<p>I was checking around and I was curious as to what the actual acceptence rate was for the University of Chicago. It turns out that it is much higher than I could have imagined. For its rank it seems odd that it accepts nearly 40 percent of the applicants (38%). Whenever it is ranked nationally, the schools the are analogous in terms of prestige and reputation have acceptence rates hovering around or below 20 percent. Why is this this way? Is the applicant pool really that strong? Surely its not as strong as the Ivies, which still yet accept less than 15% on average</p>
<p>schism, you haven’t looked at UChicago’s app, have you?</p>
<p>UChicago’s yield is much, much higher than at most comparative schools. This is because Chicago is very, very self selecting. Their essay prompts for this year’s Uncommon App are:
Essay Option 1
Chicago professor W. J. T. Mitchell entitled his 2005 book “What Do Pictures Want?” Describe a picture and explore what it wants.</p>
<p>Proposed by Anna Andel, a graduate of Bard High School Early College, New York, NY.
Essay Option 2
The University of Chicago has a venerable tradition of seminar-based learning, in which students and professors gather around the classroom table to discuss ideas. Less venerable, but no less valuable, is our tradition of conversation around another table–the dinner table. Indeed, on any given night you will find members of our student community breaking bread together, discussing everything from The Symposium to The Simpsons. We in the admissions office would argue that a community can be defined by its table—by its shape, by who finds a seat there, by what transpires there, by what is inspired there. Tell us about your table.
Essay Option 3
In Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, he writes a parable entitled “Borges y yo,” which translates as “Borges and I.” In it, Borges writes about “the other one,” his counterpart, who shares his preference for “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson,” but is not the same as he. “The other one” is the famous author; “the other one” is the one “things happen to.” He concludes this parable with the line “I do not know which of us has written this page.” Write a page. Who has written it?</p>
<p>Proposed by Zhuyi Elizabeth Sun, a graduate of Inglemore High School, Bothell, WA.
Essay Option 4
Modern improvisational comedy had its start with The Compass Players, a group of University of Chicago students, who later formed the Second City comedy troupe. Here is a chance to play along. Improvise a story, essay, or script that meets all of the following requirements:</p>
<pre><code>* It must include the line “And yes I said yes I will Yes” (Ulysses, by James Joyce).
- Its characters may not have superpowers.
- Your work has to mention the University of Chicago, but please, no accounts of a high school student applying to the University–this is fiction, not autobiography.
- Your work must include at least four of the following elements:
o a paper airplane
o a transformation
o a shoe
o the invisible hand
o two doors
o pointillism
o a fanciful explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem
o a ventriloquist or ventriloquism
o the Periodic Table of the Elements
o the concept of jeong
o number two pencils
</code></pre>
<p>Essay Option 5
Take as a model Options 1 through 4 as you pose and respond to a prompt of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful, then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.</p>
<p>Those essay prompts are supposed to attract people who’d fit in at UChicago and discourage people who wouldn’t. They’re good at it.</p>
<p>Yes, i know what the uncommon app essays are, i recieved it in the mail and i have to say the prompts are awesome.</p>
<p>Fewer students apply to Chicago because of its reputation for not being easy. But generally, those students who do apply are high-caliber. So, there is some self-selection that goes on. For example, there are 4.0 students (high ACTS, most difficult courses taken in hs ) in my son’s school who don’t want to apply to Chicago because of its reputation.
If I were you, I wouldn’t be too sure that the applicant pool to Chicago is not as strong as the those applying to the schools in the Ivy athletic league.</p>
<p>I posted this on another thread where a poster had the same question:</p>
<p>The admissions percentage is a factor of both how many students apply and how many students who are admitted attend.</p>
<p>Chicago turns off prospective applicants for a few reasons:
- It is a school with a Great Books tradition with an emphasis on academics. That sounds yummy to a Chicago applicant, but it grosses out a lot of bright and talented kids.
- The Uncommon application turns off prospective applicants.
- The lack of a huge party scene.
- Its non-ivy status doesn’t help, either.
