@DeepBlue86 , what is the source of your belief that all but 10 percent of Chicago students “would have an interchangeable experience at any of 10 or 15 schools”? Or that the admissions game at Chicago is not about identifying Chicago-style kids but in “attracting children of tycoons to pump up the endowment and pay for fancy buildings”. You sound authoritative. If you have sources for these views, please provide. Cynicism is a seductive rhetorical posture, but argument and evidence are more convincing.
As to the first point, despite some amelioration of the old Chicago educational experience, are you really saying that with its still distinctive features - the Core, the rigor of its courses and essential seriousness of its students, its less exuberant extracurricular culture - that a Chicago education is really no different from that a kid could get at the other usual suspects? Who has been telling you that? If I judge only by what kids (and parents and alumni) say on cc, I would conclude that they see Chicago to one degree or another as a different sort of place. It has still seemed that way to me in my visits of recent years. The people who always want to downplay that difference, I have noticed, are people who never went to the school and who, I am tempted to say if it were not so impolite, don’t know what they’re talking about.
As for admissions being all about attracting children of tycoons, I’ll believe that when I see it. I have some familiarity with the children of tycoons: they are seldom cut out for really hard work at a school without glamor. A school like Chicago is the last place they’d want to go. Not that there’s anything wrong with such a kid who actually does have the royal jelly Chicago-style. I trust that Gates Jr has it. Why do you think he selected Chicago, by the way? Could it be that he had heard something about the special quality of the education there? Perhaps conferred with his dad on the matter? Or was it merely that he looked at US News one day and picked out any old school because it was number three in the rankings?