<ol>
<li>Uof Chicago decided to broaden its marketing by adopting the Common Application, and indeed the number of applications it received rose by 1%. By broadening its market, however, it presents itself less as a special niche school.
<ol>
<li>There may be many reasons why an admitted student might choose to go elsewhere. I can think of finances and location. Still, it is interesting to note the different yields of schools that Chicago competes with in 2009 (figures have been rounded):
Uof Chicago: 39%
Harvard: 76%
Yale: 69%
Princeton: 60%
Columbia: 69%.
Penn: 63%
Stanford: 66%
Dartmouth: 49%
Swarthmore: 39%</li>
</ol>
<p>In other words, it would appear that for 61% of students who were admitted to UofC, the school is not their top choice. I have to say, I am surprised by this.</p>
<p>Does anyone know the percentage of students in undergraduate majors at UoC (literature, philosophy, languages, social sciences, natural sciences, math)?
Thanks</p>
<p>If FA improved, the yield at Chicago would likely improve as well. As I mentioned earlier the #1 reason students said the chose a school other than Chicago was FA. That is Chicago’s greatest weakness compared to its peers.</p>
<p>Use the search box to find the college you are interested in, then choose “Programs/Majors” on the list under the college. That will give you the number of students who graduated with each major for the most recent year where data is available. While that won’t tell you the number of enrolled students in each major, it give you a rough idea of distribution within a class.</p>
<p>Donna is right about Econ – I’ve only glanced quickly over the list, but it looks roughly like this for top 3 majors in terms of number of students enrolled.</p>
<p>“If FA improved, the yield at Chicago would likely improve as well. As I mentioned earlier the #1 reason students said the chose a school other than Chicago was FA. That is Chicago’s greatest weakness compared to its peers.”
that is absolutely correct. when my son was accepted in 2006, before the “new improved” FA policy, he was offered a loan of $1K from Chicago, even after an appeal. He received FA awards of $20 from Pomona, $18 from Brown and Dartmouth, $15 from Wash U, and so on. Every other college where he was accepted, and there were 13 others, offered more $$ than Chicago. When I emailed the then head of admissions asking why the huge discrepancy in FA awards, he not only was surprised, but had no explanation for Chicago’s meager FA offer, when colleges with much smaller endowments had offered more. In reading recent posts on Chicago’s forums, it doesn’t seem that much hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>I should have made this clear. Chicago was on her match list prior to her SCEA admission to Y. And as I said earlier, she would probably have applied to at least a couple of match schools if she had been deferred at Yale, so no, I don’t agree that Yale and Chicago are incompatible concepts & institutions. I actually know lots of students with Ivies and Chicago, both, on their lists. </p>
<p>I also assume that Yale didn’t distribute its final SCEA admit list to Chicago, so Ch. would have no basis for knowing that she “already had a Yale admission in hand.”</p>
<p>What she “was in love with” at Chicago was their curriculum. What she was put off by was the unnecessary posturing of the students, via the essays, and the “special,” “different” language of the application. </p>
<p>Thanks for the stats, marite, but I don’t think converting to common app is all that persuasive a draw, at least to affect Yield.</p>
<p>And again, perhaps my D, myself, and mantori.suzuki’s S are just the “different” ones. She, and I, do not equate preambles to essay prompts with creativity – at least the ones she was acquainted with.</p>
<p>I think it makes perfect sense, especially as Chicago’s yield is exactly the same as Swarthmore’s, which in many ways is similar to Chicago. (Swarthmore has a reputation for very strong academics, a high workload, and as an LAC is somewhat off the radar for kids who are focused on Ivies and traditional universities). </p>
<p>A lot of students use schools like Swarthmore, Chicago, or Reed as backups for Ivies. They view the elite universities like Ivies + Duke/Stanford as being the “best”, and the schools who have carved a niche for strong academics as being “next best”. </p>
<p>I’d note that a 39% yield is generally good for a LAC (Pomona is also 39%, Amherst 38%, Williams does better with 42%) - so even though Chicago is not a LAC, it probably has carved out an LAC-like niche for itself. Some of the women’s colleges do better than higher ranked LAC counterparts, which may reflect the benefits of self-selecting applicant pool.</p>
<p>Other well-ranked traditional universities that are often used as Ivy backups, such as Tufts, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, WUSTL – have significantly weaker yield rates (33% or less). So yield figures would suggest that for any college that is below the threshold of being able to have a general appeal plus be perceived as the “best” or “top” is better off carving out a solid niche. The whole “fun comes to die” thing is probably very well thought out.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Marite, because of the difference between ED and EA, not all of those figures are directly comparable (although certainly the HYPS ones are). Swarthmore’s 39% includes 40% of the class with a 100% yield (or thereabouts) and 60% of the class with a 30% yield. There are only nine or ten private colleges that get better than a 40% yield on admitted students who have a choice, and there is a pretty big gap between HYPSM (70%+) and the next group, which clusters around 50%.</p></li>