- Misdirected fears of “the hood” of South Side Chicago versus the campus’s location in Hyde Park (which features everything from affordable student apartments to multimillion-dollar homes and the likes of Barack Obama and Carol Moseley Braun)</p>
<p>I also have friends who are attending Yalevard who balked on Chicago’s application and reputation. In hindsight, this was a good thing-- both of them, while extremely academically talented, don’t have the “Chicago personality.” While they like school enough and they’re good at it, they like skipping class and partying more. It’s not that Chicago’s all that difficult, I don’t think, but that it’s impossible to skate by on easy classes, though it is at almost every other elite school. (And get higher grades for it!)</p>
<p>I also see Chicago’s non-east-coast-ness as another hindrance. From the way I see it, Northwestern and Vanderbilt are better schools for students than most of the ivies-- good location with a nearby city, good party scene, good sports, good academics-- and yet these schools don’t get the numbers of applications and the kind of yield that the ivies do, even though there’s every indication that one would be happier at NU or Vandy.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>It’s still easy to come to the conclusion that Chicago is not “as strong” as the ivies based on priority of admission. However, one could just as easily look at Chicago’s SAT midrange, which shows that Chicago students test similarly well to Ivy League/ other elite school students. Anecdotally, the other students I know who turned down top schools to come to Chicago are not necessarily at the top of Chicago.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>UChicago’s yield is around 40%. That is not “much, much higher” than most comparative schools. Given Chicago’s rank at #9 this year, it’s actually lower than peer schools like Dartmouth, Columbia, etc.</p>
<p>Either way, if you like the school, you should just be happy that the school is capable of admitting a higher percentage of students than its peers. It means you have a better shot of getting to attend! <em>Quality is not affected by admission rate</em></p>
<p>Chicago’s “yield” – the ratio of enrolled students to students offered admission – is around 33%. That’s about the same as the yield on students accepted RD at many comparable colleges (Dartmouth, Northwestern, Cornell, Penn, Swarthmore, Amherst) once you back out the effects of their 100% yield on Early Decision admittees (a program Chicago doesn’t have). They all have to admit about three times the number of available slots at the RD stage in order to fill their classes. Only a handful of colleges have higher yields, and by and large those are the rest of the top-10 universities in the USNWR rankings (plus Brown, which is around 45%). For the most part, they are all looking at the same pool of potential students. They all lose accepted students to each other, to less expensive schools, and of course to the schools like Harvard and Yale whose yields are 70%+.</p>
<p>What makes Chicago’s admissions rate high is that it gets fewer applications per slot than most of its peer schools. Unalove does a good job of summarizing the reasons for that, but I might add a few more: lack of Division I sports, and lack of specialized, career-focused programs like engineering, business, or journalism that appeal to different pools of students. Also, not having a binding Early Decision program forces it to accept three applicants for 100% of the slots in its class, while the similar Early Decision schools wind up accepting three applicants for only 50-70% of the slots in their classes, and one applicant per slot for the rest.</p>
<p>This comparative lack of selectivity does hurt Chicago in the USNWR rankings. So does its comparatively small endowment vs. other top schools, and the fact that slightly more freshmen wind up transferring to other colleges than at its peers. The reasons it nonetheless ranks in the top-10 under USNWR’s system are the strong statistical profiles of the students who do choose to enroll there, a great faculty-student ratio, and, most importantly, the fact that in the world of higher education the Chicago faculty and the quality of education it provides are widely seen as the equal of HYPS – something that is not true of many more selective or richer universities. </p>
<p>If Chicago got the same number of applications as Columbia or Duke, it would vault over them in the rankings. But that isn’t happening anytime soon.</p>
<p>There’s a UChicago livejournal community where students have been discussing our self-selectivity, rank, admissions rate etc. Here’s a choice quote from one of the discussions:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Many Chicagoans (myself included) don’t think that upping the number of applicants would be conducive to building a better school for the students who attend.</p>
<p>Well, the higher number of freshmen transfers may very well suggest that students are not very happy there, ( for a reason ) compared to peer institutions. What’s Chicago’ spin on that?</p>
<p>What? serchingon, it’s already been established that you are a ■■■■■, but this is extreme even for you. Chicago’s freshman retention rate is 98% (<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board)</p>
