I suppose the question to ask about some of these Chicago winners of the Rhodes who don’t perfectly fit our observations of typical UChicago students is whether they invalidate the observations or are untypical outliers. No one would claim that there are the same number of political aspirants and activists at Chicago as at Harvard. I can’t help wondering whether Mr. Kim ended up at Chicago because he failed to get into one or all of HYP. If so, I applaud him for having a good career at Chicago and applaud his snagging a Rhodes, but it doesn’t make him very typical of this institution.
By the way, @JBStillFlying , I and my old Chamberlin House pals discovered recently that Bernie had been in our House at BJ only two years prior to us. We can almost visualize his room inasmuch as he described it as one of those very few sets of double rooms (one set of them was just across from me on the third floor) in which one was linked to a roommate through an adjoining door. Bernie described long arguments to all hours with his roommate, who was a strong advocate of Milton Friedman! Bernie said he could never get to sleep until he felt he had bested his Friedmanite roommate. Too bad we missed out on all that, though we certainly inherited the culture of long arguments to all hours.
Don’t forget @marlowe1 - for all it seems like bernie is a chicago iconoclast, do you remember where he really wanted to go for college? Harvard.
(His hs friend is quoted as noting bernie’s desire to go to H.)
Also Marlowe, upthread tou ask how Chicago can compare to Harvard, if not for some material difference in culture, given the disparity in rhodes production. Well, HYP have established distance between virtually all top schools for coveted post-grad outcomes. Look at placement to top law schools, top med schools, etc - the gap between the very top and the “lesser” elites is similar to the gap in rhodes production. Those schools lock in (and cultivate) talent like nobody’s business.
Remember, up until ED and recent times, Chicago has accepted a LOT of kids that it lost to HYP. Just think how some of those exit outcomes for chicago grads might look different if it compete better in the open market vs those schools? But, it’s retrenched and just taken the ED approach, like so many of HYP’s lesser competitors.
There you go again, @Cue7 , with your vision of Chicago as the eternal backup. Clearly Rhodes dominance means something different for you than it means for me. If a few Chicago kids got rejected by Harvard, had good careers at Chicago, and won a Rhodes in consequence, is that supposed to be an argument for a Chicago admissions policy that would set its sights on recruiting these kids and maintaining a comfortable position of harvesting one-eighth the Rhodes that Harvard harvests? Fie on it! The Rhodes domination and all your vaunted top placements mean to me nothing but the overbearing oppression of an institution grown old with money, power and prestige. Give me air, please.
Well, the child of my favorite first cousin graduated from the University of Chicago in the early oughts as a political science major. She now works as a political director for a union; she has worked on and even run campaigns for all sorts of public offices, including president of a foreign country, U.S. Congress, and governor of her state, and a state campaign for marriage equality. She was briefly a candidate for elected office, but she went into labor the night of the nominating convention. I’m sure she will be again.
So . . . just another outlier, right?
I like outliers, @JHS . I would call Chicago an outlier among schools. And within Chicago there’s many an outlier among its students. All very good and healthy. But let’s look at the indisputable things we know about this student body as contrasted with Harvard’s.
That student body does not comprise recruited athletes having academic qualifications well below the norm to the tune of 10 percent of the totality. It does not consist of legacies and “development” kids (i.e. kids from extremely wealthy backgrounds) to the tune of 18 percent, also with inferior academic qualifications. It does not comprise kids who, excellent as their academic qualifications may be, were admitted over others equally excellent because they scored high in “leadership” and/or “extroversion”. Its students overwhelmingly take their studies very seriously as the main event of being in school and concomitantly do not take nearly as seriously or spend large amounts of time on the multitude of EC’s that, according to Steven Pinker, strip his classrooms of half their students. There are no half-empty classrooms at Chicago, where everyone talks incessantly about what they are studying. It and not Harvard is the place where fun comes to die and where they make a joke of it. It has always been that way. It is a deeply rooted culture, sometimes praised, often deplored, frequently mocked. No one deplores, mocks or praises Harvard in those terms. Harvard’s is a brand as good as it gets - universally praised and genuflected before by high-brow, middle-brow and low-brow. Chicago is known only to the highly educated. And so it goes.
I don’t know why it should be necessary to make this case. Or why there should be such incredulity that these characteristics have anything to do with the perfect marriage of Harvard and the Rhodes as against the one-night stands of Chicago and the Rhodes. Of course there are those darn Chicago outliers, who do sometimes win the odd Rhodes either because they look an awfully like someone who might have gone to Harvard (and perhaps would have if not rejected) or because the Rhodes committee in a fit of inattention or to make its non-HYP quota let them into the club.
