Is the U of Murdercapitalofthecountry worth fighting my parents for?

<p>I’m an Eastern Pennsylvania native with a decent fascination for the UChicago. I find its programs, campus life, and resources totally amazing and fitting to my interests. The admissions office says I have two more days to submit “missing materials” on my application. My essays have been “just about finished” since January 1…
If I could only talk my parents’ into using their credit card.</p>

<p>Obviously, my parents are less enchanted about the university. They do not believe its level of prestige justifies moving all the way to Illinois to earn a petty undergraduate degree.</p>

<p>My parents understand Chicago…</p>

<p>is the murder capital of the country
is worth several thousand dollars a year in travel costs from PA
is hardly a “big name” to most people (they never heard of it until I began my seige a year ago)</p>

<p>Is there anything left that could help my case (that I theoretically haven’t argued)??? </p>

<p>If not, feel free to insult my “inability to handle the Chicago experience” as someone here did in the past. It will give me the confidence to throw the application in the trash and not regret it.</p>

<p>Wait isn’t Philly the new murder capital of America? Or does Chicago still hold that sad crown?</p>

<p>To address your parents concerns:</p>

<p>1) Murder Capital: Chicago is definitely NOT the murder capital. It is ranked #14 nationally after New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C, Oakland, Kansas City (Missouri), Newark, Cleveland, Pitt, Philly, Cincinnati, and Memphis. There are lots of fine universities in these cities. Also, while Chicago has its bad neighborhoods, Hyde Park is an incredibly affluent neighborhood. UChicago campus police are amazing, and they will literally arrive within 30 seconds of your pushing a blue light. I once had to call for help several years ago, and they arrived just that quickly. Since then, things have only gotten better.</p>

<p>2). Travel Costs: Any university away from home has travel costs. If you need to stay in PA for financial reasons then that’s a different story. I just think that it’s important to go away because you’ll have a much better experience. </p>

<p>3). Hardly true. UChicago is tied with Columbia for the #8 spot in the USWNR rankings. It is ranked ABOVE many ivy league schools including Penn, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth etc. Chicago is also nationally renowned for its academic rigor, and was recently called “our closest approximation to the idea of a great university” by a professor at Columbia University.</p>

<p>Breakerboy - on a serious note, to go on what floatingriver said, there are a lot of great schools people in different parts of the country have never heard of (Chicago, UPenn, Pomona, Haverford, Northwestern, etc etc etc.).</p>

<p>If all the quantitative and qualitative metrics point to a school being very good, well, then, it probably is. As I’m sure you’ve found, Chicago is at or near the top for any academic index or quality that assesses the strength of an institution. </p>

<p>As a note of personal disclosure - I went to Chicago for undergrad and Penn for grad school. I spend a lot of time in the midwest still, and people generally have no idea about either of these schools. They think Chicago is Univ of Illinois at Chicago, and UPenn is Penn State. Bland name recognition should not be a big factor in your decision.</p>

<p>Chicago is not the murder capital of the world nor is it not prestigious</p>

<p>Well, I need a really strong sales pitch about why a UChicago undergrad degree is better than, well, the University of Scranton.</p>

<p>I have already applied to three Ivies, but I had to forgo Boston U, Columbia, NYU, Boston C, CMU, Brown, and other prefered places because of similar reasons (though ironically I won the battle to apply for and possibly attend Penn).</p>

<p>I need to attack safety and travel expenses the most (or whatever brilliant ideas the Chicago intelligentsia can discover ;))</p>

<p>For travel expenses - do the homework - go to Expedia and find out how much flights cost. Go to Amtrack and compare time and cost, ditto for Grayhound. </p>

<p>Safety? Give them the crime statistics. Look up the Hyde Park neighborhood. Remind them it was safe enough for Obama and his family. That house he bought looked pretty nice to me from the google satellite photos. </p>

<p>And finally sell Chicago - the Noble prize winners, the best selling authors, the rank in USNWR - whatever you think they’d respect.</p>

<p>I think the statistic was that there were like two muggings out of the entire student population at uchicago in the last five years. That’s incredibly safe, much safer than Philly, Miami, New York, Los Angeles… etc.</p>

<p>The academics at Chicago are amazing - it’s known as the hub of intellectualism. It’s social sciences departments are amazing - especially economics and sociology. Its physics department is amazing as well - specifically modern physics and astrophysics. The biology and chemistry departments are great too, and overall, it’s known as one of the most international schools in the world.</p>