<p>freshman retention rates of HYPMS = 98, 99, 98, 98, 98</p>
<p>^^^^ What? And it has already been established that you should go and feed on some Meow Mix, pleease.</p>
<p>
by JHS</p>
<p>Again, what’s Chicago’ spin on that?</p>
<ol>
<li>Admissions rates are calculated by dividing the number accepted by the number applied.<br></li>
<li>If the rate is higher, that means one of two things: the number accepted is high, or the number applying is low.</li>
<li>UChicago accepts more or less the same amount of people as most of the other universities of its caliber, so in conclusion…</li>
</ol>
<p>the total number of applicants to Chicago must be lower than it is at other schools with similar “prestige.”</p>
<p>I still don’t understand how people could think that acceptance rate is a good indicator of selectivity. It’s much more an indicator of popularity. </p>
<p>Serchingon: “Chicago’ spin” on what, exactly? Cite a stat, por favor.</p>
<p>Any thoughts about why there is a slightly higher number of freshmen transferring to other colleges “than at his peers”, like JHS mentions.</p>
<p>First of all, one can’t assume that everybody who leaves the school has transferred out. Of all the students I know who will not be returning next year, not one is not returning because they didn’t like the school. These students have outstanding health, financial, and family issues-- one of my friends was in complete tears when her parents told her that they weren’t going to be paying for college any more, another wrote an extremely heartfelt facebook note to tell us that family issues are keeping her at home and that she wants nothing more than to return to Chicago.</p>
<p>I’m sure there are students who transfer out because it doesn’t offer a program that they realize they want (business? engineering? communications?) or that they want to be at a smaller school, a larger school, a more rural school, a more party-centered school, etc. Not everybody who transfers out of school does it because they dislike it-- they are 18 years old, their goals change from time to time, and different colleges suit different goals better than others. I remember reading a post by somebody on these boards who had transferred from Amherst to William and Mary-- a move than many would see as a downgrade, but the poster had good reasons for it. He or she felt that Amherst was too small, too rural and reminded the poster too much of high school.</p>
<p>And I’m sure there are some students who absolutely despise the school, bar none. I’m not particularly concerned, nor should you be. There are also people in the world who hate chocolate ice cream. What do you want me to do about it?</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>I’m also not sure that Chicago has that low retention. Sure, it’s low in comparison to HYP (schools that students want to make sure they graduate from, and schools that make sure you will graduate), but I seem to remember that it’s on par with NU and others.</p>
<p>“Any thoughts about why there is a slightly higher number of freshmen transferring to other colleges “than at his peers”, like JHS mentions.”</p>
<p>It could be for any number of reasons and it would be silly to interpret a single, vague parameter (“slightly more”) as support for any significant generalization, without more information. </p>
<p>It’s hard to put “spin” on a 98% freshman retention rate.</p>
<p>Well, being that the case, perhaps there was no need for JHS to make that distinction…was there? It can not influence the ranking that much compared to the others.</p>
<p>Honestly, I may have been wrong about retention, or out of date. I didn’t check anything before writing what I wrote, I just remembered having noticed that several years ago when I was trying to understand how USNWR calculated its rankings. In any event, I think it’s clearly a less noticeable ratings factor than endowment and selectivity.</p>
<p>Make of this data what you will.</p>
<p>Source: <a href=“College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics;
<p>Rates of Retention for…</p>
<p>Yale-- 99%</p>
<p>Harvard–98%
MIT-- 98%
Stanford–98%
Columbia-- 98%</p>
<p>Chicago-- 97%
Northwestern-- 97%
Amherst-- 97%</p>
<p>WashU–96%
Swarthmore–96%</p>
<p>JHU-- 95%</p>
<p>Oberlin–91%</p>
<p>Reed–85%</p>
<p>I attempted to pick schools that are often cross-considered with Chicago.</p>
<p>I think that Chicago is getting more and more popular, so I’d expect its admission rate to steadily decrease in the next few years.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You’re right, I believe, in that it’s getting more popular. However, I don’t expect the admissions rate to steadily decrease in the next few years. Rather, I see it lurking around 25% the next 5 years or so. (I’m assuming that the admissions rate will drop to about 25% after our change to the Common App) I’ve heard a number of people say “Chicago? Oh yeah, I was going to apply there, but then I saw the essays…” I think the popularity increase is mostly do to USNWR top 10 ranking, but this won’t change the fact that students won’t put a major effort into an application to a school they really aren’t that interested in.</p>