“Well, HYP have established distance between virtually all top schools for coveted post-grad outcomes. Look at placement to top law schools, top med schools, etc - the gap between the very top and the “lesser” elites is similar to the gap in rhodes production. Those schools lock in (and cultivate) talent like nobody’s business.”
Other than the fact that HLS/YLS tend to admit large numbers of their own, which might be for a whole variety of reasons, what do we actually know about HYP’s grad school placement vs. the “lesser elite”? Stats please, @Cue7.
“Remember, up until ED and recent times, Chicago has accepted a LOT of kids that it lost to HYP. Just think how some of those exit outcomes for chicago grads might look different if it compete better in the open market vs those schools? But, it’s retrenched and just taken the ED approach, like so many of HYP’s lesser competitors.”
Not sure how you are defining “a LOT” - the number of cross admits has to be pretty small every year. Even prior to introducing ED, about 1/2 of UChicago’s admits were EA candidates with a strong preference for UChicago. ED only segmented the early and regular pools - it never shifted down the quality of applicant nor would it have altered his/her personal interest in the place. My guess is that most of the cross admits before introducing ED were RD applicants and would have applied RD had ED1/ED2 been offered. They simply don’t have a strong overall interest in attending UChicago, so no amount of “open market competition” would be able to flip those percentages, although surely Admissions is striving to get it close to 50/50. Fit does matter.
And the idea that Chicago grads would have “better exit outcomes” if only they took in more HYP types - where does that even come from? According to the Career website, 96% of UChicago grads have substantive plans in place (employment, grad school, etc.) compared to 95% at Yale (based on its final class report). I’m guessing H and P have similar stats. When you look at industry outcomes, UChicago and Yale are SIMILAR. For instance, 12% of Uchicago vs. 13% of Yale grads go into consulting. 33% of UChicago and approximately the same percentage of Yalies go into finance and business. 11% of both go into gov’t/nonprofit and public policy. So where does this big advantage attributed to “HYP types” show up exactly?
https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu/about/outcomes-data
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/files/documents/class-2017-outcomes.pdf
@marlowe1 I think you are at least a little wrong about practically everything you wrote in #45. The one thing I agree with completely – at least as of a little while ago – is that Chicago has a clear culture that kids don’t miss class. Everyone believes that academics come first, even the athletes (or most of them). I also agree that that’s not the case at Harvard, at least not for many students. (Although I’m also sure that at Harvard there are also many, many students who do not miss class, and who put academics first all the time.) The Yale I attended was much closer to the Chicago end of the spectrum than the Harvard end, by the way.
I know for a fact that there are athletes at Chicago whose academic credentials are below the norm, because a couple children of friends were among them. One was sorely disappointed not to get any Division 1 offers; the other turned down Division 1 offers to go to Chicago. Neither was a typical college athlete, to be sure. The first came from a family with high educational achievement that pushed the kid to go to Chicago. The second shocked his parents when he applied and was accepted; they didn’t think he would be able to handle it. His father was sure he was a future pro, but the kid himself decided he would rather trade his (considerable) talent for a high-quality credential in the business world. Both kids did fine at Chicago. The first pretty much hated it, but he’s the one who is in a top-flight PhD program now.
I don’t think anyone really knows about the legacy situation at Chicago. It was hardly an issue until a few years ago – 90% of the Chicago college alumni I know in my generation told their kids not to apply, and the one exception family (double-legacy) had kids who absolutely cleared the bar as it existed 8-9 years ago when they applied. I haven’t seen any statistics about legacies. I bet there is a legacy preference at Chicago. And . . . given the state of the university’s finances, and the considerable bet they made by leveraging up to build buildings in the past dozen years, if they don’t have a development preference, Zimmer and Nondorf should be fired. (I’m not worried that they will be fired.)
Chicago is different. But not anywhere near as different as you like to believe. And I dislike your repeated attempts to legislate who is a real Chicago student and who isn’t based on what stereotype appeals most to you. There are all sorts of kids there, who choose to go for all different sorts of reasons. And given that they are generally deciding where to go to college when they are 17, most of them have a very imperfect idea of who they are and what they want when they are making those decisions. One of the things that is absolutely great about Chicago is the way in which it transmits its culture to its undergraduate students. That would be much less impressive if all the students were already in the cult when they arrived.
“There are all sorts of kids there, who choose to go for all different sorts of reasons.”
This is likely true; however, 100% of the matriculants we’ve conversed with have mentioned the academic culture of the place as being prominent in their decision process. They may all have varied backgrounds and professional goals, but they have all prioritized academics for their undergraduate experience. Now, that might not be true for literally every single incoming student, but it’s certainly true for a good number of them. I don’t even see how the school could maintain the culture it does without the students’ cooperation. Anyone not open to being in that culture is probably going to be pretty unhappy and looking to transfer out. And we know that the school can easily choose who it thinks will survive best in that culture, unlike it could a generation or two ago.
