@mentordad I congratulate your son on his discernment - and you on conducting that odyssey with him to the many schools you both visited and pondered. It must be rather wonderful to do that with a child just at this crucial juncture of his life, not only sharing the travel together but all the fodder for discussion that that experience must produce and your joint efforts to winnow and sort it all out. Best of luck with all that. You are getting good advice here from several of our resident number crunchers.
@JHS Midwesterness, as I, who never lived there either before or after college, think of it, doesn’t express itself in the same way at the University of Chicago as at other midwestern schools. You can find lack of irony in quite a different sense at Ohio State or Michigan State. And the University of Chicago does indeed draw its people very significantly from the coasts (though some of these may be “honorary midwesterners” in possessing the qualities I attempted to describe and which I attribute especially to the geographical Midwest). These are stereotypes, of course, and go back a long way in our national history of often jocular descriptions of regional personalities. There’s usually some truth in stereotypes. However, you are certainly right that the University is a world of its own, and you are also right to point to an urban-rural divide in which the University of Chicago probably seems to someone from downstate Illinois very much like a school in a big eastern city.
@JBStillFlying has described the qualities in the Economics Department that give it a Midwestern flavor. I could do the same thing for the English Department, at least as it existed fifty years ago in the waning days of the old Chicago School of Criticism. There’s an amusing book about the schools of criticism that existed at approximately that time (“The Pooh Perplex” by Frederick Crews) in which the Chicago School is depicted as humorlessly Aristotelian, unconcerned with esthetic felicities and utterly graceless - as opposed to the dashing worldly Yale School, the edgy sophisticated Columbians, the gracious and stylish Princetonians, the estheticized Virginians, and so on. I might also quote one of my old Chicago friends who went on to do his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton and to become an eminent mathematician in his own right. As he says, at Princeton the goal is “elegance”. At Chicago mathematics is meant to be hard work… One could go on in this vein through many departments, I think.
I plead guilty to overstating differences. If that’s so in a Chicago-positive dimension, then I can only say that many do so in a negative one. There must be a reason why so many protest so vigorously that the old College was a failure and that radical change was and still is required to banish a certain universal and still persisting stereotype - the one which I myself had a little fun with in my previous posting. And, yes, Yale is also a serious school and much to be admired, and no doubt its students are highly intellectual, but one thinks of so many things that make it so different from Chicago - wealth, sports, clubs, snob appeal, a culture that highly regards extra-curricular activities, a student body highly drawn from private schools and imbued with eastern irony, polish, etc. Chicago just seems different from that, Midwestern in a word.