“I also think his view of “Midwesternness” is very skewed, and almost unrecognizable. Midwesternness is Ohio State, Indiana, UIUC. The University of Chicago is a region all its own. But in any event, Chicago is full of kids from the (sea) Coasts, and that has been true for a while.”
class of 2020 profile shows that the largest segment is “Midwest”, and while East Coast is a close 2nd, West Coast is a bit farther behind. https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/page/profile-class-2020
Also, @JHS, with all due respect you might be misunderstanding “Midwesterness”. This is key to understanding UChicago vs. a vs. East Coast elites, at least at one time in the school’s history. In the Economics dept. they referred to “Freshwater” vs. “Saltwater” thinking, particularly for Macroeconomic theory. The former: UChicago, Northwestern, CMU, URochester, UMinnesota. The latter: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, possibly MIT (at the time). Now, this was approximately 30 years ago - more than a generation in terms of economic thought but it represents how deep this “Midwesterness” ran at one point. The school has a tradition of being more maverick (there’s that word again!), less bound to “established” traditions, more interested in bringing a fresh perspective to some age-old issues. One UChicago PhD student I knew at the time commented that when he visited an Ivy for a job market talk, they seemed far more concerned with the wine at dinner than with his paper. He got the distinct impression that these well-known and well-respected tenured academics were really more into lifestyle than ideas (and they were pretty famous in their fields). Just an impression, of course. But his comment underscores how different is the training at UChicago, at least in certain grad. departments. That can’t help but filter down to the college and it’s probably more a symptom of the school’s overall culture than one department’s experience.