<p>re OracleP7’s posts:</p>
<p>I am constantly amazed by the lack of historical perspective among the current high school and college student cohort. Since practically the day it was founded, Chicago has never NOT been regarded as a top-rank American university, which by the middle of the last century meant it was a top-rank world university. In 1900, it was a founding member of the Association of American Universities, the original accrediting organization for American PhD-granting universities, along with Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins, and hosted the organization’s first conference. When I was an academically ambitious prep-school student in the early 70s, I saw it as pretty much the exact equivalent of Columbia – which meant that it was maybe less attractive than HYP, and maybe more attractive than Penn, but without question a first-class institution, a place full of smart people like me. </p>
<p>The sense that there is some huge gulf between the reputation of Harvard and that of Chicago is an artifact of the past 30 years, and has its source in several things: the sharp decline of the Chicago south side in the late 60s, the slow decline of the economic vitality of the upper Midwest, the comparative rise of California and the Sun Belt, the fact that Chicago did not do as good a job of raising endowment as many other schools, including colleges which were not remotely seen as comparable to it a generation ago, the rise of athletics as a marketing tool, and the fact that – other colleges having produced many more screenwriters, actors, and politicians – Chicago did not have the media presence of its academic peers as interest in elite institutions was exploding in the 90s. Rory Gilmore never mentioned it; no one road-tripped there from Orange County; it never had a Conan O’Brien. What is going on now is much less the rise in reputation of a former unknown than the restoration of a balance that existed for nearly a century until very recently.</p>
<p>Chicago is and has been different than Harvard (or Yale, etc.) in many ways, but not RADICALLY different by any stretch of the imagination. For a long time, it has emphasized intellectual inquiry and critical thinking almost exclusively, while places like Harvard also emphasized “leadership” and artistic achievement, too. But those are relative weights. Harvard has always been, and tried to be, a center of intellectual inquiry and critical thinking, and Chicago has never turned its back on leadership or art, exactly. It’s probably true that, within the senior class at, say, Horace Mann, Scarsdale, or Harvard-Westlake, there’s a big difference in attitudes between the kids whose first choice is Harvard and those who would choose Chicago under any circumstances. But someone from Mars, or Japan, or maybe even Mexico, would barely discern any difference, in the kids or in the institutions. (Except, of course, for the whole endowment thing.)</p>