“And given that they are generally deciding where to go to college when they are 17, most of them have a very imperfect idea of who they are and what they want when they are making those decisions.”
The idea that students come in sort of clueless - while obviously strictly true - is a tad presumptuous in its implication. From what I’ve noticed, the kids who are admitted ED at the very least seem to be very well informed about the place, particularly its commitment to a flexible, liberal arts education. Of COURSE they aren’t yet crystallized on “who they are and what they want” - that is PRECISELY why many of them are even at Chicago! So the idea that they are just stumbling into some university system or other and happened to luck out in this case is an inaccurate portrayal of these young people. It defies an understanding of the the vast information and resources available to this age group now. It also defies history. A generation ago many DID stumble into UChicago as a backup to more selective institutions; the outcomes, as Boyer explains, were not pretty.
@JBStillFlying said - “100% of the matriculants we’ve conversed with have mentioned the academic culture of the place as being prominent in their decision process. They may all have varied backgrounds and professional goals, but they have all prioritized academics for their undergraduate experience.”
That’s what you’d expect at the Academic Ivy!
Post #45 actually considerably understated the proportion of Harvard’s class made up of LDC - i.e. the kids who are legacy, development (i.e. rich enough to be seen as targets for donations) or children of faculty. That figure was not, as I misremembered it when I made the post, a mere 18 percent: it is actually 33.47 percent (per the Arcidiciano study) - that is, over one-third of Harvard’s admitted class. Add to that the 10 percent who are recruited athletes (though there is likely overlap between this group and the LDC group) and consider that the percentage of non-minority non-ALDC kids admitted to Harvard is, by contrast, 4.9 percent.
Chicago no doubt does give some level of preference to athletes and to this LDC group. I wish they didn’t, but I’m sure they do. We don’t know the figures as we now know them for Harvard. But is it imaginable that the Chicago figures could approach the Harvard ones? Or that anyone would want them to approach the Harvard ones? I don’t believe you desire that yourself.
Yes, @JHS , I have a preference for Chicago remaining true to its history as it enters the new age. I am willing to put some water in the wine in order for it to do that. And I admit as well that there have always been kids at Chicago that didn’t fit the mold. Some of them succeeded on their own terms, some adapted, but many, many were made very unhappy by what they found. They would have been happier if they had not come to Chicago under the illusion that it would be a sort of lesser ivy. And the tone of the UChicago student body would have been better without their eternal kvetching about the glory of Harvard. You can call this attitude of mine “legislating”, but I call it describing, analyzing and, yes, advocating. You are also doing that: your observation, your analysis and your advocacy - perhaps your personal history, as mine for me - lead us in different directions. Let’s argue about it, Chicago-style.
@Cue7 at #49 - that’s also what you’d expect at an academic un-ivy.
But @JBStillFlying at the academic un-ivy, I sure wouldn’t expect to see great exit outcomes, robust career advising, lots of extra curriculars, lots of pathways to coveted jobs, a fairly athletic cohort of students, and a strong commitment to a learning/residential environment!
Maybe by un-ivy you mean Chicago in the 90s? It was definitely the academic un-ivy then. Academic as ever, not ivy at all.
@JHS mentioned that there is likely to be legacy preference at UChicago now. I agree that legacy is helpful but to a limited extent. Now given ED, it’s difficult to figure out where the legacy preference ends and where the ED preference begins. Or if the applicant is a younger sibling, that might have as much or even more impact as having parents who attended a generation ago. While the potential to build a multi-generational legacy at UChicago certainly must sound exciting, they would only be in the nascent stages of the project at this point. More likely they would give specific consideration to those children of large-scale donors (some of whom are undoubtedly alumnae but some of whom are not). While legacy on its own is probably (relatively) correlated with attendance, that might have more to do with fit and degree of enthusiasm than anything else.
@Cue7 at #52 - how can anyone possibly disagree with you, given that you’ve managed to appropriate many college best practices as “Ivy” and the negative ones as “Chicago in the '90’s.” It’s a narrow and simple world in which you dwell, but at least your logic is clear.
Here’s a challenge for you: compare and contrast free association and speech at UChicago vs. “The Ivies.” Which ones are most similar to UChicago? which ones are different? To give you a jump-start: Princeton was one of the first (if not THE first) to adopt the Chicago Statement; Columbia followed in due course.
@JBStillFlying - I anticipate a lot of the ivy plus group adopted the Chicago principles for free speech, no? It’s an example of chicago operating exactly as you’d expect in the peer group, right? Being the academic one, they are a leader in idea generation and thought leadership. Why would it be any surprise that the academic ivy came up with principles re free speech?
