University of Chicago Admit Rate and SAT relative to Ivy/Competitive Set

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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@ JBStillFlying - on having presumably a “right brain” daughter who is studying history (social science) at UChicago, I bet it’s interesting to engage in conversations - you get past the superficial and get deep and abstract really fast, I bet.

I changed my profile photo to the artwork on permanent display at our county education center for middle school art by DD20 from a few years back. It’s a “scratch art” so the original is the negative of the image you see. I remember back in the day when we had negatives, it was hard for me to mentally reverse the images - like a minstrel ?

So I also have a couple of those artsy types (FYI - DD20’s SAT English was higher than her Math like her older sister) ?

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@JBStillFlying - here’s the heart of our disagreement:

You said: - UChicago is still an “intellectual monastery” compared to Brown and many other schools. The “Fun goes to die” rep. is still alive and well despite efforts to change it.

That idea, centrally, is what I dispute. Maybe others can chime in, but do the ~1700 matrics at Chicago see themselves as entering some sort of intellectual monastery? Is Chicago still a difference in kind from its peer schools?

Everything I’ve seen - all the monetary investments in the college, advertising from the Nondorf crew, etc. - fly in the face of what you assert. From where I sit, Chicago has tried very hard to say there is a difference in degree, but not a difference in kind.

30 years ago, Chicago was a different experience to many peer schools - it was monastery vs. school. My hs guidance counselor once likened it to the difference between going to West Point and Harvard - just an entirely different type of experience.

Is that truly still the case now? Has Nondorf simply found a way to convince 35,000 applicants they should consider an intellectual monastery instead of a school? Is the “where fun comes to die” mantra still alive and well, but more people are just drawn to fun dying? Does the Northeast prep crowd just crave a monastic, no-fun experience more now than ever before?

I think not.

But, maybe many others are perfectly willing to pay $70k+ a year to send their kids to an intellectual monastery.

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@Waitlistedparent at #40: Not sure my kids fall neatly into that Left-Brained/Right-Brained categorization. Our stereotypical “left-brainer” attended art school for her college. One of our “right-brainers” placed into Calc 2 at UChicago, enjoyed the proof-based approach, and is now is drawn to the philosophy major. Another “right-brainer” scored higher on the SAT math than the verbal, and turned the Uncommon Essay into a critical analysis of a literary work. I think my kids would be interesting subjects for a psychological study on this subject. They might provide some evidence for a re-definition of the “conventional wisdom.”

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Clearly my “assertions” - along with my P’21 and P’23 creds, I guess - are no match for @Cue7’s hard-nosed observations and detached, logical reasoning concerning this issue. But here are a few thoughts:

