I have a 2024 admit. She was accepted to Harvard and Princeton and did not hesitate to choose UChicago. The views of the school are definitely changing. She could see through the hype of HYPS, and many high-achieving peers coming behind her feel the same way.
@JBStillFlying - lacking options (as MIT does) and not being on the same level are different things. There may be some delineation of difference, but it seems the only school quite clearly delineated as “beneath” was Chicago. (Literally, a student didn’t see it as a true peer.)
Also JB - there are plenty more circles where chicago is completely unknown, right, much moreso than Harvard? You’d agree w that?
Nondorf has done a great job marketing, but it comes down to cash, I think. If chicago had lots more cash to burn, there’s a broader array of outreach they could do.
And @marlowe1 - universal recognition is good for all the reasons you state and more - validation, opportunity, status, everything…
Happy Mother’s Day!
What a wonderful choice she made. I agree that among my kids’ peers, it is an equally desirable school. Congrats to the university for increasing its undergraduate emphasis. And congrats to your for the academic achievements of your daughter.
I’m not going to comment anymore here as trying to differentiate or segment among so many great institutions is meaningless and takes away from all the good. I would be proud to have gone there, and the administration is clearly doing a wonderful job. The campus is so beautiful as well.
@Cue7 - The authors were attempting to understand how kids at H and S perceived other elite schools and found every other school lacking, including MIT:
“When the Stanford students we interviewed recalled getting into MIT they were faced with minimal decision-making: they picked Stanford. Thad, a white male from an upper-class, academic family, reported, I had no idea what I wanted to major in. So I was really looking for colleges with widespread academic strengths because I thought there was a good chance I would be an engineer, but there was a good chance I would be humanities (…) I applied to MIT because of my dad mostly, but it wasn’t really my number-one choice.” (Section 4.3)
Are you next going to say that Wharton wasn’t demoted for being too “preprofessional?” 
BTW, these are perceptions not necessarily reality, although they absolutely inform decision-making and reinforce stereotypes. You should take heart from @mamacookie’s post above because perceptions might be changing, as you yourself suggested upthread.
It is likely that the students in the cited survey were thinking about the types of students who they know attended U Chicago, and/or what their parents said, and/or what they learned from college guidebooks…so a probable mix of facts and hearsay.
I have a few thoughts based on my kids’ suburban Chicago high school having sent an average of 11 kids to UChicago each of the last five years. I and my D19 know several dozen of these students and their families.
IME, the students from our HS tend to be introverted and studious, with many being eccentric (manifesting in different ways). I would not call all of them intellectual, or life of the mind types, although some are. They are typically not mainstream, gregarious, jocky, or cool. So, some of the study feedback may have been rooted in this type of teen perception…perhaps the participants were thinking kids I want to be like don’t go to U Chicago, and this study gave them a vehicle to say that.
The students from our HS that went to UChicago do tend to be different than the kids that go to HYPS (who are primarily recruited athletes and/or legacies).
As we know the experience college students have is directly and indirectly communicated to the HS students…these local UChicago students tell their siblings, friends, and parents that ‘where fun goes to die’ remains an appropriate characterization.
Again, just my observations based on the students whom I know…not saying they are representative of all Chicago students, but it’s a sample of more than a handful, further informed by having hired/worked with several UC undergrads over the last decade in consulting.
In our area, UChicago is highly respected and known for what it does…but it will likely always be tough for them to get our athletes who can play DI or Ivy legacies.
Again, @JBStillFlying - i read wharton and mit and princeton to be lacking bc of some characteristic - too preprofessional, technical, country club-like, etc. I only saw that one quote about chicago “not being good enough,” or “beneath” the others.
H and S may very well see Y and P as “beneath,” too. BUT, it seems to be the case that chicago is probably farther down the pecking order for most (exceptions like @mamacookie can always apply).
I don’t think anyone would disagree that, globally, H and S are better known - in more corners - than Chicago. Chicago is a tremendous school. But, I’d like the near universal recognition, too.