<li><p>The most popular majors among the students who have declared a major, in descending order, are Economics (18%), Biology (10%), Political Science (8%), Mathematics (7%), English (5%), and History (4%).</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Epiphany, how many students who are cross-admits to both Chicago and Yale do you think choose Yale over Chicago? </p>
<p>If your daughter was “put off” by the qualities you listed about Chicago, then she did NOT want Chicago. Why would you as a parent have wanted her to apply to a college she did not like? Why would Chicago’s admissions department have wanted to encourage a student who preferred a different environment?</p>
<p>I didn’t want to force her to do anything. She loved the curriculum; so did I. I wanted the application not to be disappointing; so did she. </p>
<p>Or, maybe I’ve been, haha, around CC too much and have a guilt complex about not liking Chicago more. (JHS’ “team” list on the Ivy Reject thread.)</p>
<p>And since you mentioned this as well, she did apply to Swat. It was her only LAC on her list. She loved the rigor, just as she loved the rigor at Chicago, the rigor at the Ivies. She considered Swat also a very good fit for her.
:)</p>
<p>JHS–Thanks for both sets of stats. It appears that the student body at UofC is not that different in terms of its intellectual orientation from that of other schools such as HYP. </p>
<p>Calmom:
</p>
<p>I don’t follow the argument whereby UofC is both a “next best” and has succeeded in carving out a special niche. </p>
<p>Also, epiphany and I are attempting to differentiate between liking a school, which we both do, and liking its application form, which we don’t. I happen not to like the very bland prompts on the Common Application, either, though I doubt that the adcoms at the schools that make us of it spend much time worrying about them.</p>
<p>Easily. That’s a pretty basic marketing concept, honestly. It’s not the broadest appeal the way the Ivies are – and it has a special niche. It’s “next best” when taken in the context of the broadest appeal – and it’s “best” when taken in the context of a very specific group of students who want to go there.</p>
<p>Remember the Saab? There was a point in its lifecycle where it was clearly nowhere near as large / appealing as other cars in the same class, but it had a very small, incredibly loyal user base who wouldn’t ever consider driving anything else, formed Saab clubs, etc. The Saab positioning appealed to this sense of offbeat quirkiness. It’s not for everybody. It needn’t be. Part of the self-image was “I don’t drive what everyone else drives.” Still, other cars in the same class outsold it, because they had more broad, popular appeal. That’s precisely the case with the Ivies vs U of Chicago. Broadly speaking, more people will choose H over Chicago or Y over C. That doesn’t preclude a small group of people who pride themselves precisely on making, dare I say, the “uncommon choice.”</p>
<p>I think that’s it! YK, it’s perfectly fine to find Chicago not to one’s tastes! I think you’re inadvertently buying into a concept that you “should” adore Chicago and if you don’t, well, you’re showing yourself to be declasse, just don’t get it, etc. I think it’s perfectly fine to be intellectual and to not care for what Chicago holds itself out to be, and prefer more “mainstream” (for lack of a better word) alternatives. But then just come out and say it – you didn’t care for the prompts and it turned you off. That doesn’t mean that Chicago is wrong for using those prompts. Maybe you’re not suited for Chicago. That’s perfectly fine. What’s wrong with not being suited for Chicago? </p>
<p>YK, just to pull a random top school, Duke is a fine school, but I wouldn’t go near there with a ten-foot pole. Just not my thing. They portray themselves and their school culture in a way I don’t care for. That doesn’t mean they’re “wrong” or “misguided” for doing so. If other people are happy there, more power to them and I wish them nothing but success. I don’t know why one wouldn’t feel the same towards Chicago.</p>
<p>I think some of the Chicago prompts are nutty, and some are pretentious, but I do know that they really appeal to kids who are uncomfortable with writing revealing essays about themselves. I think their Chicago essays (even the quick offhand one older son gave me - he didn’t actually apply to Chicago) revealed more about their personalities and intellect (though not necessarily intellectualism) than the standard responses to Common App type questions. </p>
<p>Because of starting early on the Chicago essays, and also because of reading the Baraud book, my younger son did manage to write a decent Common App type essay - though it didn’t answer any of the specific prompts it was definitely in that vein. </p>
