UChicago is Tops at Top Prep Schools

marlowe1
Sat, 02 Jan 2021 11:41:12 +0000

A fellow goes to bed and a Chicago thread brings in another gusher. The analogy of flies being attracted to whatever substance we are putting out here is amusing. However, I see another dynamic at work: During the time of covid some of us have been missing the peculiar energy, passion, and relentlessness of our old Chicago board discussions. A pent-up demand is expressing itself here. I take the present eruption as a hopeful sign of returning normality. For those who don’t like it, well, what was it Harry Truman said about kitchens and heat?

@Data10 , the figure I cited of 43 percent ALDC at Harvard is drawn from the data for white students in Table 10. Limiting the data to those figures sharpens the analysis because it takes the separate preferences and issues that arise for the other demographics out of the equation. I believe it reasonable to assume that well more than 50 percent of the white admits from the prep schools are ALDC.

The reason I prefer the stats in Table 7 to those in Table 2 is that the former shows the shape of the entire distribution of academically ranked kids over ten deciles, whereas the latter, though it captures a tiny subset of supernovas in its top ranking, at 1-2 percent of the total they come from a pretty distant galaxy and are not very helpful in the present discussion. The destinations of these rare birds, even if we could know them, would not help us very much to characterize the entirety of the entering cohorts to Chicago and other schools from any particular prep school. That is what we were talking about here. In particular I was battling the impressionistic assertion that Harvard et. al. netted only the tier-1 kids, leaving the tier-2s and 3s to lesser schools like Chicago. I was looking for some hard data, and I found it in the tables above, which don’t bear out these impressions at all.