@Mwfan1921 : “IME, the students from our HS tend to be introverted and studious, with many being eccentric (manifesting in different ways). I would not call all of them intellectual, or life of the mind types, although some are. They are typically not mainstream, gregarious, jocky, or cool. So, some of the study feedback may have been rooted in this type of teen perception…perhaps the participants were thinking kids I want to be like don’t go to U Chicago…”
I would concur that the overriding sentiment expressed in the last statement here may carry the greatest weight for many high school students who are deciding not only where to attend, but where to apply.
Where a student characterizes perceived differences between themselves and those with whom they are familiar (students from their educational and social environment who have attended any given university, in this case HYPS or UChicago) as essential, appreciable differences, that student, in choosing one university over the other where there is a choice in the offer acceptance stage, may simply be making what they feel is a defining statement of who they are, or are not.
The backward lens of time may have them wonder if a different conclusion might have been made. Or not.
Sure. A secure person doesn’t care if someone else thinks some other person/school/spouse/child is better than them/theirs and who’s happiness and satisfaction isn’t affected by whether some other people think they/their school/spouse/child are better or worse than some other school/spouse/child.
For instance, I don’t go around saying “I don’t want anyone to think that any child is better than mine” and I personally think that someone who goes around saying that isn’t at a terribly high self-confidence/maturity level.
@Cue7 , no more than dining out on a name at cocktail parties or calculating the monetary value of a degree do any of these other things you cite matter to anyone with a mind, heart, or soul.
“Validation”: Does one get that from other people bowing and scraping before the name of one’s alma mater? How pathetic is that? If you had read David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” (written while a prof at the U of C) you would recognize this as the vulgarest possible form of “other-directedness”.
“Opportunity”: The proper Chicago question would be, for what? Making money?
“Status”: Pathetic, again. Did you never yearn to break free from the imprisonment of that middlebrow concept? Did Socrates have status? Did Leonardo? Did Shakespeare?
“Everything”: Means nothing. Everything is not anything. There is no there there.
My wife and I have 3 degrees from Yale and we couldn’t be more excited and happy that son will be attending UChicago this fall. He applied ED1 as recruited athlete and never looked back on foregoing his Yale legacy/development application option.
IMO, the 2 comprehensive universities with most status are H and S. Chicago is already equal to Y and P (except for its lower endowment), and MIT would be the other peer in this class of the most elite comprehensive universities (Caltech is just too nichey and small and not comprehensive but undeniably incredible).
Chicago has a chance to attain same prestige as H and S among the general public over the next 20 years if it does these 4 things (not easy from a political or operational sense, but definitely doable):
- Increase the endowment. Many others have commented on this and the rationale should be self-explanatory. Hopefully, the whisper number of $10 billion for Chicago's next campaign will be achievable once the economy recovers. Chicago already has Top 10 wealthy alumni despite its dour period of the 1960s-1990s, and recent moves of greatly enhancing career services and Business Economics track will hopefully accelerate things in this direction despite what some may complain about pre-professionalism.
- Continue to invest heavily in Computer Science. CS department is already growing rapidly and targeted by the administration as a key priority. UChicago has several areas to leverage to try to become a Top 10 CS program. The city of Chicago has existing strengths in fintech with major quant hedge funds, but is underdeveloped as an overall entrepreneurial center. Hopefully UChicago can expand its Polsky Center program, and leverage relationships with TTIC (one of the top machine learning academic institutes) and Argonne/Fermi national labs to help make it and the city the clear tech hub of the midwest.
- Expand Engineering a bit further. Creating the Molecular Engineering program was a great move by UChicago because it can now say it offers the one thing that was lacking compared to all of its peers. Engineering is imperative to be a truly great comprehensive university of the future and Chicago's program essentially covers Biomedical, Chemical, and Material Sciences Engineering disciplines thru its various tracks. However, while UChicago should not try to offer every additional Engineering discipline, it should seriously consider adding Electrical and Mechanical Engineering as these 2 areas are also fundamental. That would be it, no need to expand any further with things like Civil or Aerospace, just offer EE and Mechanical and then call it a day.
