<p>I don’t understand why Chicago doesn’t appear on the radar screen of an academic magnet school in northern New Jersey. What else is it supposed to do to improve unaided brand recognition? It has a near-monopoly on one of the Nobel Prizes. People associated with it were (deservedly) blamed for providing the intellectual underpinnings for starting the Iraq War, and blamed or praised for reforming the economy of a continent. A former professor was elected President of the United States. A current administrator left her job to be First Lady. It has highly-ranked professional schools, and highly ranked departments in a number of popular fields, including economics (of course), math, English, life sciences, physics, sociology, and English. It is ranked in the top 10 by USNWR. I don’t care much about USNWR, but I was under the impression that academically ambitious New Jersey high schoolers did.</p>
<p>Indiana Jones taught there.</p>
<p>It’s never (or not in the foreseeable future) going to have a BCS football team, a Sweet-Sixteen basketball team, or even a famous athletic conference. (Whose blood runs faster contemplating the next match-up between the Maroons and the Violets?) It is not going to have an undergraduate engineering school anytime soon. It would probably get more applicants if it did, but it doesn’t really WANT applications from kids who are set on going to engineering school. It’s not going to move to the suburbs, something that would probably make suburban potential applicants more comfortable, too.</p>
<p>I don’t know how much unsolicited mailing Chicago does. (They did some back in my day, I know, because I got it. My kids probably registered on the web site early enough so that it would be impossible to tell in their cases.) The champion of that is Washington University in St. Louis, and I know I have been dismayed to contemplate how much they must be spending on that program, and how desperate and generic it makes them look. (Most of the unsolicited marketing materials my kids got from colleges made the colleges look desperate and generic.)</p>