<p>I don’t see that it’s so terrible that some kids would rather write about “Why Wednesdays” than “an experience that you learned from”.</p>
<p>Well, marite, there are some interesting differences. I looked briefly at Harvard’s data, taking into account that Harvard has about 25% more major-eligible students than Chicago and requires a decision regarding concentration earlier, and adjusting roughly for the fact that double-majoring is much more common at Chicago (it looks like slightly more than 20% of the students there double major, while joint concentrations at Harvard are more difficult and relatively rare). Anyway, the percentage of people studying economics, English, and biology (including biochem) is about the same both places, but Harvard has a lot more people in Government (Political Science) – 485, or about 12%, vs. 325 – and (surprisingly) fewer people in Math – 130, vs. 275, although a lot of the difference (not all) is made up in Applied Math, 100 vs. 8. Looking at some other fields, Chicago and Harvard have the same number of Classics majors (35), which of course is a somewhat higher percentage at Chicago. Chicago has 20 in its History of Science program, Harvard 115. Linguistics (in which joint concentration seems especially popular at Harvard) has 32 people at Harvard, and 53 at Chicago. Harvard has a lot more Sociology concentrators, though: 150-80. Chicago has somewhat more people in Physics, on a smaller base – 124-112 – despite the presence of a biophysics option at Harvard that is housed in Biology at Chicago.</p>
<p>Anyway, none of these differences are remotely earth-shattering, but they do tend somewhat in the direction of more pre-professional orientation at Harvard. Not as an absolute matter, but as a matter of deeper hue – it looks like there are somewhat more people headed towards law or medical school, or finance (those applied math people), not to mention the 100 or so engineers.</p>
<p>I think it’s absolutely correct that Chicago students are not fundamentally different from Harvard students in their intellectual orientations, but also correct that there is a slightly different feel about the place (which of course is borne out by the PhD-production statistics, too).</p>
<p>Good of you to look at the data! Harvard changed the timing for declaring a major (it’s no longer the end of freshman year), so it is of some importance to consider the years in which these data were produced. As you note also, Harvard has more students so percentages rather than absolute numbers might be more helpful. I was somewhat taken aback by the low percentages of students in History and English at Chicago, given the type of prompts one sees on the Uncommon Application.
Would you agree that the major difference is in the number of students majoring in Government at Harvard? I see it as an indication that a lot of political figures pass through Harvard and thus Harvard attracts students who are interested in politics. I am more likely to see students interested in economics and biology as being pre-professional, regardless of location; and on that count, H and C are about even.
I am not all that surprised by the lower number of Math majors at Harvard. I think that Math 55 intimidates a lot of students who can’t help but compare themselves with the 55ers. I’m told that Sally’s Honors Analysis class at C is just as rigorous, but it does not have the same mythical aura . As for Physics, the Princeton physics major I knew seemed to spend his summers at Chicago. The Fermi Lab is a major draw.</p>
<p>…because it’s more than “not liking the essay prompts” (some of them).</p>
<p>It’s the equation many – still on this thread – draw between A and B, A being “liking the essay prompts,” B being "the kind of [intellectual, scholarly, imaginative, creative] student who “belongs” in the U.ofCh. atmosphere. I do not see the logical connection betwen those two values. That is because B is > than A; it is not = to A. </p>
<p>It’s not about her liking the prompts, or me liking the prompts. And this is not about her, except as an example who is invisibly disproving the handy theory. What doesn’t compute is the stereotyping. I would tend to agree with JHS that Chicago probably doesn’t want only butter-pecan lovers, yet, it would seem from the evidence, that the essay prompts restrict or reduce the very niche they claim to want – or appear only to attract butter-pecan lovers, when in fact the green-tea ice cream lovers and white-peach ice cream lovers also may be among those not liking the essay prompts (not to mention many butter-pecan lovers as well).</p>
<p>A student like my D was in high school and was in college, who had the rigorous college lists and the corresponding college results she had (and she’s hardly alone), should be feeling attracted to a school like Chicago, especially when such an intellectual, scholarly, imaginative, creative student shows every sign of tending in that direction. </p>
<p>I was joking, PG, when I put myself artificially on the list. I guess if I had a team I’d have to create one, like “Those who don’t understand why several Ivy League acceptances are a rung (or two?) below – in dignity or worth – liking the Chicago essay prompts.” It’s just a weird hierarchy to me, but apparently I’m not weird enough for Chicago.</p>