- Consider D1 athletics and rejoining the Big Ten. I am admittedly very biased about this recommendation and know that this might cause the most consternation of all suggestions. But I will argue that one of UChicago's biggest mistakes in terms of harming its lay prestige was Hutchins' decision to kill the football team and leave the Big Ten in the 1940s. Yes, D1 sports cost a lot of money and require some alteration of admissions standards for athletes in certain sports to be competitive, but Stanford and Duke manage to compete at the highest levels while not harming their academic reputations and the Ivys also take their sports quite seriously. If UChicago were part of the Big 10, is there any doubt that its general prestige and recognition would be much higher even its teams were Northwestern caliber? The answer is clearly No.
By the way, UChicago will be searching for a new Athletics Director as Erin McDermott just resigned for Harvard: https://athletics.uchicago.edu/general/2019-20/releases/20200507j3g4j7
This now presents an opportunity for the Maroon Phoenix to rise from the ashes and go D1 again if President Zimmer hires a visionary AD to reclaim Chicago’s glory. I am sure that certain UChicago alums will cringe at the very thought of D1 athletics invading the life of the mind, but this move would not be radically different from all the other recent changes that have occurred at UChicago oner the past 20 years (luxury megadorms, expanded career services and RSOs, heavy prep school recruiting, Top 10 standing in D3 Directors Cup, Engineering and Biz Econ ties to Booth). UChicago would already have the universal prestige of H and S had it not been for the terrible mistakes under Hutchins which the current administration has been undoing, and I am hopeful that these trends under Zimmer and Nondorf continue in full unabated force.
The first post in this thread stated: “Very insightful piece !”
I disagree.
My observation: “Much ado about nothing.”
@marlowe1 - I shouldn’t have said “everything,” what I meant was: for all the reasons universal recognition is beneficial.
I truly couldn’t make sense of the relevance of #27 to our present discussion. We are talking about whether there are differences between these institutions. This was the subject of a very interesting sociological study. The H and S kids studied thought there were differences. They described those differences. We are now discussing them. One of them was an assertion by a Harvard kid that Chicago just did not rise to the level, for reasons of prestige, with H and S. Many on this board have told us this in other discussions. The question is whether this is true and, if so, whether we should care about it. I have given my own reasons as to why we should not care. @Cue7 has given his reasons as to why we should. To me it’s an interesting debate, and one that was imposed on us by the study, not because we at Chicago sought it. Of no other school was this said. And of course it is said repeatedly on this forum. Is it your thought that it is not a proper subject to discuss? It may be of no interest to anyone not connected with this university, granted, but if so, there’s no need to listen in.
@Zoom10: RE: Your post #29 above contains a priceless observation in the context of this thread:
“By the way, UChicago will be searching for a new Athletics Director as Erin McDermott just resigned for Harvard.”
P.S. The article regarding the departure of Chicago’s athletics director to assume the same position at Harvard University shares an important fact which differentiates Harvard & Stanford from Chicago and many other academically elite schools:
“As the nation’s largest Division I athletics program, [Harvard] boasts approximately 1,200 intercollegiate athletes across 42 varsity sports.”
Yes, Publisher, that UChicago’s AD just left for Harvard is apropos food for thought in this thread.
However, it should be noted that she worked in the athletics depts of Princeton and Columbia prior to coming to Chicago. Also, it may come as a surprise to some that Harvard is the largest D1 program in the country as measured by the number of varsity sports sponsored.
I know that I am asking to win the lottery, but if UChicago were to rejoin the Big Ten, that would be transformative in a spectacular and good way (I know many would disagree). Think about what seeing UChicago competing on ESPN and all the networks would do for the reputation of the university. And this would not be like Ivy sports that are mediocre D1 that no one cares about. In ranking of sports conference prominence, Big 10 = SEC >> ACC (Duke) >>> Pac-12 (Stanford) >>>>>>> Ivy.
FWIW I am more impressed by a Chicago JD degree or a Chicago MBA than by the same degrees from Stanford or Harvard. My impression is that Chicago professional graduate degrees come with a strong intellectual foundation.
With respect to undergraduate schools: Different strokes for different folks.
