<p>No clue… I haven’t read up on the actual figures but even if NU’s increase were 7%, in the end, NU would still be rejecting more students (~20,000+ out of the 27,500 who applied) than the total # people who applied to UChicago (about 19,500?).</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t care for selectivity that much beyond a certain point. Extreme selectivity does create a certain special aura about a school, but at the same time, the quality of students we’re getting is already great and that’s ultimately what matters. The truth is, many people who were denied by NU are great as well (I know plenty… if you met them in person, you would be just as impressed with their intelligence and persona and wonder why they got denied in the first place), but maybe they didn’t get in because maybe they didn’t work as hard on their self-presentation in the app or they slacked off a little bit after being in the pressure cooker for so long. The system can be unforgiving for these people, and NU knows that. A lot of the rejects are also just as good on paper but are waitlisted/denied anyway strictly due to lack of space, and that’s where a great deal of subjectivity comes in (a professor who read apps was telling me). What I like about NU admissions (I guess you could say the same for a lot of other top schools as well) is that it doesn’t pretend to make the right decisions all the time and knows some of the kids it ends up rejecting will end up doing great things in college and in the future. However, it’s simply faced with the harsh reality of highly selective college admissions.</p>
<p>NU actually considered decreasing its undergraduate population (and substantially increase its selectivity in the process) but ultimately decided against it. The reason for the proposal was to improve undergraduate education, but they concluded we can keep our size (or even increase it a little bit) and still be able to provide a topnotch education. Our student/teacher ratios are low enough, percentage of classes with 20 or fewer are high enough, research opportunities are already pretty extensive, etc. so there wasn’t that strong of an argument for the decrease (less revenue from tuition also?).</p>