<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>