I’d recommend that everyone re-read that Newsweek article that @Cue7 posted upthread. Here’s the link again: https://www.newsweek.com/inside-admissions-game-164802
It’s a peek into the Pre-Nondorf admissions process at UChicago at a time when O’Neill proudly stated “We’re not ‘building a class,’ creating this ideal little world with so many of these and so many of those,” . . . “We accept the best, and hope to get as many as we can.” Indeed, according to the article Admissions doesn’t run the admitted list through the computer till the end. “Only then does Chicago learn that it has accepted 1,529 men and 1,631 women. Their average SAT score is about 1420. Their ethnicity, something that many applicants don’t divulge, still isn’t known in the aggregate. Chicago prides itself on using no gender, racial, geographic or other quotas in deciding whom to accept.”
- This is consistent with what Cue has said about those days. (NB: it was around this time that the College's admit rate dropped to below 50% for the first time in decades or perhaps ever).
How different were those methods from today’s process, and how different is today’s class from that of the early aughts? Today the typical elite university’s admissions dept. - actually, ANY university admissions dept. - is run by seasoned professionals and assisted by sophisticated computer modeling. Best practices combined with technology and good ol’ marketing knowhow probably do maximize the number of qualified applicants (and even unqualified ones!). Institutional goals such as increasing the number of low income, URM, women in STEM, athletes, leaders, and so forth should be pretty easy to achieve.
UChicago didn’t report ethnicity on its class profile till around 2006 (Class of 2010). In those days, it reported about 14% URM (AA/Hispanic) and 15% Asian. White was reported under 50%, IIRC. However, a large segment simply didn’t self-identify as anything at the time. It’s possible that White was under-reported; or that Asian was, or that URM was. We don’t know. International representation was around 10%.
When Nondorf was clearly established at UC and number of applications increased to north of 25k, then some patterns emerged: every reported “non-white” racial group gradually crept up to current representations; Asian representation in the matriculating class increased about 25%, URM doubled. And international representation increased about 50%. Keep in mind that these proportional gains were happening in a time of enrollment growth, so the actual numbers of Asians, URM’s, Int’ls, etc. were growing faster than the overall population of the College.
However, scant as the data is from those “O’Neill days” they still show the same upward trend. For instance, in the two years prior to Nondorf, URM’s increased from 14% of the matriculating class to 20%! So there was definitely some “institutional targeting” going on back then, regardless of how the process unfolded. O’Neil even acknowledges this in the article, that while they don’t use quotas, they do give a bump to qualified minority candidates because they add a fresh perspective to the classroom.
Varsity athletics is an interesting one w/r/t data. I asked my son what percentage of the class in 2003 played a varsity sport in high school. “Um . . . 10?” Nope: it was 45%. In fact, prior to Nondorf they had over 50% of the class represented as high school athletes a couple of times. It’s consistently over 50% now, but even during Nondorf’s earlier days it wasn’t all that different from the O’Neill “we don’t build a class” era. O’Neill, in fact, likes athletes, observing that " smart athletes manage time well, and find unorthodox ways to succeed. He recalls a recommendation written years ago by a high-school football coach: “This boy reads poetry and physics in the locker room. I don’t have another one like him.” Does this sound all that different from what posters have testified about today’s UChicago’s own D3 athletes? No wonder they decided to build up that program.
Men/Women: O’Neill’s department consistently favored women; Nondorf’s consistently favors men. Which one is building the class, and which one isn’t? Or perhaps does the systemic gender bias have more to do with curriculum and majors? CS and ME are newer additions, for instance. Or - as Cue speculates - are they chasing high test scores? Per the article, the admissions committee seems to have the same overall views about test scores back then as they do today: highly correlated with grades, not generally useful on their own for an admissions decision, but useful for bragging purposes.
And, similar to what MwFan noticed for the Class of '23, it appears that UChicago admitted candidates who had low '20’s ACT’s even back in the early aughts (per the data). Not sure if that proves a “hook” as much as it confirms that the admission committee didn’t rely on the ACT for the whole story.
Geographic: With UChicago’s increase in popularity came a shift away from the traditional Midwest base that it relied on. Mid-Atlantic, New England, South, SW, and West were all the beneficiaries. Is this deliberate or is it the natural consequence of a rising reputation? the Adcom could certainly focus on admitting the best w/o regard to underlying geographics and still end up with a more diversified group, simply because “the best” is being chosen from a very large and geographical diverse applicant pool.
Rural/small town kids - a “clear” institutional priority via Empower - was a top priority back in O’Neil’s day as well, per the article. They’ve just kicked it into high gear recently.
Finally, as we learn in the article, the adcom had a preference for strong leadership and “focused devotion to a few deep interests” back then as well! The data from the early aughts confirms that the top three EC’s today - high school athletics, music, and community service - were the most popular back then too. The data show that high school EC participation has increased over the years; however, that might be a natural outcome of increased selectivity (they are admitting more “accomplished” students now) perhaps supplemented by the overall bump in EC activity among kids vying for top schools. For instance, currently over 80% of matrics have done “community service” which means a host of things from NHS to scouting to running an NGO.
Over the Nondorf years those EC participation rates have stabilized so it’s possible that Nondorf is “sculpting” for this characteristic a bit. But this stabilization tends to go hand in hand with the applicant numbers finally starting to flatten out. I’m guessing this is more of a “law of large numbers” phenomenon than anything else. If Nondorf has allowed his preferences to show up anywhere, it’s in high school athletics and theater as both jumped last year. Or . . . . that might just be something specific to the Class of '23.
In sum, I don’t see where UChicago has deviated much from its long-standing admissions practices. Any current institutional target now seems to have existed back then during the “we’re not building a class” era, perhaps with the exception of military vets and police and fire. And there doesn’t seem to be much (any?) evidence that any of those “institutional” goals supplant how they ultimately choose their admits. In the end, you still have to be a great fit for the school’s intense intellectual culture. I’ve noticed too many bright, high achieving kids who match several of Cue’s “institutional criteria” get dinged while unhooked kids get admitted. Those unhooked kids just had something that the hooked kids didn’t. (And, btw, that’s holding grades, course load and test scores constant!).
Oh, and those still counting up the number of estimated “hooks” at Chicago, a useful tidbit: in 2017 there were 3800 Odyssey scholars so that’s an average of about 380/year (the program was launched in 2007).