  1. One person's "school" is another one's "intellectual monastery." We know plenty of kids who passed up applying to UChicago in order to avoid the more (in their view) severe focus on academics. So there still seem to be plenty out there who view the place as an "intellectual monastery." And there are are probably even some on campus who view it as such. However, most of those 1700 matrics seem to view it as a "school," because to them a school is an institution with the primary focus on academics. As stated many, many times in the past: FIT. IS. IMPORTANT.
  2. Back in the day, many MORE UChicago students (relative to total matrics) considered the school a "monastery" because they were a poor match for the intense academic focus. According to Behnke at the time, the College was routinely admitting 60-70% of a quite-small applicant pool and matriculating a good number who considered UChicago to be a third or fourth choice. Again: FIT. The College has remedied this problem by turning UChicago into a first choice or strong 2nd. This was achieved by increasing the applicant pool from around 5,000 in '97 to around 32,000 20 years later (and today around 34,500), and then choosing RIGHT FIT candidates from among that significantly larger pool.
  3. Turns out that when you add some non-academic "best practices" that are alive and well on other top campuses (decent housing, RSO's, decent career placement, better financial aid) you attract more applicants. Who knew :wink:
  4. Also, turns out that you can attract more applicants when you actually make high schools and families aware of UChicago as an undergraduate option. Your HS counselor aside, @Cue7 - many GC's and families simply didn't know about the College (my husband, who grew up on the Main Line, was one of them, only becoming aware of the school when his professors at Duke were helping him apply to PhD programs). A good number of others (for example, my parents who were pretty savvy about elite education) thought UC was grad school only. Former admissions director Ted O'Neill certainly dropped the ball, but he was hardly THE problem. The institutional wisdom of the time was that if you didn't already know about the College you wouldn't be a good fit. It had been decades in the making and perhaps was tacitly encouraged by the faculty's preference for grad students and the significant social upheaval happening on the south side during the 20th century which worked on its own to reduce the number of matriculants. The College wasn't really trying to recruit much of anywhere. So having the college infrastructure of a Harvard or a Brown couldn't even be financially or logistically justified at the time; those schools had significantly higher enrollments to support the infrastructure.
  5. @Cue7, you should have listened to your HS counselor!!! Maybe others can chime in here, but I don't think many kids there today are following the schedule you posted back a few months ago of your College days. They are devoting notably more time to academic work. So the school remains at its core pretty similar to the place you landed at back in the day. Maybe there is still a sizable group of "monastery types" on campus who happened to be admitted under the Kinder-Gentler-This-is-Now-a-"School"-So-Go-Have-Fun era of the "Nondorf crew." (Of course, to some that kind of academic intensity is, indeed, "fun" - just as it was to at least some of your classmates in your day).
  6. I repeat my earlier question: college students throughout the country are now stuck at home doing nothing but remote schoolwork, so how are they faring? I think this forced experiment might actually provide some answers to the question of "degrees" vs. "differences." It would be interesting to know.
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@JBStillFlying - this is purely subjective, nothing hard-nosed or analytical in my reasoning here, but I am still puzzled. You said the “where fun comes to die” rep is still alive and well, and the “intellectual monastery” view still resonates.

Maybe you can offer more illumination here - is that still the rep? The biggest change I’ve seen in decades has been this shift from “spartan monastery” to “hard academic school.”

This seems like a huge shift to me. And, I don’t think it’s because the school has more qualified students now than back in the day (although they certainly do).

I think it’s because the school actually did want to stop being an intellectual monastery!

Keep in mind, the “non-academic” best practices you gave short thrift to in your post above literally have cost Chicago hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars. Building a first-rate gym, a first-rate arts center, building high-end dorms, improving dining on campus, improving welcoming (and closing receptions), and so much more. This has probably cost a billion dollars (literally), and constitutes an attempt to kill the “where fun comes to die” mantra.

But, if you and your kids still feel the school is monastic, I’m disheartened by that. I think the school has put forward massive sums of money to CHANGE. If, after 2 decades and millions of dollars, this change hasn’t occurred, that’s profoundly disappointing to me.

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@Cue7 - Those embellishments and additional features on campus are great to have around. No disagreement there! Bookish types like gyms and palatable food as much as the non-bookish. And there was much “room for improvement” in college housing, to put it mildly. Those were necessary and, really, standard changes. All university physical plant and vendor contracts need updating over time, even if they were in great shape to begin with. UChicago might be special, but it’s not exempt either from the laws of gravity or the residential requirements of students and their families.

If you asked my kids whether they were experiencing a “monastic intellectual life” at UChicago they would think you were referring to Thomas Aquinas.

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@JBStillFlying - then it looks like we are converging on an agreement here - that, for us, at least, the term “monastic intellectual life” doesn’t resonate with the Chicago of today.

That, then, is a huge change. My college friends in the 90s and I would joke, at the end of a summer break, that it was “time to go back to the monastery” or “time to go back to bootcamp.” Unless I’m mistaken, those terms are used much less today.

Put another way, if you could take the talented Class of 2020, transport them back to 1990, and ask them to describe Chicago then, I anticipate their descriptors would resemble mine, more talented they may be. The extremely spartan dorms, complete lack of academic advising, higher crime rates, extreme lack of career advising, lack of active student groups, lack of athletic fields/gym space (that seemed almost intentional!), lack of student diversity, high tuition and low financial aid, etc. etc. would make even the talented Class of 2020 chafe, no?