<p>Southwest flies Chicago Midway to Philadelphia now. $119 with 8 Flights per day.</p>

<p>Unless you’re planning to go home every weekend, “thousands” is a bit high.</p>

<p>Why UChicago is better than the University of Scranton: Let’s start with defining a degree as not only the piece of paper that one receives upon graduating from an institution, but the experiences one receives from attending a university from four years (both academic and social). Given that definition, then we can proceed to ask what experiences will you receive by virtue of attending the University of Scranton as opposed to the University of Chicago? I cannot answer that but by the fact that I know that most people (no offense to you, but you have to admit it’s true of people in our state lol) from Pennsylvania aren’t the brightest in the world and that the University of Scranton most likely only draws locals or, perhaps, people with roots in that area (or people who are obsessed with the Office? nah…). As well, I will assume that many bright and motivated students from that region will go to a top-30 university or, at the very least, will go to Pitt, Penn State, or Temple. Given, then, the student body that most likely will be at the University of Scranton, you will not gain much, intellectually, from the student body and that won’t make you any better off. As well, the professors at the University of Scranton won’t be world-class professors that will be able to help you grow by virtue of their insightful ideas or their powerful reasoning abilities that will be apparent in classroom discussions. You couldn’t be given any research opportunities or internships that will not only look amazing on your resume for whatever your future plans are, but will help you gain invaluable experience. The bottom line is, the experiences you would most likely run into at the University of Scranton will not come even close to those you would run into at the University of Chicago. As well (though this was slightly implied earlier), your critical thinking skills will most likely be much sharper after obtaining a UChicago education. And, on top of that, a degree from the University of Chicago will help you more where it actually matters as opposed to a degree from…the University of Scranton.</p>

<p>This especially matters if you want to go to any grad school because you will essentially need a 4.0 from the University of Scranton coupled with near-perfect/perfect MCAT/LSAT/GMAT scores to even be considered by some of the top med/law/business schools and then, even, you would need some good and well-regarded research exp. that you couldn’t obtain from the University of Scranton.</p>

<p>Travel Expenses: This, in my opinion, is not a legitimate reason to keep one from attending an institution. The travel expenses may be a hassle and they may, even, be quite burdensome at times, but one cannot simply say that the money is not, by any means, worth it without investigating the situation further. One must consider the opportunity cost of simply not paying these travel expenses and attending the University of Scranton. Assuming you get a reasonable financial aid package, then, while the University of Chicago may be more costly in the present, the travel expenses will be nothing compared to the differences in the salaries of jobs that you will be offered if you go to the University of Chicago as opposed to the University of Scranton. As well, the critical reasoning skills combined with your degree that you’ll get from the University of Chicago will not only originally give you good job placement, but will help you move up the job ladder in whatever career you do pursue (this would be because of the critical reasoning skills obtained, not the degree itself).</p>

<p>Safety Issues: As a general rule of thumb, don’t walk by yourself at night and you should be fine. If you’re just going to be running around the south side of Chicago, then, yea, safety should be a problem. However, so as long as you’re smart about what you do, then you should be relatively safe. Anyways, I realize that every time I walk outside there is a possibility that I could be shot the second I walk outside, that I could be kidnapped once I start going on a walk, or that a plane could crash on me (don’t laugh…this actually almost happened once to me on…that day). Does that make me not want to walk outside every day? Of course not. While I never think of these possibilities, I know in the back of my mind that they’re possibilities but their likelihood is so small that they play an almost negligible role in any marginal analysis of my options. Likewise, if you think that the benefits of attending UChicago outweigh the risks of going to UChicago then the safety issues shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Anyway, you should be worried at the safety issues at UPenn as opposed to those at UChicago.</p>

<p>Sorry if this is incoherent…I have a headache :frowning: (poor me…I know)</p>

<p>I’m assuming your parents only saw the benefit in applying to HYP? I thought my parents were overbearing. They wanted me to apply to all the ivies and to forget about UChicago, Amherst College, and WUSTL. My parents straight up told me, “You can apply to these places, but if you think we’re going to pay for you to some “no-name schools”, you’re sadly mistaken.” </p>

<p>It made me sooo angry. Not only do i like these three schools, they are far from “no-name schools.” I applied to them and when April rolls around, I hope to have the opportunity to bicker for my decision to matriculate at these places.</p>