In other news, I’d expect that Dartmouth produces the most Olympic skiers in the ivy+ group, and duke the most nba players. The respective ivies producing what you’d expect!
Of anecdotes there are no end. I will tell one.
An old Chicago friend of mine had a good career and life (he is recently deceased) for which he gave a lot of credit to his education at the U of C. His widow requested one of his old friends to speak at his memorial service (the only other speaker was a colleague of his later days) and specifically asked him to evoke her husband’s young self and the experience of him and his friends at an institution in which he had been happy and of which he spoke often. So this was no instance of the stereotypically embittered Chicago alum pushing his children away from a place where he had been unhappy. Yet my friend’s two accomplished daughters had attended elite schools in the east (Vassar and Columbia). Why did they not go to their father’s old school? Not because their father’s experience had been bad. Both of them considered Chicago but in the end both thought it just didn’t fit their personalities. Perhaps they were also a little reluctant to follow in the footsteps of a parent or to leave the the east, and they worried about crime in the neighborhood and, among their own teen circles, UChicago’s reputation of harshness - something their father was not entirely willing to dispel despite having embraced it for himself. He was hardly one to exert his own persuasiveness in an area where he himself had once chosen without parental guidance. That attitude is a familiar trope at Chicago: this place is not your ordinary elite school, you ought not to come for any perfunctory reason, but only because you and it are a self-chosen good fit. I submit that a parent’s school is for this reason not as heritable at Chicago as elsewhere. Indeed, the one classmate I knew in my day who was the child of an alum was unhappy and transferred out. Though there must surely be a reasonable percentage of alum’s kids at the school today, could it really be that the student body is, as Harvard’s is, composed of more than six children of alums/rich donors for every kid who lacking any of those privileges simply discovers an enthusiasm through his or her own researches? I highly doubt this, though only current students and their parents would have any real knowledge.
To finish the anecdote - one of my friend’s very accomplished daughters, the editor in chief of a prominent periodical publication, confided to me after her father’s service that though he had never indicated disappointment in her decision not to go to his old school, she herself had come to think that she made a mistake. Perhaps, she said, he ought to have insisted on it - like all the Harvard alums do.
@JBStillFlying asked what characteristics would make a school an “un-ivy.” Here are some:
- A commuter school and/or school with little emphasis on residential life
- a school with little advising or emphasis on post-grad outcomes
- a small athletic program and/or little emphasis on athletics
- a school with little emphasis or variety of extra-curricular opportunities
Some examples of un-ivies are st johns college (new mexico), what used to be shimer college, many (almost all?) large public universities, community colleges, 2 yr colleges, and many others!
Honestly, so many colleges follow the un-ivy model. Ivy plus schools are incredibly resource intensive.
“I anticipate a lot of the ivy plus group adopted the Chicago principles for free speech, no? It’s an example of chicago operating exactly as you’d expect in the peer group, right? Being the academic one, they are a leader in idea generation and thought leadership. Why would it be any surprise that the academic ivy came up with principles re free speech?”
- You are incorrect. In the four years since the Statement has been released, only two ivies - Princeton and Columbia - have endorsed either the Chicago statement or a substantially similar statement. Of the wider group, only JHU, Vandy, WUSTL and G-Town have done so (Vandy's approval was with the faculty senate but not sure it went beyond there). So perhaps Free Expression is another characteristic of being 'un-ivy'; in fact, this is a specific recent example where other schools in the ivy and plus groups have followed the example of UChicago.
The idea that you need an ‘academic leader’ to come out with pinciples of free speech and academic inquiry ignores the reality that these elite universities are ALL ‘academic leaders.’
Let’s go a step or two further to see how UChicago fares as your “academic ivy” with respect to the following.
-
Trigger Warnings Letter
-
Test-Optional
Who in the ivy-plus group has followed? If not, why not?
@JBStillFlying - I am again confused. The ivies also differ from each other in significant ways. As I’ve said before, they are not a monolith.
Brown’s entire educational approach (and curriculum) is vastly different than Columbia’s. The student experience and locale at Dartmouth is pretty different than Columbia.
The trigger warning letter is curious, bc it’s pretty clear the writer of the letter had nothing close to agreement with faculty. Many chicago faculty actually opposed that letter.
Test optional is nice, but an example of a flavor of ivy - not a difference in kind. St johns college is an example of a difference in kind. So are community colleges.
Would it make you feel better if I called Chicago the free speech ivy or test optional ivy?
Finally, among even the ivy plus group, I think you’d agree Chicago is one of the foremost academic leaders in the group. They created so many chicago schools of thought, have a defined academic culture, etc.
It’s why it can be the academic ivy!
You can continue to show me how Chicago is a different flavor of ivy, but i already agree with that. Not sure what you’re trying to prove.
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