For intellectualism: Chicago is number one. Entrepreneurship: Stanford is tops. Worldwide name recognition & prestige: Harvard.
My takeaway from the study can be summarized in one word: “Fit.”
I pointed out the size of Harvard’s athletic program, and the well known prominence of Stanford’s athletic program, as a way of distinguishing a large portion of the undergraduate student bodies at Harvard & Stanford from UChicago.
I think that the study may have missed an important angle regarding athletics.
To me, Chicago is the most prestigious school in the country with respect to intellectual firepower.
@Zoom10 makes a good point about raising the prominence of an institution’s image by athletic conference. Doesn’t seem to be what UChicago is about, but it is a point worth consideration.
Yes, the fact that Erin McDermott left Chicago for Harvard is likely telling us that a person of her ambition and accomplishment had gone about as far in her field as possible at Chicago. She was probably always destined for Harvard. I would be most surprised and, I might add, most disappointed, @Zoom10 , if she were replaced by someone with aspirations to take athletics to any higher level at Chicago. Indeed, I would speculate that her departure may well have been caused not only by the good opportunity offered by Harvard, with its larger, more well-funded programs, its more serious athletes and sporting tradition, but that she reached a ceiling of opportunity at Chicago not only in terms of funding and programs but with the possibility of full devotion and hence accomplishment that any UChicago student-athlete could give and still be a UChicago student. I would welcome a new Athletic Director who is a UChicago grad with a good understanding of the modest way athletics must always fit into the culture of this school if it is to be what it is. Of course, there are those who don’t accept that if. Let the debate rage.
Sorry @zoom10 but UChicago won’t be going D1. Not sure of the purpose of doing so.
I know someone who is a parent at Harvard and a sponsor of Harvard Athletics. Here is the letter regarding Erin MdDermott sent to the Harvard Community:
"A Message from Claudine Gay, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Dear members of the Harvard Athletics community,
I am pleased to announce that Erin McDermott has been named the next John D. Nichols ’53 Family Director of Athletics at Harvard. She will assume the role on July 1, 2020.
In embarking on this search, I had the unique privilege of diving deeply into one of the most beloved parts of our institution and hearing from the people who care about it most: our coaches, who have dedicated their lives to transformational leadership in sport; our staff, who have similarly dedicated their lives to Harvard’s mission of education through athletics; our alumni, who keep us true to our traditions as well as our aspirations; our student-athletes, whose intensity, commitment, and talent is a constant source of inspiration and hope for the future; and our faculty, who are committed to a transformative experience for all of our students. The conversations on campus and with athletics thought leaders around the country were eye-opening, reinforcing not only the singularly formative experience of sport, but also the complex issues ahead for intercollegiate athletics.
From the first moments of my conversation with Erin, I knew that I had found in her the partner I was seeking and the leader that Harvard needs for its next century of success in athletics. Steeped in Ivy League principles, fundamentally committed to student-athlete success, and driven by her values, Erin is someone who has formed a deep appreciation of Harvard and its place in the Ivy League, as well as the things that make the experience we create for our student-athletes unique. Throughout her career, she has privileged face-to-face relationships as the foundation for collaboration, innovation, and change. Erin knows better than anyone the power of a strong community united by common values, both when we are celebrating our accomplishments and confronting challenges. In this moment, when our opportunities to be together as a community have been so disrupted, I couldn’t be more excited for Erin to join us and to bring her passion for education through athletics and community-building through recreational sports to this new moment.
Erin’s appointment marks her return to Ivy League athletics after seven years leading an era of strategic growth and impressive success at the University of Chicago. As Director of Athletics and Recreation, she oversaw 20 intercollegiate sports, more than 40 club sports, an active intramural sports program with thousands of student participants annually, a robust fitness program, as well as athletics facilities. Since her arrival to Chicago in 2013, the Maroons captured 17 UAA championships, seven NCAA individual event championships, and six top-20 finishes in the Learfield Sports Directors’ Cup standings among 450 NCAA Division III institutions. Under Erin’s leadership, the department reached several major milestones, including adding women’s lacrosse as the school’s 20th varsity sport—the first varsity sport to be added in 30 years—securing the university’s first ever department-wide apparel agreement with Adidas, and launching the Friends of Maroon Athletics to increase engagement with alumni and enhance the student-athlete experience. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Erin served as Deputy Director of Athletics at Princeton University where she oversaw internal operations for 38 intercollegiate sports. She began her career in athletics at Columbia University where she worked on issues of compliance and oversaw recruiting activity and eligibility for 28 varsity sports.