I think even @marlowe1 analogized his time at Chicago to having a bit of a bootcamp/monastic feel. In that, he and I are similar.

At the same time, I think when I attended (and marlowe too), the student faculty ratio was something like 3:1, and we had far fewer adjuncts, administrative bloat, etc. It was basically a roster of 1000 phenomenal professors supporting a student body of around 3500. THAT feel probably will never be replicated.

Anyway, if you transported Brown’s Class of 2020 back to 1990, I think the actual experiences would be pretty synonymous. Outside of some demographic changes and some (more modest) investment in the physical plant, the Brown experience of 1990 isn’t all that different from the Brown experience of 2020 (at least, to the same degree as the Chicago comparators).

So, if we’ve made the shift from “monastery” to “academically hard but vibrant and diverse school,” well, then its a billion dollars well spent. But, again, lets call a spade a spade - this was a time of fundamental shift, then.

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  • Actually, @Cue7 - my kids would have had the same response back in your day :smiley: Now 'boot camp' is a different analogy. I think at least one of them would attest that fall quarter of first year was like a boot camp. Also, my son corrected me: he wouldn't have thought Thomas Aquinas. He would have thought St. Benedict because, as he pointed out to me, it was Benedict who founded the monastic life.
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@JBStillFlying - yes, I think a bootcamp for a quarter or two could exist, but would your kids characterize their entire college experience as a bootcamp? (There is an implication, with this term, of austerity and a lack of auxiliary resources.)

Again, I would think now there are so many supports and resources in place - academic advisors, tutors, career advisors, lots of other services - that have truly rounded out the experience.

Come to think of it, if I had to sum up my Chicago experience in one or two words, it would be: austere. Either that, or “intellectual monastery.”

You could ask your kids what their one (or maybe two) word descriptions are. I’m curious to hear them! (If they go with “austere” or “monastic” I’d be surprised.)

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@Cue7

  • They would not characterize the entire experience as a boot camp and my son didn't find fall quarter to be a boot camp, but more of an opportunity to learn to manage his time optimally. He did get the skinny from his sister so that helped.

It’s really not clear they would have characterized their time there 25-30 years ago as “austere” or “boot camp” either, let alone “intellectual monastery.” I see them primarily utilizing the same resources now as existed back then (academic advisors, tutors, office hours, etc.) and not focusing all that much on the other newer things like shiny dorms, RSO’s or preprofessional development. It’s great that those things exist, obviously! They just don’t attract my kids like they do other kids. The one thing that has to be a definite plus is the larger class size of crazy-smart kids.

  • @Cue7 I'm wondering if you have the term "intellectual monastery" exactly right. The word "monastic" derives from the root-word "mono" meaning "alone." Spiritual monks distance themselves from the world in order to focus on the "other world" and often live a very contemplative life, even while in community. But intellectual growth uses very different faculties and experiences than a contemplative spiritual life does! It fundamentally relies on interactions - even debates - with many others in the classroom, seminar, tutorial session, office hours, study groups, or even just shooting the breeze with your housemates. No doubt actual feelings of isolation are a real threat at UChicago and other college campuses, but that's not a problem that has exactly gone away over time (in fact, it may have gotten worse).

Again, seeing how the various college students across the US are holding up - whether they are thriving in remote learning and why - will render tremendous insight. They are presumably all studying in solitude, cut off from close contact with friends and buddies except by phone or zoom.

  • I don't think "academically hard" is ever going to come up as pithy description of the place, but "no safe spaces" just might :wink:
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It’s interesting how over quite a large span of time at the U of C the same tropes have been used to describe student culture. In the 1950s a Dean of the College humorously called Chicago students “maggotty minded monks”. When I arrived in the early sixties we frequently described the place as “boot camp”. Cue attests that both descriptions were still functioning during his era circa 1990. JB tells us that her children have not entirely rejected those terms in substance, only the negativity and self-mortifying psychology attached to them.

