P.S. Surprised that Swarthmore College isn’t listed as a UChicago overlap (although it is listed as an overlap in the Swarthmore College write-up in Fiske).
@Publisher seems to be fixated with Fiske and US News. Clearly, UChicago’s internals are not toeing the line on what constitutes a “peer.” In other words, How Dare They?! Another case of UCDS.
Northwestern is $10.8 billion. They have had great difficulty recently with above rate expenses/drawdowns and well below market returns. I am not sure about details driving both issues. There are many fine schools with either major endowments not in my discussion (like University of Texas) or schools with market leading endowments per student (like Washington & Lee) that would expand this list/discussion greatly. I tried to keep the “peer list” to the ones that Chicago really battles/aspires to battle.
Demographic changes are hard to ignore. Over the next 30 years, the most explosive growth in the US will be among hispanics. Maybe this is what they’re aiming for?
I like your spirit, @CupCakeMuffins , and you raise an interesting question. Why are there not more elite private institutions in a state that has produced more than its share of potential founders thereof? —I’ll take a shot at an answer: Isn’t it largely that the history and ethos of Texas, famously a raw frontier society, has not favored a devotion to disinterested inquiry on the part of those who got rich there? And talk of the enrichment of personal life through an understanding of “the best that has been thought and said” and all such high-minded notions sounds distinctly like eastern snobbery. Rather, as the wealthy kept expanding their acreage and drilling their wells it was left to the state and the churches to establish all these institutions devoted to the finer things.
The small city I grew up in had three church-related colleges; similar ones and several larger ones were sprinkled all across the state in almost every county. They gave it its educational tone and were the means of bringing knowledge of the world, through the lens of the Good Book, to its rough inhabitants. These schools are excellent in their way and they too attest to the human spirit, but only the Rice Institute, as it then was, among private institutions was founded with a wider and more secular vision. But there are telling differences there too. Its founder was a Massachusetts real estate tycoon and slave-owner transplanted to Houston before the Civil War who stipulated in the charter for his proposed school that it be reserved for poor children of the white race (it was also for many years tuition-free, until that aspect of the charter was also broken). The founding dates to 1891, roughly the time of the founding of the University of Chicago, though the school did not open its doors until 1912 inasmuch as William Marsh Rice, unlike John D. Rockefeller, vacillated and toyed with other charitable schemes while keeping his nephews and nieces (he had no children) dancing in attendance and in suspense as to his intentions. The flow of funds had to await his death (he was murdered in his Manhattan apartment by his butler at the urging of his lawyer and a nephew) and an ensuing sensational trial rejecting probate of a forged will under which the New York lawyer would have been sole beneficiary. You can’t make this stuff up. New York lawyers never change.
John D. Rockefeller famously said, “God gave me my money, how could I withhold it from the University of Chicago?” William Marsh Rice is not reported as having said anything on the subject of God and the Institute, but his lawyer and his disappointed nephews and nieces might have said, “The City of Houston and his slaves gave the old man his money, how could he withhold it from us his faithful lawyer and his loving next of kin?” But he did, and he paid for it with his life. I’ll hoist a glass to him and wish the institution he founded well. However, the sons and daughters of Texas are numerous and talented enough to send some of their number to a sister institution to the north. After all it was founded by a Baptist.
I think it is as simple as the vast majority of the growth in Texas occurred since 1960, at a time the public institutions were well established already and have always been an affordable and prestigious option. Many years ago when I applied to law school, UT law was free to those admitted. Even now, undergrad tuition is held at $10k, and several of its departments rank in the top 10 nationally. Private colleges could have been established after 1960, but not many have been anywhere in the US.
Texas has other reputable schools like Baylor, SMU, TCU, Trinity and Southwestern. All doing superb but not T20 level recognition yet. Texas’s public schools like UT Austin and A&M are doing great but not as visible as UC Berkeley/U Michigan. If these schools were on east or west coast, they may generate more interest from out of state and international students.
Higher Ed is big business including public schools. When a school has $Billions sitting in an endowment that grows every year from gains and donations when will people start questioning why do these schools need such huge war chests? Bragging rights? Big paychecks for the asset managers? Sure, they hand out scholarships but that’s pennies on the dollar for these endowments.
Recruiting students from Texas is strictly a business decision. Good for them. I hope some students cash-in.
To @marlowe1 point all the private universities mentioned are associated with churches that founded them and continue to be very influential with them. Interestingly, UT with the large population in Texas and more importantly, lack of competition from prestigious private schools should be right there with UCB/UM but it seems to be a notch lower.
UT is the public school system with the highest endowment, by far. If one adds them all together for the UT System it is up there with Harvard. Yes, it is not easy to understand why it is not considered by many to be in the same league as, at least, UVA and UMich.
Cupcakemuffins, so since you are seeing things from a Texas lens, would you be okay if UChicago heavily recruits from TX then? Potentially that means free education for poorer Texans, and better education for those few young Texans who would thrive at a private, liberal arts, non-religious college setting. (What are the downsides to TX and Texans?)
