<p>I think we ought to acknowledge a couple things here. First, Chicago does NOT want only butter-pecan lovers. </p>
<p>More importantly, however, for all of the recent past, maybe up until this year, admissions at Chicago and admissions at Yale and Harvard were very different beasts. Yale and Harvard do NOT require applicants to do a lot of custom work to apply there. Their attitude, I think, is a combination of “We’re probably going to reject you anyway, so we’re not going to make you do backflips before we do” and “We’re only going to accept students who are practically perfect in every way, and the standard application materials are fine for telling if a student is practically perfect in every way.”</p>
<p>Chicago has to accept roughly twice the number of students Yale or Harvard does (maybe three times as many, if you adjust for the athletes and legacies), and from a much smaller applicant pool – still, and certainly in the recent past. It has never had the luxury of simply throwing out the imperfect applicants. It has relied a lot on essays as a selection method because it has had to/wanted to take more risks in order to assemble a student body the faculty liked (understanding, of course, that its non-risky picks might well be headed to Yale or Harvard anyway). And the essays were, and remain, a good basis on which to make that kind of bet. Furthermore, while Yale and Harvard can select a perfectly good class by saying no more than “Write something interesting” – after all, if they need more help than that to write something interesting they aren’t practically perfect in every way – Chicago’s experience has probably been that, without some additional help, its applicant pool did not produce enough essays of earth-shattering brilliance to fill all the necessary slots. </p>
<p>Finally, Yale and Harvard have the benefit of awesome brands and hundreds of impressions left by popular culture. Forget US News, how much do you think years of promotion on Gilmore Girls is worth? Everyone else is stuck trying to come up with some marketing program to get people to pay attention, especially Chicago, which, between its “bad” neighborhood and fun/die reputation did not find itself near the top of that many high school students’ lists. For better or worse, the annual essay prompts have become one of the most effective ways for Chicago to distinguish itself at the high school level. When you market like that, you are always going to turn some people off – WashU, in a roughly similar boat, but with a slightly different approach, certainly does. In the end, I doubt the people at Chicago should care if they turned off a student who was going to get into Yale, because that student was NOT likely going to be coming to Chicago in any event. I’m sure they turn off people they would like to apply, too, but I think the evidence suggests that, at least so far, they have done a pretty good job of getting students to pay attention, and the essays are part of that. If the effort isn’t perfect, too bad.</p>