But serious study has always involved a certain weariness of the flesh. This was observed a long time ago in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” in a long chapter devoted to “the melancholy of the scholar”. Burton’s technical psychology of the four humours attributed this tendency to the brain’s “drying out” with being overtaxed. That etiology may be antiquated, but it tells us something important in human terms. With all the exhilaration of the exercise of one’s brain in learning things comes weariness, self-doubt, and even despair - agenbyte of inwyt, as the monks themselves called it in an earlier age. Perhaps similar things could be said about athletic or musical endeavors or any form of human attempt to do something very difficult and well. However, the brain is a peculiarly delicate, balky, and recalcitrant organ.

The College of this University has always been a serious institution in which the raison d’etre was learning things, not the other ephemeral collegiate activities dear to popular legend and culture. For that reason it has always attracted a critical density of kids for whom learning was the central thing that motivated them. You could call them brainiacs or masochists or oddballs or maggoty-minded monks. Those old tropes may have been typical of all scholars everywhere afflicted by melancholy and agenbyte, but to my ear they also have a special tonality of the U of C about them. Call it self-deprecating humor. I and my friends were neither monks nor marines, but we liked to call ourselves both those things intermittently, and we had a tendency from time to time to wallow in despair of being smart enough or tenacious enough to get to the top of the mountain we had set out to climb. This was not inconsistent with actually making it to the top, or at least in the course of the climb to pleasant halfway houses, feeling pretty damn proud of ourselves for having come that far. The ultimate pride was in having graduated a really tough school and having learned a lot about self and world. The agenbyte and the melancholy were minor movements in a symphony that ended in the major key.

I don’t say this can’t be done at other schools. However the focus is more intense here, less diluted by other interests and distractions, more honored. This produces its own form of satisfaction in that boot-campish ethos that “we are in this together”. The same sort of serious and studious kid at another institution would feel isolated or at most confined to a subset of the like-minded. Here the agenbyte is shared by all in a community of learners. That knowledge is the best antidote to loneliness. Going to the gym, doing an EC, or being comfortable in one’s dorm are fine, and perhaps even necessary, but they are not sufficient for anyone fired up by the challenge of learning really hard things. Why else would anyone come to this college?

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I grew up outside of the USA but I have a few friends who attended Chicago for undergrad in the 80s, all clearly very smart but no discernible unique traits. My son is going to attend in the fall so my association with the college really began last summer when we toured colleges. Now the admissions department may select student guides and speakers carefully but the students we met seemed indistinguishable (in a good way) from students we met at other highly ranked colleges. If you had no prior history with the college it looks very similar today to other top 10 colleges, perhaps with Columbia being the closest. I did think I detected a bit more humor in the Chicago students than the Columbia ones, but that is probably my imagination. Our tour guide was from Southern California and had very amusing tales of surviving her first winter.

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@JBStillFlying - “Studying alone” would be how I characterized most of my time at Chicago. For my major (ahem, “concentration”), I spent vastly more time outside of class than in class - and I spent a lot of that time reading/studying. Moreover, study groups weren’t really necessary for my work. We also didn’t have tutors (that I could recall), and academic advising wasn’t expansive at all.

If feeling removed from the world, and engaged in contemplation alone are two important features of a monastery - yup, I totally felt that. Moreover, most of the interactions I had revolved around my work - whether in class a minority of the time during the week, or in office hours. I had friends, went to the gym, on occasion went downtown, etc., but a huge chunk of my time was spent studying/reading alone. Office hours with profs were great, but, again, we weren’t hanging out - we were talking about academics. Being at Chicago, in some ways, felt like being a floating brain.

Moreover, if I wanted to expand outward, I don’t know if I could if I tried. We didn’t have many active RSOs (that I knew of), exploring internships/summer work wasn’t cultivated, etc. Maybe we had some club sports?

Another big part of this is choice. Now, it looks like students have options to pursue other things. Existing in a vacuum removed from such collegiate choices for four years is different than choosing which aspects of life (tutors, advisers, office hours, etc.) a student will maximize. Oh, also, there is legitimately more stuff to do in HP now - no question - than 30 years ago.