A recognized leader in college athletics, Erin has also served on several national committees, including the Executive Committee of the National Association of Division III Athletic Administrators and the Board of Directors for Women Leaders in College Sports. She is a member of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA), and a 2019 winner of the NACDA AD of the Year award.
Erin’s deep commitment to the holistic growth and development of student-athletes is reflected in her successful track record of creating a culture that leads to outstanding performances on and off the field. During her time at Chicago, 14 student-athletes were selected as Collegiate Sports Information Directors Association Academic All-Americans, the most prestigious academic award in collegiate athletics. And at both Chicago and Princeton, she successfully partnered with university leadership to develop student wellness programs that expanded support for student mental and physical health on campus. She is a firm believer in the leadership development opportunities that athletics—both competitive and recreational—can provide students, and has been a steadfast advocate for the value of intercollegiate athletics in student development and the overall health, diversity, and culture of a university environment.
Erin’s professional journey is rooted in her own formative experience as a former student-athlete. A member of the women’s basketball team at Hofstra University, she served as team captain and was the winner of the school’s senior scholar-athlete award. She credits her experience at Hofstra for her decision to pursue a career in college athletics as it was there that she realized the profound educational value of sport. Inspired by fellow teammates and coaches, the experience catalyzed personal growth, maturity, and resilience—lessons and values she still carries with her today. She earned her bachelor of business administration in International Business at Hofstra University, and her master’s degree in Sport Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a native of Massachusetts, Erin’s move to Harvard is also an exciting homecoming. I am delighted that she has agreed to join us in Cambridge.
Throughout her career, Erin has proven herself to be a thoughtful and effective champion for the power of sport to develop students as individuals and leaders, and she does so in pursuit of excellence in both academics and athletics. As a values-driven leader with deep roots in the Ivy League, Erin joins Harvard poised to advance the proud traditions and philosophy of Harvard Athletics, and to positively shape the experience of our student-athletes and all those who participate in club sports, intramurals, and Harvard’s extensive recreational programs.
I am profoundly grateful to the members of the search advisory committee, Mike Smith, Jack Reardon, Stephanie Khurana, Tommie Shelby, Gwill York, and Katie O’Dair, who, together with our search consultants from Korn Ferry International conducted extensive outreach with members of the Harvard Athletics community and worked diligently to identify and review an outstanding pool of candidates. And, of course, I am grateful to Bob Scalise, whose legacy of leadership and distinguished service to Harvard Athletics and to the Ivy League is incalculable. I am thankful Bob has generously agreed to continue serving as an advisor to me on athletics through academic year 2020-21.
This is an exciting moment for the future of Harvard Athletics. Even as we enter a time of significant challenge posed by COVID-19, I am hopeful and confident about what’s to come. Erin will be a powerful advocate for our student-athletes across campus and within the Ivy League, and I look forward to partnering with her to ensure the continued success and vibrancy of our athletic programs. Please join me in welcoming Erin to Harvard! Go Crimson!
Sincerely,
Claudine"
Marlowe1 writes:
I would welcome a new Athletic Director who is a UChicago grad with a good understanding of the modest way athletics must always fit into the culture of this school if it is to be what it is. Of course, there are those who don’t accept that if. Let the debate rage.
As usual, I’m in full agreement with Marlowe1! Athletics at almost ever level above intramural hinder the intellectual mission of the university. They distort and warp the values that make UChicago a special place. I’m sorry-- know these are assertions, not arguments (I have to run now), but the abundance of material made available in the recent and on-going Harvard Asian discrimination case provide…abundant evidence.