Does UChicago live up to its "extremely hard" reputation?

uchicagoalum2
Fri, 03 Apr 2015 23:53:43 +0000

6. The composition of the student body is different from the outset.

UChicago is a DIII college where sports are principally an activity for team members (and a few roommates or house members who might be willing to throw some moral support their way during a home game). Moreover, Chicago is not particularly notable for any particular sport (even if some teams have won plenty of divisional titles), hence the admissions office is not willing to trade scarce admissions spots for sought after athletes. The emphasis remains on the scholar-athlete, with stressing the former, rather than athletes than are incidentally students as is the case at some institutions due to their competitive DI status (Harvard, Stanford, Duke), or DIII schools that take winning at sports seriously (Hopkins).

Chicago also does not have any legacy admissions tradition money aside. If your father and his father attended Chicago, this does not inherently matter for much, unless they gave inordinate sums of money (and we are talking in the funded a named building range of cash). Admittedly, this tradition is dying fast at most schools, but coming from the right family has not mattered at Chicago since the 50’s. And unlike HYP, LSE or Oxbridge, the college does not appear to go out of its way to attract the children of high flying (albeit not inordinately rich adults). While the modal student is from a dual earner, solidly upper middle class family, it is not like a third of the class are the children of corporate law partners, investment bank managing directors, tech moguls, etc. There are definitely schools in the US that are of the view that students from these types of families are better positioned to thrive after college because of the financial and other soft resources at their sails, and load up on them in their classes. Chicago on net retains a greater degree of socioeconomic diversity.

Finally, for many of the reasons highlighted throughout this post, Chicago has been historically unpopular with students from nationally elite boarding / preparatory schools, and only in recent years received an uptick of interest as it bubbled to the very top of the US News rankings. While graduates of Exeter, Taft and so on tend to do better than average performancewise during their time in the College (as they do elsewhere), these same students often carry with them a preprofessional disposition / definition of success that dampens the intellectual environment. Quite notably, there are too few at Chicago to form a discernible prep school clique lasting beyond the first year, which in contrast thrives at places like Yale and Princeton.

Poster attended Chicago and studied at four other selective institutions.