0.5%
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/5/3/university-chicagos-acceptance-rate-plummets-7-2-c
@TheVulcan In my mind, managing yields is definitely not evil. Every responsible college that operates on a budget should manage their yield wisely. Throwing admission offers at applicants with no thought as to whether they will be good fits or will attend the college is a huge waste of limited resources and a disservice to other applicants.
I would hope MIT and Caltech would deny admission to any applicant whose application screams “I would rather go to Stanford”
I know for fact Stanford, like Harvard practices big time on hooks. And they routinely reject ISEF 1st place in any category, not to mention 3rd place.
I highly suspect that most applicants apply to multiple colleges. Having a preference for a specific college should not be held against an applicant. If it should, then there should be only ED at all institutions. That’s it.
Nonsense.
Key learnings for me are:
- Be happy and be grateful with what one got.
- Everyone is informed, with stats at fingertips and the play field layout known. Be comfortable with your risk tolerance, calculation, draw of luck and the results that come with it. It’s game time decision.
- The institutions are the same before and after the results come out. They all look after its own priorities and interests, be it yield, ranking or prestige. Don’t trash the one that rejected you. After all, you choose it to start with.
Actually @TheVulcan at #420 - we don’t know what the current deferred rate is now. It was never mentioned for the Class of '23. Last spring only a couple of kids posted that they were admitted as deferreds. It could be lower than .5%.
“I highly suspect that most applicants apply to multiple colleges. Having a preference for a specific college should not be held against an applicant. If it should, then there should be only ED at all institutions. That’s it.”
- Everyone has their reach and presumably would attend if accepted. There is a reason why "top colleges" are so popular! And then, the advantage of an ED2 option is that you can have not one but TWO specific preferences. If both are a "top college" you significantly increase your chances of attending one of them by having an ED2 application in your back pocket.
Hey everyone! I got deferred EA (VERY much expected) and I’m planning on applying ED2 now! Anyone else planning on applying ED2?
Alright, let’s allow ED2. But then let’s get rid of EA and RD.
EA and RD is another option but then probably colleges would feel under more stress then in the current scheme.
I would go even further: let’s have only RD and let colleges have just one take. I believe that would be a little more fair for applicants.
Transparency is another important issue.
Not sure how UChicago needs to be more “transparent”? We know that the early admit rate was 7% last year and that the overall rate was 6%. That means that the ED2/RD admit rate was around 5% (new apps).
And why would the College want to get rid of EA and RD when they admit half the class that way?
Regarding yield management, UChicago has had a very crucial reason for doing so the last few years, and that’s because it was growing the student body by about 1,000 more enrollees within a 4-5 year time period amidst a very tight housing situation. Class of '22 was oversubscribed by about 50-75 enrollees and it caused a bit of a housing crunch. Fortunately, this will resolve by next fall when the new 1,200-bed res hall comes on line.
Dirst, perfect stats kids get rejected at UChicago, Stanford. MIT and other T20 all the time. A lot of the times it’s because their essays scream “I will be miserable if I went there but I will go there if it’s the highest rank school I can get into”.
Those apps are not wrong to be rejected … for the good of both the school, the applicant, and Really, everybody else. No one wants a kid who is surely going to be unhappy at some school.
Second, applicants that check all the boxes often result in weird combinations of acceptances. Imagine an application that has a 50/50 chance. It’s good but not a shoo-in. In these cases these apps are most affected by what the school needs to round out the class. An app like that can be accepted by a “better” school but rejected by a “worse” school. And vice versa. It’s even more weird when we don’t know which school is better. (Is uchicago better because it has a better UsNews ranking? (disclaimer I think Caltrch is the bestest school in the universe) In those cases we can only surmise that one school saw that the applicant is a good fit to its culture and the other did not. Or perhaps it’s just the coin toss (luck, 50-50)
The fallacy I keep seeing is that “if school A is better or is a peer and it accepts applicant X, then school B which is worse or is a peer should also accept them. Well as
Shown in the examples above, there are other factors, including luck, that is at play…
The third scenario is that, well it’s possible that the worse school made a Mistake. It’s also just as possible that the “better” school made a mistake!
Cheers!
While this thread is wildly entertaining to read, I feel that a poster or 2 should move on. As a parent of a child that was accepted last year in the early rounds (not rich, not a minority, unhooked, and an intended STEM major) - it feels a bit insulting.
Congratulations to the students that were accepted this month and good luck to the ones that were deferred - and if you were rejected, brush it off and don’t take it personally. No doubt you are a stellar student (most are that apply to UChicago), and you will find an amazing college that’s right for you.
Hey Vulcan, I am a sometime poster over the last 7-8 years with a son who graduated at UChicago 2017. I’ve followed the back and forth between you and other posters, most of whom I greatly respect. I tend to side with those people in the discussion so far.
However, I want to say that your son had an extraordinary HS career; I can’t remember seeing stats that exceed your sons. And admission to both CalTech and MIT, arguably the two best technical universities in the world, is mind boggling. So, from me, congratulations to your son and to you and to your whole family. I know he will do great things.
When ED1 is designed to select those sprinkled with magic UofC dust, ED2 those for whom UofC is the second love, what is EA for when EA applicants are the ones who are either uninterested or apply only for status? Why would EA applicants ever be selected? Why even defer EA candidates?
Of course any university must manage the number of admitted students. This can be done in many ways. It could be done even if RD was the only way to admit students. Having EA with ED at the same time kind of defeats that purpose. RD is even worse from yield management? I believe ED exists for selecting financially well rounded candidates and EA likely exists for selecting those with some special characteristics that would improve USNews ranking. No one really knows because of lack of transparency. However limited evidence presented on these forums, in my opinion, support @TheVulcan conclusion. The reason therere is no transparency about EA (when offered together with ED) is that if people knew what it is for, they would stop applying EA and that would hurt USNews numbers/rankings.
