect the results to be as good or better?

(This makes what happened in 1999 even more astounding for Chicago. Then, it had a graduating class size of 800-900 students - the class sizes now are literally 100% larger - and it produced 3 Rhodes winners. 3 out of ~800 has got to be the best per capita output in the nation.)

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There’s been a lot of publicity in Philadelphia about the Temple student who was chosen. Actually, he’s precisely not the sort of student Chicago has been admitting:

He was a street kid whose mom committed fraud to get him into a barely half-decent elementary school in a nicer blue-collar neighborhood. He initially went to a vo-tech high school, and ultimately graduated with a 2.3 GPA from a charter school that was then in the process of being closed down for myriad administrative and academic failures. He got an associates degree at the local community college, where he did really well, then transferred to Temple. I heard him on the radio talking about how Temple was the pinnacle of academic ambition for him, someplace that seemed unachievable not so long ago.

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Yes, @JHS the Rhodes trust seems to be expanding its scope. At the same time, some things never seem to change: almost 1/3 of all winners come from just three schools - Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.

(And ok if you want to be technical - as you were above, 31.2% of the winners - 10 winners - came from h s and y. So, before you correct me on this, not quite 1/3.)

Some schools are doing just fine in this (somewhat) changing climate. Heck, Chicago’s class size has been bigger than Yale’s for a few years now, but the production disparities remain.

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I wonder if the publicity the Rhodes has been getting about its association with a British “colonialist” Cecil Rhodes has made it uber sensitive in awarding its scholarships. In that case, it is not UChicago that has changed, but it is the Rhodes which has changed. Of course, that does not preclude UChicago from changing its approach to choosing who they support for the Rhodes. Maybe the scholarship support office should think about this. I think a review of the biographies of awardees for the last 10-15 years could be revealing. I would enjoy hearing comments about this.

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OK, I won’t be technical, but I don’t see where you get 10. I only count 9. MIT and Washington University in St. Louis got the same number of places as Yale, and that was one more than the University of South Dakota and Millsaps College got.

What I would say is that just over half – 17/32 – come from the pool of highly selective private universities that dominate the USNWR rankings. Five years ago, it was 18/32 from same pool, but a much smaller number of colleges. Harvard and Yale combined for 13 of the slots, Cornell and Stanford each had two, and Brown one.

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More than UChicago’s class size, is it possible that its aggressive ED strategy is not helping in this respect? While it is attracting some strong academic students through the early cycles, they tend to be those who want to maximize their chances.

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The first class of people admitted ED is the class of 2021. Realistically, it will be at least three years, and maybe four, before we know how they finish in the Run for the Rhodes.

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It would be more interesting to note if the selection committee was blind to the college the applicant graduated from, otherwise you don’t know what prejudices are part of the process.

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@JHS - ah yes, your eye for detail is good - the U.S. winners from H, Y, and S this year came to 9 total. Stanford had one additional winner from Jamaica.

These points on the exact numbers aside, what is your larger point? In the past ~15 years, Chicago’s College has grown by 50% - far more than any other top college in the country. At the same time, Rhodes production at Chicago has declined. (I haven’t checked numbers for Marshalls, Fulbrights, etc., but I’d be surprised if there was much change there.)

Yet, Chicago’s College now has more top, diverse, talented students than ever before. Supposedly, the pool of qualified candidates for this award should be much larger than ever, yet the numbers haven’t changed at all (or, if anything, have gone down).

How can this be explained?

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@Cu123, you may be suggesting that the path to a Rhodes is smoother if you’re an HYSP applicant. I think that’s likely the case. Yes, there are slots for kids from public universities, and other ivies and schools like Chicago collect a few winners over the years, But the Rhodes people aren’t any more immune to snobbery than the rest of us. To keep up their own prestige they want a certain annual haul of winners from prestige schools. They probably set out to take 8 or 9 or so from these highest of high end schools, year in and year out. They also look for kids from less distinguished places to show that they’re not just all about snobbery. It’s not so different from what drives HYS to take plentiful numbers from Groton and Exeter together with as many disadvantaged kids from the inner city as possible. The middling kids always get the short end in these beauty contests. In the Rhodes derby a school like Chicago is caught in the middle - it doesn’t tick the box either for glamor or for populist credibility. Just speculation.

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I suspect that small sample size may have a lot to do with this particular tempest in a teapot.