There is a difference between academics with nothing buttressing the experience, and academics combined with rich layers of options. One seems more monastic/boot camp like, the other seems like, well, a hard school. Also, JB, no safe spaces might not be accurate either. Chicago has literally created all these difference safe spaces - the counseling services center, diversity offices, etc. - that it never really had before! Also, erm, campus is literally safer. There were far fewer safe spaces in my day (literally and figuratively) than today.

@marlowe1 asked, outside the academics “why would anyone ever come to this college”?

  • Amazingly, one could now honestly come to Chicago for the exit options. The work will be hard, but for those who want it, there's a definite payoff. The bridges the admin has made to an array of industries is strong. Outside of maybe 6-7 schools, Chicago's exit options are better than anywhere else. That's a huge draw, literally worth the big investment.
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@River65 , I hope you will share with us in due course your son’s observations of his experience in the College. It is hard to get a true feel for this from the externalities of a campus or sometimes even from meeting people. Whereas real experience inside the belly of the beast is unbeatable.

Over the years of my being on cc I have noticed that comments by students and former students both on this forum and in another popular forum are nearly unanimous in describing UChicago’s culture as being different - more focussed on academics, objectively more demanding - than the schools, often ivy-league ones, described by their friends at those schools. Perhaps that’s just a human tendency to support the home team, but the form it takes is the interesting and telling part. Almost all say that while some students at the U of C coast along, take (relatively) easier courses, are focussed more on ECs, and so on, they are in a distinct minority. Love it or not, the academic focus is what this school is known for and what its former students attest to. Judging from what one reads here and elsewhere from prospective students, it is also why they want to come here rather than to another school. They see themselves as that type and they imagine how great it would be to find themselves in a school surrounded by lots of others like themselves.

Was anything like that at work in your son when he chose the U of C?

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@marlowe1 - you contend that, underneath all the shiny, glossy surface (new dorms, nice gyms, RSOs, etc.) lies the “belly of the beast” - which is unchanged.

I dispute that. Part of the Chicago mantra I knew was that it seemed almost intentionally austere - let Brown and Duke have their vibrant student life, with lots of student clubs and outlets for student exploration, and let Princeton and Yale have their lavish residence halls and robust advising. Chicago was a gritty, austere place - our swimming pool was a dungeon (basement of Ida Noyes), and “support” was a 4 letter word - find advising and tutors elsewhere! It was just a sign of weakness to even ask for a “tutor”!

Once you add in all those “niceties,” you change the complexion of the place. It’s the difference between going to a monastery or… a demanding school (with all the positive supports the word “school” implies - advising, tutors, exit steps, etc).

Academics is surely more front and center at Chicago. But, they now have resources and structures around them that, frankly, exceed what you find at most other places. Part of the old Chicago was reveling in the lack of those supports. Not only did we not send students to McKinsey - our career services (I think that was like 2 ppl in Ida Noyes?) didn’t even bother asking McKinsey to come to campus!

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You should re-read your Aristotle, Cue. There is a very important distinction - it might even be called the indicia of true understanding - between the substance of a thing and its accidents. Are you seriously contending that a nice swimming pool and the like amenities are the reasons kids choose Chicago as against all other schools?

I can agree that these and similar niceties create a less austere atmosphere without buying in to your conclusion that the nice atmosphere is what it’s all about. That’s the tail wagging the dog. None of the kids who talk about their reasons for coming to Chicago - and none of the recent graduates who reflect on their experience there - describe it in those terms. And they do contrast their experience with that of their friends at other schools.

What you appear to be suggesting is something like a principle of hydraulics in which seriousness about studies equates directly to deprivation of creature comforts. Thus, when there are more of the latter you believe there must necessarily be less of the former, the two polarities held forever in a zero-sum relationship. Yes, there’s a correlation, but it is surely a weak one, not this grand divide. You are confusing a personal taste in nice dorms, better counselling, and ECs (accidents) with the substance of intellectual achievement. I myself prefer austerity, perhaps most of the students of your era also preferred it, I suspect many present-day students prefer it. But that is a taste, an accident, not an eternal linkage. You hated it - these deprivations are what you remember and what the school meant to you, they were its substance, they are what put you on the mission to destroy it. With every amelioration of its austerities you proclaim a loss of the soul and substance of the place and you perform a victory dance over it. Ugh.

