Oh, please! That was the most cynical move ever. It didn’t have to be solving financial issues in the short term, and probably didn’t actually solve any of them. What it did was to let them boost the perceived selectivity of the college and to redeploy the financial aid budget more efficiently, while screwing over a lot of students of the sort marlowe1 waxes poetic about. It wasn’t personal, it was just business. But it wasn’t about improving the educational experience by keeping out the Ivy riffraff.
As for Cue7’s lament, my kids – roughly ten years his juniors – have found the University of Chicago a great place to be from. In one case, in East Coast financial and philanthropic communities, and in the other case, well, at the University of Chicago. I also have some cousins who would have been Cue7’s contemporaries – I think they graduated in '97 and '00. They are both pretty ambivalent about their experience there, and I don’t think either has traded much on their undergraduate degee – one because he has a high-quality math PhD (and I do think UChicago helped with his admission there, but only a little, beyond teaching him a lot of math), and the other because she is a labor union state government lobbyist several states away, and bragging about where she went to college would not advance her career at all.