<p>Hear hear, JHS and hyjeonlee.</p>
<p>A top administrator at UChicago who is an alum of the college has said that this stream of thought (“The freshmen don’t care about learning for the sake of learning! They’re better-looking than us! They’re more NORMAL!”) has been around since at least his time, and he graduated from the College in the late 80’s/early 90’s. So if we really have been “regressing” each year, there should be more data to show for it in some form or another. </p>
<p>Here are CAPS’s career outcomes for the graduating classes of 2007-2009. The College became more selective over this time frame, but what students choose to pursue and how remained remarkably stable, even with the economy tossed in as a wrench: <a href=“Home | CareerAdv”>Home | CareerAdv;
<p>So College graduates go on into finance/business AND to grad school in relatively large numbers and have been doing so well before you even knew this school existed/ back when it was more “nerdy.” What we don’t know was whether the finance person was a classics major or whether the grad school in American Studies kid majored in econ, so “love of learning” and “UChicago-ness” are hard to measure. On a pure anecdotal level, it’s hard to be successful in the finance/business field if you don’t love what you’re doing, and many of my alumni friends in such fields love the knowledge that they have acquired, with other kinds of knowledge, too. I know many “UChicago” personalities, if we measure by the “learn for the sake of learning” metric, who are now in medical school, business school, law school, and other “pre-professional” fields. What the writer of the piece does not have that somebody like me has is a span of time in which to track acquaintances and friends through their majors and after graduation.</p>
<p>My best friend from high school attends an institution that puts about as much pride on itself and its exceptionality as UChicago, and even she has become bitter about the “growing pre-professionalism” at her school, which is funny to me, because if anything, the school successfully rebranded itself a few years ago to communicate its difference better.</p>
<p>I chalk it up to the lack of experience/ naivete of college freshmen nationwide.</p>