UChicago vs UPenn CAS

tk21769
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:00:53 +0000

In all seriousness, you can’t go wrong here but Penn has a “better” brand / higher prestige on the coasts (West and East), especially in business / finance circles and medicine / sciences. Rankings shift up and down but Penn is an ivy league school that will always be in demand. UChicago was a “safety” school for all of the ivy league schools (minus Cornell) about 10 years ago, when its acceptance rate was north of 40%.

I don’t know about business/finance; UChicago does not have undergraduate business/finance programs.
As for medicine/sciences, take a look at objective metrics such as alumni STEM PhD production or the number of affiliated Nobel laureates.

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/50-schools-that-produce-the-most-science-and-engineering-phds-2/
(for STEM PhD production, according to the cited NSF list, UChicago ranked #7; UPenn did not make the T50)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation
(for affiliated Nobel laureates, according to this list, UChicago ranks 4th in the world; UPenn ranks 21st).

Admit rates rise and fall, possibly due to demographic trends or changing tastes. If you looked at average test scores or some measures of alumni accomplishments, you might find that even in years when UChicago’s admit rates were higher than they are now, they still managed to attract a self-selecting pool of strong students (even if, at the time, many of them were a little too pale and nerdy for some Ivy League adcoms’ tastes).

Personally, I think they are both academically strong enough that net costs and personal “fit” probably deserve to override academic quality comparisons (let alone hard-to-measure brand differences). No doubt, UChicago in particular isn’t for everyone.