<p>I haven’t looked at the “data” here. I do agree that, scanning the EA Results thread, it looked kind of “statsy” as an impressionistic matter. I have a couple of reasonable hypotheses about that, however, that don’t involve a dark conspiracy between President Zimmer and the Magisterium to subject Chicago to the Church of USNWR.</p>
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<li><p>Remember what happened this year. Roughly 6,000 kids who might have been expected to apply early to Harvard or Princeton did something else, instead. On the whole, that would be a bunch of kids with very strong stats. It looks like hundreds of them, at least, applied EA to Chicago.</p></li>
<li><p>I think Chicago is less different from Harvard, etc., than some of the Chicago students like to think. At least 75% of the students at each school – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, certainly Columbia – would be perfectly happy at Chicago, and vice versa. There is no reason to believe that all those additional applicants with relatively high stats don’t fully exhibit the Chicago values that current students care about. I would be the first to agree that having 2300 SATs, and a 3.9 unweighted GPA, and being President of the Debate Club doesn’t mean that a kid is an intellectual . . . but it doesn’t mean that he isn’t one, either. Many of those kids are going to have teachers who respect them, are capable of writing kickass essays, and, in fact, care deeply about learning and intellectual inquiry.</p></li>
<li><p>Faced with a choice between two otherwise similar, passionate, intellectually curious, personable applicants, what criteria is the selection committee supposed to use to distinguish between them? SATs and GPA aren’t the be-all and end-all, but they are better than darts or dice, and I think it’s hard to avoid them.</p></li>
<li><p>Having pored over scattergrams from various high schools a few years ago, I got the following impression about Chicago’s admissions practices: They were clearly quirky and less predictable than those of many other colleges, and Chicago was clearly capable of rejecting kids with high stats. But – in part because Chicago rejected fewer kids than many of its competitors – it didn’t reject THAT many kids with high stats. Chicago’s acceptance rate seemed pretty clearly to correlate with SATs and GPA. Not perfectly, but significantly nonetheless. A kid with 1500/4.3 w might have a 70% chance of admission, while one with 1300/3.8w might have a 30% chance. And, of course, if other schools rely more heavily on stats, Mr./Ms. 1500 would be more likely to have other attractive admissions offers and to go elsewhere, while Mr./Ms. 1300 was comparatively more likely to enroll at Chicago. So the enrolled class (and the local atmosphere) would be more skewed towards the unusual cases than the admitted population as a whole.</p></li>
<li><p>And what’s different this year is that more of the high stats group is showing up at the EA stage, vs. the RD stage where they always applied after being deferred by Harvard or Princeton. If we were playing under last year’s rules, the same group of kids would have applied to Chicago, and would have been accepted, except more of it would have happened RD.</p></li>
</ol>