Let all the positive and negative points flow . . . they should be judged on their merits.
IMO, whether you think UChicago is more like its peers or whether it hasn’t changed in the essentials depends on whether you know the place historically, or currently. The contrast in perspective is like night vs day. My son views Chicago very differently from how I do; he’s more like his contemporaries. They were all top achievers in HS and were expecting to get in somewhere really good and are glad to be at Chicago because the academic challenge is in their wheelhouse (there are a few exceptions, of course, but they seem to be few). While they are clearly “UChicago Types” (in my view) they have no self-awareness of that and care even less. My D’s group was a bit more hooked into realizing that they were admitted according to “Type.” A good number came in via that first ED1 class and it was UChicago hands down for all of them (at least from what I could gather from talking to other families).
Is there an essential difference between my D’s crowd and my S’s? If so, is that due more to “birds of a feather” or to genuine differences between the two classes? Who really knows? And as my kids would point out: who really cares?
UChicago gets plenty of posters on shred-it or here saying “I applied and now I’m scared to go” or “I applied but I need to know how it compares to these other schools I got into” or “I got in not sure how didn’t expect to what now?” For a variety of reasons, those are not any sort of refutation of what the data show: that UChicago is choosing better-fit matriculants than it used to. How much it might have bent the campus or academic culture to conform to the whims of the Ivy+ applicant pool in order to make that happen, vs. how much that applicant pool might always have had “UChicago Types” to begin with had they bothered to seek them out . . . might be a fun topic of conversation but is not particularly relevant to the College’s goals for expansion or revenue-generation. The criteria always had to be maintaining academic rigor. Whoever they admit still needs to do the work, and the workload is still pretty high. Regardless of your grade or your motivation for taking this class or that major, regardless of whether you are headed to law school or for a PhD, regardless of whether you are in 15 or Zero RSO’s or an athlete or an artist - or both - you can’t get out of doing a lot of work. And going to class. And thinking.
I’m guessing that is one thing on which everyone can agree!
IMO, that is the only criteria that matters, because it separates a serious school from others that might have a broader set of goals for their undergraduates. I tend to call the latter group “less serious schools.”