<p>I’m very appreciative of the input. And yes, motion12345 and seeme25, I’m surrounded by people with a rather “PA” mindset…provincial as hell really. I have a friend who qualified for an application fee waiver, but his dad almost didn’t allow it because it was “all socialist stuff”. Still another friend’s dad forced him to stay at home because the “University of Scranton is just as good, if not better, than Notre Dame”.</p>

<p>That said, it’s difficult to put my own parents’ resistance into words. This IS undergraduate college and if I get into Cornell, UPenn, or Princeton (don’t count on the last one) I could receive more than adequate preparation for any graduate school. I understand Chicago’s graduate schools and research facilities are the more famous/prestigious/international aspect of their campus anyway.</p>

<p>And what about financial aid? This is just as important to my parents, yet I am not convinced myself though that UChicago is as “need-based” as the others. How does it compare?</p>

<p>Thanks again for the input so far. Truly amazing.</p>

<p>Seeme25: OH MY GOD! I put up with it every night!</p>

<p>I sent the common app to Harvard for the hell of it (didn’t finish the supplement though since my mother was not about to pay $75 for an “obvious rejection”). Two weeks later a Harvard alum calls about an interview, and MY DAD GETS THE PHONE! He starts thinking Harvard is after me…that they WANT ME! </p>

<p>He still harasses me to this day for giving up my “one shot in life”…at the place where “the Kennedys went”. Harvard is number one…after which it’s Yale and then the U of Scranton and then the small, local LAC where my mom works.</p>

<p>BreakerBoy, the travel expenses really shouldn’t be a significant amount of money. I looked at ticket prices for travel from Chicago to Long Island (a fourteen and a half hour drive) for the admitted students weekend and it will only cost about $148 for a round-trip flight or $168 for the train. I know someone who goes to UPenn (a four and a half hour drive from my house, one and a half hours by train) and she pays $100 for train tickets to and from her school. Another friend of mine goes to American University (five hours from my house) and it costs her ~$110 for the trip. Perhaps you can show your parents that the proximity of the school to your home doesn’t have a huge affect on the expenses? Unless you live so close to the University of Scranton or UPenn that the travel expenses are extremely cheap.</p>

<p>BreakerBoy, the travel expenses really shouldn’t be a significant amount of money. I looked at ticket prices for travel from Chicago to Long Island (a fourteen and a half hour drive) for the admitted students weekend and it will only cost about $148 for the flight there and back or $168 for the train. I know someone who goes to UPenn (a four and a half hour drive from my house, one and a half hours by train) and she pays $100 for train tickets to and from her school. Another friend of mine goes to American University (five hours from my house) and it costs her ~$110 for the trip. Perhaps you can show your parents that the proximity of the school to your home doesn’t have a huge affect on the expenses?</p>

<p>Specifically on travel expenses: Southwest Airlines flies between Philly and Midway, the airport in Chicago that’s actually convenient to U of C. I don’t think we have ever paid more than $200 / ticket, and often as little as $70/ticket. How many times are you actually going to come home? My guess is that excess transportation compared to Penn is, at most $1,000, and could be less than that.</p>

<p>If U of Chicago had a football team, your parents would have heard of it.</p>

<p>Show them a list of Nobel laureates by university affiliation (but don’t use the Wiki one or they’ll use the old argument that anyone can edit Wikipedia). Show them that UChicago has as many affiliated with it as CAMBRIDGE (and if they don’t recognize that name, you might as well give up :P) and far more than other big names (take Oxford and a few others to illustrate this). Then point out that UChicago has only existed for about 700 years less than Cambridge/Oxford (hopefully they won’t note that UChicago was actually established before the Nobel prizes were first awarded, but older institutions tend to have more experience etc).</p>

<p>If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.</p>

<p>“Teacher of Teachers” did it for me.</p>

<p>Perhaps reading the entire article from which an earlier poster drew that interesting former Columbia provost’s quote would help:</p>

<p>[Chicago</a> News Cooperative - University of Chicago, a Bright Spot for the City - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10cncwarren.html]Chicago”>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10cncwarren.html)</p>

<p>Also, perhaps give them this:</p>

<p>[OpinionJournal</a> - TASTE COMMENTARY](<a href=“Opinion & Reviews - Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com”>Opinion & Reviews - Wall Street Journal - WSJ.com)</p>