UChicago Class of 2024 EA / ED

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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Since I have nothing better to do right now, I thought I would summarize my understanding of Dean Boyer’s book on the History of the University of Chicago and how it may relate to admission decisions being made at the University

President Zimmer and others have stated that The University intends to be keep and improve on its status as one of pre-eminent research universities in the world going forward.

The University had long recognized that graduate students and excellent faculty were necessary for fulfilling that mission, but for several decades since the late 1930’s the University did not consider a thriving undergraduate population or strong Alum support deriving from it as key to retaining its position as a strong research University.

Starting in the 70’s the President and Board realized that given the changing landscape of federal grants, it was impossible to sustain the financial health and status of the university without a thriving critical mass of undergraduate students and strong financial support from its alums.

So long before “US News” ever began its ranking, the University started taking steps to make the undergraduate experience better. This is what many of the critics of the University’s policies are uninformed on. The transformation journey have been a long hard slog for the University for close to 50 years now and is not yet complete. the University went from being the top 3 in terms of endowment in the early 1920’s to where it is today, so it is trying to recover from a really deep disadvantage compared to its peers.

What does that mean for undergraduate admissions. Well as I indicated, the University is looking for for not just well qualified students but for students who will be happy to attend and who will leave after enriching the campus life for others and support the University in building up its financial strength relative to its peers.

This is critical to its strategy of having a thriving undergraduate population. Selectivity, Yield, number of apps etc are not end in themselves. They are relevant only in how they help in transforming the undergraduate population and campus environment at Chicago. I suspect even the US News ranking is part of that strategy

Chicago always got good students, but it was not a typical applicant’s top couple of choices, until a decade or so ago. This affected general student happiness and campus climate. That has been changing because of the changes they have made, the rise in the rankings and many other factors. Introducing ED and going TO gives them another set of tools to find students that consider it their very top choice and are willing to not just say it put to show it.

But they also need a broader pool of applicants to radically transform the campus climate. Narrow casting to a small pool with very pointy academic interests would not achieve this goal. So they have marketed aggressively, changed housing, gone Test optional, promoted athletics and Greek life etc., not because they just want a lot of kids to apply. There is a reason for increasing the pool. It allows them to round out the class with well qualified students who will be happy to attend and indeed contribute and enhance the life of other students on campus.

The problem is that as the number of applications pile up, it becomes harder and harder for applicants to show that they are

  1. Well qualified
  2. Want to be there. This is not an issue with HYPSM as much, but with Chicago, the school has to be careful, given its history. At the very least the school wants to weed out opportunists who target Chicago simply because of its new found status. These kids will soon resent being there and having to work hard and this would affect the campus climate dramatically.
  3. Will actually bring something beneficial and unique to campus life compared to the 16 or so others they are competing against for that same seat.

Some good students undoubtedly are overlooked, but having four applicant rounds and going “TO” gives the University the best chance for netting the type of students it looks for. I really don’t think there is some nefarious plot going on in Admissions to deliberately mislead students.

So if an applicant is going to pick the EA and RD round to apply, that’s fine. IT just means that they have to make a very strong case that they really want to go there and will add some interesting and unique flavor to the student body. That is not an easy case to make, so many will come up short, not because the University is actively conspiring against them, but because there are only so many empty slots and some will make the case better than others. Being well qualified, or assuming that you will get in because you got into a peer institution is not a good strategy for admission. Chicago’s needs are different for what it needs in an undergrad body than HYPSM and other Ivies, although there is obviously an overlap.

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Thank you, @surelyhuman. Great summary! (The rest of your posts are equally impressive)

Enjoy your time at UChicago - but first, enjoy the remaining months of high school with pressures of admissions having been lifted:)

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@marlowe1 @JBStillFlying Thanks for the great info. From informal polling, I’m guessing about a 20% EA rate this year but I guess we will never know for sure. As to your question @marlowe1, yes she does fit the general ideal of a UChicago type–very inquisitive across multiple subject areas, which shows up in her awards and honors. The essays may have been the secret sauce. She wrote her own prompt (which is clearly an easy way to stand out and not that hard to do if you are a brainy, curious type) and the response to the prompt sort of blindsides the reader. The Why Us essay was also very unique. It helped that she’s read almost 50% of the authors on great books list originally established by Hutchins & Adler. If that doesn’t scream “UChicago type”, I don’t know what does. Just to note, she’s a white majority female, not hooked. All that to say, UChicago must really care about the essays and is looking for a certain personality type far beyond test scores.

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@surelyhuman
“1) Well qualified
2) Want to be there. This is not an issue with HYPSM as much, but with Chicago, the school has to be careful, given its history. At the very least the school wants to weed out opportunists who target Chicago simply because of its new found status. These kids will soon resent being there and having to work hard and this would affect the campus climate dramatically.
3) Will actually bring something beneficial and unique to campus life compared to the 16 or so others they are competing against for that same seat.“

I wonder whether these three “criteria” are truly unique to UChicago, I could easily change the Chicago there with many top schools.

I still could not understand why the EA/RD only rounds, or ED/RD only rounds, could not “maximize” the number of qualifying and unique Chicago admits. Maybe I haven’t drank the Chicago cool-aid, I truly believe most if not all Chicago students could be happy and successful at many other schools, and quite a few other school students could do the same at Chicago.