A few observations having been on the advisory board for a “feeder” high school in Texas and having been involved in recruiting for UChicago and another peer institution:
Texas is not a gold mine of academic talent. On the contrary, it punches well below its weight (and rightfully so!) on a population adjusted basis in the same way that Florida does despite a lot of headline economic activity and population growth.
First, it is a low tax state that is bottom of the barrel nationally on educational expenditures. The number of public high schools that are deemed to consistently produce talent of interest to highly selective colleges is no more than a dozen and they all sit in Austin, Dallas and to a lesser extent Houston. None are famous in the way that Boston Latin, Stuyvesant, Thomas Jefferson, etc. are.
Second, Texas has no historic tradition of elite private high schools and most privates today are run of the mill with either a religious or country club vibe overlayed. There are only a handful which are legitimate feeders akin to the publics mentioned above.
As has been well documented elsewhere, the dual earner, high professional prestige households that are the primary pipeline for students to selective colleges are in short supply in Texas. The number of very high paying jobs in elite professional services, technology, biomedicine, etc. relative to the total population benchmarked against places like NYC, Boston or the Bay Area is stark. Indeed, many of the companies that have moved to Texas in recent years are doing so precisely because they are importing lower paid white-collar roles that are hard to fill in high cost states like NJ, CT, MD, etc.
Accordingly, even at those high schools that are capable of turning out UChicago caliber students in consistent enough size to develop meaningful relationship with admissions, the number of parents who are prepared to fork over 60K plus is pretty low. There are a lot of families that fall in a household income range where private colleges are often seen as an unaffordable luxury especially for more than one child.
With regards to the public schools above, there is a very large representation of first or second generation Asian immigrant students whose parents – no matter how talented their child – would never pass up a good state school option.
Which brings up the issue of UT Austin… which when you focus in on its sizable and well-established menu of honors programs is arguably one of the best public schools in the country setting aside UVA / Michigan / Berkeley. In a world where college affordability is top of mind and many UT honors programs are nearly free or have sub 10K a year fees you end up with an aggressive creaming of the crop effect. We have students ever year who literally get paid after summing relevant scholarships and funding to attend.
Because Rice still has a 16% admission rate versus half that for many Ivies its can falsely appear that top performers from Texas choose it disproportionately over other schools. In reality, it is picking up a lot of students who just missed getting a slot at a highly selective research university in the lottery of life but are for all intents and purposes are equally well qualified academically. In many ways in functions a lot like liberal arts colleges in New England today vis-à-vis the Ivy League proper.
Those are some good corrective observations, @novusdoctrina . Nevertheless, I take it as axiomatic that there are Chicago-type kids to be found everywhere in the country and in all circumstances. Texas kids are neither inherently dumber nor inherently smarter than Boston kids, but they have been way underrepresented at Chicago for a long time. I like the idea of doing something about that. It is good for the University of Chicago, and it is good for Texas. More importantly, for the right kind of kid it is good for the kid - if one believes as I do that Chicago has something to offer different from the options available down home.
Anecdotes, especially old ones, are a dime a dozen, but here’s one all the same… When I went up to the U of C I saw many reasons to feel overawed by the place, not least by some of my better-educated classmates from the east. I had come from a middling and no doubt underfunded high school in a middling small Texas city. However, greater familiarity - including seeing the struggles of some of my classmates, even seeing some drop out - convinced me that my education had been, if not good, then good enough, at least if joined to other ingredients. Some of those are the sort that tend to be fostered in less academically oriented cultures, where you are constantly being told not to get a swelled head or be too big for your boots, where the ancient virtues of fortitude, tenacity and courage are especially honored. Scholars need those virtues too, as Karl Weintraub was constantly telling us. If the candle of intellectual curiosity begins to flicker in high school a proper education can bring it to a blaze. But a big blaze at the beginning of a life can, if not tended, quickly go out.
I look back now and remember the twenty or so top students in my high school (none of whom left the state for college): all of them had the potential to flourish at Chicago, and two or three of them rivalled the most impressive kids I met there or anywhere. On the other hand some of the more privileged kids at Chicago had the smarts and the good head start but not the work ethic or the sense of what a Chicago education might mean. For some of them Chicago was a ho-hum or default option from a more favored school and they showed that attitude. Whether that is still so today I cannot say. However, few who make the trip up from Texas will be lacking in enthusiasm. For them it will be the intellectual adventure of a lifetime. Hook ‘em.
The highest SAT scores in the nation from a private school come from St. John’s in Houston. There are dozens of outstanding private and public high schools filled with diverse students all over Texas, as one would expect in a state of 30 million. The top 6% policy of admission at UT does result in a less academically qualified frosh class than some other public universities,but it may have offsetting policy goals.
It is just ignorant to assert that Texas has fewer intelligent or educated children. There are plenty of doctors and lawyers and engineers and investment bankers, and plenty of high performing schools those parents demand.
University of Chicago recruits heavily at the top private schools in Houston. Two students in my daughter’s senior class of 140 attended, and many more applied and/or were admitted. The same holds true for the rival high school, St. John’s. My daughter liked the University of Chicago and applied, but she chose Rice because the price tag was a lot cheaper and for the warmer weather.