A couple side notes:
- This article describes UChicago as "the Midwest’s closest equivalent to an Ivy League school." While others have questioned my characterization of Chicago as the "Academic Ivy," it looks like at least some reporters view Chicago as quite ivy-like! (No doubt, Chicago's administration would be happy with such a description.)
- Chicago is too tight-lipped about the actual data, and too invested in self-promotion for us to actually tell how influential TO is. Are there 20 TO students in the class? 100? 400? Who knows. Other U.s provide a range of data (% first gen, % legacy, etc.). Chicago provides almost nothing.
Until we know how influential TO actually is at Chicago, these articles read like fluff pieces.
- Along with offering TO, what sort of specialized resources does Chicago actually offer students from more meager backgrounds? Enhanced advising? Additional tutoring? Free summer classes? Subsidized travel to and from home? The policy change is nice - but what sort of support are such students actually getting?
In comparison to its peers, Chicago has modest means. How much can it offer students who may need such support?
- Connections to prestige pathways -- @marlowe1 may remember this, as I do: For many years, Chicago recruited and retained lots of students from rural areas, students "off the beaten path." These students often flourished at Chicago, and I remember many of them had a work ethic and toughness I certainly couldn't match. This constitution prepared them well for a Chicago education.
This constitution did NOT prepare them well for what Chicago now seems to covet: pathways to prestige/high paying outcomes for its college grads. The rural low SES folks I mentioned at Chicago were great, but they often weren’t hawks about their GPA, and they rarely showed interest in the pathways Chicago promotes on its glossy fluffy outcomes literature (Goldman Sachs! Merrill Lynch! T15 Law School!)
How are the current crop of such students interacting with Chicago’s new institutional drivers? There seems to be some tension between recruiting from such areas on one end, and having certain expectations for outcomes on the other.
My own hunch here is that many of Chicago’s admin goals are working in sync with one another. For instance:
- If you expand the class size to match Harvard's (read: around 1700 a year), that leaves a lot of wiggle room to recruit a larger number of "types" of students (read: a certain number of prepsters who may easily fall into prestige exit outcomes, more rural students, more first gen students, more legacies, etc.)
- I expect, then, that Chicago's numbers on so many fronts (accept rate, yield rate, % going to top law schools, % seeking professional careers, % athletes, etc.) will more closely resemble it's ivy-brethren.
Put another way, Chicago is sticking true to what the reporter in this article said: UChicago is the Midwest’s closest equivalent to an Ivy League school.
The Academic Ivy! Now with TO and a pipeline to Goldman Sachs and Columbia Law!