Why the app numbers at the U of C should be out-of-synch with almost all its peers is interesting and counter-intuitive. We are forever being told that ED and the low rates of admission in other categories will drive the overall numbers down - and yet this never seems to happen. I hazard the intuition that recognition by high school students of Chicago’s desirability is still on the upswing, whereas the desirability of the peer schools cannot be any more well-known now than it has been for many years. Thus, while Chicago may have lost applicants for many reasons (including from the non-ED categories as described above and for the same reasons the peer schools lost applicants) there was a countervailing trend unique to the U of C in which bright kids (including quite obviously a bunch from Texas) were discovering a school their counterparts might not have known about or considered a few years ago.
Speaking of the Texas trend, could it be that its big numbers came at the expense of the internationals? But that’s not exactly correct since “Texas is a whole ‘nother country”. It should be counted as such! [joke]
Not so sure, @Zoom10 , about your speculation that Chicago is abandoning “needs blind” as an admissions policy. That policy is of extremely long-standing, going back to before my own day in the sixties and is especially appropriate at a school that has always honored intellectual achievement above all else and has not historically attempted to recruit the wealthy. No doubt the Administration is modeling the demographic effects of the College’s new-found popularity. It must be a welcome consequence to them that there are more children of wealth at Chicago than ever before - though ones suited to this College in the same way that the less wealthy and the poor are suited to it. However, I would need some proof in order to believe the cynical assertion that the admissions people, faced with two applicants of precisely equal merit, one poor and one wealthy, will now choose the latter. That would be a scandal. Someone in Admissions would be very upset about it, and a plain vanilla envelope would rapidly appear under the door of the offices of the Maroon.