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@makemesmart I think there is a difference between “Could be happy” and “Will be happy”

Harvard or Stanford could care less that you want to be there, most applicants would want to be there. That has not been the case with Chicago till recently. So making sure you choose the student pool wisely becomes very important

I am sure that some students at Chicago would do well elsewhere and some students elsewhere would do well at Chicago, but not all students at Harvard or Stanford or even other Ivies would be happy at Chicago. There are many reasons for that, including the Core curriculum, lack of Div I athletics etc. Chicago is being prudent in placing a big emphasis on campus climate and students wanting to be there as their first or second choice. The administration probably feels that this affects outcomes

Chicago did have just EA/RD rounds till a few years ago, but it takes a lot more work to identify the right students and you can get a lot of false positives( specially as the school has grown in popularity) if you don’t force the applicant pool to self sort themselves into groups for whom Chicago is clearly the first or second choice and groups for whom it isn’t. It’s not perfect obviously and some applicants get the short end of the stick but it has definitely made it easier for them to identify the students they want.

Why not do away with EA?

I suspect because EA nets them enough good applicants that they feel they would miss without it. My GC told me that roughly 30% of first round admits, so roughly 300 to 400 students are from the EA pool. Another 300 or so are from the RD pool. Those are non trivial numbers

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I heard something similar in class 2023:

Total early application is 15k, total application close to 35k.
Total admits is 2100, yield 83%

200-300 EA admits from a pool of 4-6k? ~700 ED1 from a pool of 4-5k
~700 ED2 from a pool of 7-10k ( some EA deferred switch to ED2
~400 from RD of 20k
ED yield is almost 100%
EA/RD in the range of 50%

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^ @surelyhuman Only 300 from the RD pool? Admitted or enrolled? 300 admitted seems low. Last year they admitted a little under 1,100 in the ED2/RD round and if ED2 is around 400, then RD had to be over 600.

@jhchicago - where did you get your stats? Would be interested to know if they are admitting that many ED2’s.

Edit to add: the problem with “200-300 EA admits from a pool of 4-6k? ~700 ED1 from a pool of 4-5k” is that the pools don’t add to 15k. WaPo had the 15k number which presumably is accurate.

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Early application of 15k is inclusive of ED1, EA and ED2.

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@jhchicago that’s not correct. WaPo had numbers as of the Nov. 1st application deadline. That’s ED1 and EA. Not ED2 which is a Jan 1 deadline. Also, we know from the early Feb. admit events (for ED1 and EA) that the admit rate was 7%. That means 1,050 early admissions (ED1 and EA) out of 15,000 early (ED1 and EA) applications. They typically admit 1/2 of the class “early” (ie Nov. 1 deadline) and 1,050 is appoximately 1/2 of the total admits for Class of '23.

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@JBstillFlying: you are right. The article says 15k is for early round with deadline of Nov1 (ED1 and EA). However the breakdown between ED1 and EA is not known and people are making a guess. 7%on average, wow! Would guess ED is in 10ish and EA is in low single digits.

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^ Yep, That’s my guess for ED1: 10-12% and EA: low or just under 4%.

The big mystery remains ED2. They have never disclosed a thing on that.

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Having higher yield and the number of applications is more than about USNWR rankings. It’s about “prestige”. It’s about bragging rights. It indirectly affects rankings as well.

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^ Uchicago always thought they were special and prestigious - what they needed money. That’s why they’ve increased the number of applications and yield. And - by the way - there’s not much you can do to “juice” the number of applications other than tell everyone about who you are. And those numbers exploded well before ED. Furthermore, since the intital push to 30k applications in 2013, they’ve only inceased about 2.5% per year on average. So if they are mainly chasing prestige, they sure are doing a pathetic job of it.

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I would imagine the ED2 pool is big and competitive, given we know 1) a lot of Chicago EA deferrals switches to ED2; 2) A lot of Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton SCEA rejects and deferrals apply to ED2,3) those people who didn’t get around to do Nov 1st. I somehow think most of the remaining 20k will apply ED2.

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20k seems a bit aggressive.

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@1NJParent ‘Prestige’ would be correlated to the quality of the student body, the faculty, the academics, the research and output; ‘prestige’ at this school has not been gotten by ‘bragging’ about the quantity of apps and the yield rate (although UChicago can totally brag about that too.)

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If this is true, it’s no wonder they don’t disclose it: applying EA to UChicago makes no sense (unless also applying to MIT/Caltech).

Apply ED if it’s your top choice, or apply to Princeton or Yale, where REA acceptance rate is 3 times higher.

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^ @TheVulcan I’m a bit skeptical of those #'s. Simple arbitrage would have determined SCEA to be a better deal by Year 2 of UChicago’s ED plan. Also, it implies that 1400/1700 enrollees are ED. Finally, of all the different groups we’ve met at these admit events, we can’t find more than a couple of ED2’s. ED1 - yes. RD - yes. EA - one or two (at the local event). So ED2 is a smaller group than 700 based on anecdotal evidence. Am happy to be corrected but I’d be shocked if ED2 has been the size of ED1 for Class of '21 and '23.

Edit to add: that’s not to say that these numbers aren’t tweaked every year, or that going forward will be like recent history.

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@JBStillFlying, so what do you think real EA admit rate might be?

I think it is pretty clear it is a lot lower than peers’ REA, even if these numbers are not precise.

My point is, applying to UChicago EA is a good deal for UChicago and a bad deal for applicants.

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To arrive at 83% yield, ED has to be substantial. CIT has 40% yield with EA/RD. Basically

100%x+ ~50%y= 83%
X+Y = 1

EA is a good deal for applicants who got admitted and bad one for those who did not get admitted. That’s true for RD too. And true in every school.