@ThoughtProcess1 @TheVulcan Let us make this simpler. Should Caltech or MIT give admission in the RD round to a student who has already been admitted to Stanford SCEA if the student is well qualified but has posted on her Instagram or Twitter feed that Stanford is where she is definitely going but is just waiting to hear back from MIT and Caltech because her parents want to see how competitive she is at the other schools.
This goes beyond mere preference. There is a clear first choice here; the die is cast and it would be unreasonable and illogical to expect schools to ignore this kind of data while making a decision. The quality of the school hardly matters here. It is the applicant’s preference for a school for whatever reason that is relevant here.
Now with sophisticated data analytics, colleges are getting quite good at divining the equivalent of that Instagram post by looking at many years of admit data and applicant profiles.
So when they think that there is very low probability that a well qualified applicant will attend even if admitted (i.e. low fit), they take that into consideration in their decision. The onus is on the well qualified applicant to make the counter case strongly enough to convince the school otherwise. If the applicant falls short while making that case and yet feels aggrieved when the college rejects her, then whose fault is it?
It is unfair to then blame the school for having an unfair or obtuse admission policy specially when the school has repeatedly publicly announced that they care a lot about fit and actually give strong preference to applicants who are well qualified AND want to be there AND will contribute in a positive way to the culture there.
Most negative results hinge on one or more of these points no matter which round they are applying in. Applicant
- Was not well qualified
- Did not make a strong case that they want to be there
- Did not make a strong case of how they would contribute to life on campus(And Chicago’s campus environment from what I have learned
is very different from HYPSM)
Most failed applications focus on 1) and ignore or do a poor job at the other two which is where a good applicant can do a lot of research and stand out. Granted ED makes it easier to make the case for 2) but that case can also be made with EA
I agree with @jhchicago at #424. However just like “They all look after its own priorities and interests, be it yield, ranking or prestige” so can we and hence this discussion about admission process at UofC. There is no need to trash EA aplicants either as smart but not brilliant, lacking that special magic, uninterested, or plain just trying to ascend to elite status. I doubt ED is designed to select by brilliance. What applicants need to know is what these pools are really for in order to make more informed decisions.
To encourage them to “kiss the ring” by switching to ED2. (When my son was withdrawing his app it was offered as an option)
Is UofC trying to select a great class? Of course it is. Is its four round admission process has only this goal in mind, come what may rankings-wise (see Catech, that regularly loses candidates to MIT, yields about 40%, but has no binding rounds)? I think we all know the answer to that.
Folks, I want to thank everyone for good discussion and well wishes, and congratulate again everyone that got in and wish best of luck to those that are still waiting to hear from their top choices.
You guys don’t like the existing U of C Admissions system. Fair enough. But you make the leap from what could be an argument and a discussion to scurrilous and derogatory accusations - unproved and unlikely. Your parting shots (“kiss the ring”, “I think we all know the answer to that,” “I doubt ED is designed to select by brilliance”) are little changed from your opening ones.
One benefit of a Chicago education is the acquisition of a taste and respect for dialectical argument - the taking on of the possibility that one just might be wrong or even the modification of one’s views through response to objections. I have seen little evidence of that here but much in the way of repetitive assertion of dogmatic belief - in the bad faith of the University, in the conviction that juicing the numbers is what it’s all about, that the whole admissions regime was designed for the “evil” purpose of making an inferior institution look better than it really is. These may be widely circulated canards, but they call for skepticism and rational analysis, not these lazy and frankly paranoid assumptions.
@surelyhuman is showing us the Chicago style of argument when she lays out in some detail the case for Chicago’s approach to admissions at #435. She may be right, she may be wrong, she may be partly right and partly wrong, she may have only a piece of the picture - yet hers is the sort of reasoned reply that ought to lead to discussion. Instead it is ignored in favor of these muttered sneers. Go in peace, my friends.
@TheVulcan Your ask a very valid question. “Why does Chicago have four rounds, instead of two like some of its other peers”
Here is my attempt at an answer
It is not really driven exclusively by rankings. A high ranking doesn’t hurt but to accuse the college of being totally ranking focused is a bit much
The four round process is primarily geared towards giving the University the most applications from which they can pick for three qualities
- A well qualified pool, like most other peer schools
- Maximize the percentage of students who really want to be there as their first or second choice
- Maximize for the type of students who will preserve and enhance the campus environment with their contributions
Chicago, if you have read Dean Boyer’s book has really struggled with the last two for a long time for a lot of reasons that I don’t want to get into here
Almost everything they have done in admission has been focused on 2) and 3). ED1 and ED2 exist because of 2) and because 2) significantly affects 3) and is a necessary but not sufficient condition for 3)
So why bother with EA and RD?
Only selecting from the ED pool will maximize 2) but it’s not sufficient to maximize 3)
There are all kinds of RSO’s and student interest groups on campus and their health determines campus health and vitality and not everybody in the ED pool would be a good fit for these groups, so you need a very large pool of applicants to find those hard to find nuggets. It is not to simply goose the rankings game.
I believe they went test optional and have EA and RD to maximize for 3)
Chicago seems to care an awful lot about 3). Just look at all the steps they have taken with athletics, Greek life, housing etc. This is specially true because of its reputation of being a cold and unfriendly place less than a generation ago. And it now shows in the student body.
The one thing I have taken away from my admission experience is that if you just focus on 1) in your application you will probably be denied at Chicago.
If on the other hand you show (not just tell) that you really want to be there and can convince them that you will make the campus more interesting, fun and lively (opposite of where fun comes to die), you will increase your chances
of admission dramatically.