UChicago is Tops at Top Prep Schools

aquapt
Sat, 02 Jan 2021 06:06:41 +0000

UChicago’s meteoric rise has been extremely well strategized. While the school has indeed risen in prominence and reputation (i.e. by the above-mentioned “poaching” of top faculty), they have also taken extremely pragmatic measures to drive down their acceptance rates by attracting as many applicants as possible. Their relentless advertising and even their pre-pandemic shift to test-optional have served this goal.

At the same time, they have managed to keep the percentage of entering students receiving need-based financial aid under 40%. This is lower than other schools on these lists with smaller endowments than UChicago’s 8.5 billion, such as Brown, Cornell, and NYU (percentage receiving aid in the mid-40’s) and considerably lower than the schools with endowments in the tens-of-billions, like Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford, which give need-based aid to more than half of entering freshman.

So, how does UChicago have need-blind admissions and full-need-met aid, yet end up with noticeably more full-pay students than its peers? Emphasis on Early Decision is one way, but others like Penn and NYU and Rice do this too, and still have a higher share on financial aid. Admitting a bigger share of international students (who aren’t subject to the need-blind and full-need-met policies) is another way, but Columbia and NYU have lots of internationals too, and still have noticeably fewer full-pay students. Athletic scholarships aren’t taking up any slack, because Chicago is a DIII school.

So, perhaps targeted marketing to well-funded prep school students is another piece of their successful strategy in attracting a high share of full-pay students to support their bottom line.

(Source - common data set via CollegeData website - % of freshman applying for financial aid multipled by % of FA applicants qualifying for need-based aid.)