<p>“I know people who denied Harvard and Columbia, and many who denied MIT to come to Chicago, despite receiving a worse financial aid offer.”</p>
<p>Chicago is just heaven for a certain type of students interested in pursuing career in pure academia. However, it doesn’t do a great job attracting the general applicant because many applicants hold the notion that at Chicago they can get to the same place as Ivy + Stanford, MIT, and Duke grads, but they would have to work a lot harder. I spoke with a senior admissions officer at Chicago, a family friend, and she said Chicago usually lose 75% cross-admits to Brown, 70-75% cross-admits to Columbia, Dartmouth, and Penn, and split 50/50 with Cornell.</p>