UChicago Accepts 13.38% Earl Action

UChicagoGrad
Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:34:56 +0000

@tawarren: they dont mean that 98 percent of the class is filled. They mean that 1380 people have been offered a spot at UChicago, enough to fill 98% of the freshman class if the yield were 100% (which of course, it will not be).

It’s not unlikely that all that UChicago is just being super-cautious with early action acceptances, since they’re non-binding. Beyond that, since top-tier schools like Harvard and Princeton and Stanford and Yale have single-choice early action, which prohibits you from applying early action to any private universities, that means (I believe) that no one who applied early to Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford applied early to UChicago.

Which isn’t to call UChicago’s application pool subpar. It is to say, however, that single-choice early action kept 20,000 applicants (who probably had some pretty good scores and grades) from applying to any other top-tier schools, including UChicago. My guess is that it had at least a little negative pull on the overall quality of the early applicant pool, which translated to the acceptance rate.

(Which might have been why, for example, there were lower early acceptance rates at Georgetown (12.8%) and UChicago (13.8%) than there were at Harvard (18.3%) and Yale (14.4%)).