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@marlowe1 - here’s an equation:

Chicago of 1990 = academics + no support

Chicago of 2020 = academics + supports

That’s the difference. To me, it’s a big one - one that leads to a fundamentally different total than before. Support - be it in nice dorms, more advising, people who care about your exit options, etc., totally changes the experience. The implicit message is: we care about you as a person.

The mantra of old Chicago was: you don’t like this austerity? leave.

At essence, then, is the difference between belonging and enduring. It’s a big, fundamental difference.

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^ @Cue7 What does UChicago have now in terms of those “resources” that exceed other top places?

Also, I offered up “no safe space” as a potential guess on my son’s thoughts. Given that you have now “corrected” the viewpoint of an actual student, there doesn’t seem much more to offer on that. You have your point of view and that is that.

Agree with @River65 that the students at UChicago seem to have more of a sense of humor than other places. I’ve had the notion when visiting HP that UChicago kids are less concerned with “looking cool” but it’s just an anecdotal notion and I haven’t been around during Canada Goose Season.

Did UChicago kids used to “look” distinguishable from kids at other places once upon a time? My observation is that it wasn’t - and isn’t their looks but their thinking that can distinguish some of these people. Undergrads were fewer in those days but they pretty much appeared like normal undergrads to me. I always thought they were particularly vivacious compared to the grad students (a more silent brooding type in all but GSB or Law) but that’s not the relevant comparison.

Back when my D was a first year, whenever she’d be asked by friends and extended family about how she liked UChicago she would reply: “It’s pure hell . . . and I love it.” Hyperbole? A bit. But she also described UChicago in her essay as “a serious school” and would likely agree 100% with @marlowe1’s post above. Some of these kids have heard and internalized all the “horror stories” and chosen to pass them on with a positive spin.

This morning I asked D for a one or two word description of her undergraduate experience at UChicago. She replied: Boolin’ so I asked for a translation as I don’t speak Collegetongue. She replied “having a jolly good time” and asked me why I cared to know this. I replied that someone on CC attended in the 90’s and described his experience as “boot camp” or “intellectual monastery.” She replied “well to me that sounds like a good time.”

My son pointed out that there is plenty of community interaction even in contemplative monasteries (at least those in the West) so “intellectual monastery” might make sense for his experience. The important nuance here is that he’s not talking about atmosphere of UChicago as much as modeling via analogy how a serious student approaches his or her work, although he’d no doubt acknowledge that the academic culture supports the student with that goal.

@Cue7 - both my kids enjoy spending hours upon hours reading and studying in solitude. They drag their books around with them (my son, for instance, brought all of his texts home with him). They will likely have them for years and years. I was the same way so I get that.

I suspect they would find, as our adult friend who did Committee on Social Thought found out once upon a time, that the intellectual culture provided plenty of support. Tutors and advisors are important and my limited understanding is that the College had those resources; however YMMV according to major and also it should be pointed out that my D’s initial academic advisor really sucked back in 2017-18 so it’s not like that particular problem has disappeared. (NB: her major advisor is great as are the grad student preceptors for her thesis seminar).

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@JBStillFlying - amidst all the solitary studying, do your children feel supported? If they have problems, are there places they can go for help? You mentioned tutors and academic advisers - I don’t remember having anything active on that front, when I was there.

If they are curious about what they want to do after college, are there people they can talk to? If they did want to pursue a non-academic interest, are there ways for them to pursue it?

The mantra I remember for all those “bigger” questions was: figure it out for yourself. On the academic front, professors and TAs were open and helpful. Academically, honestly, I had few qualms.

It was everything else. If I was curious about exit options, who was I going to talk to? There was even some arrogance toward that (you want help getting a job? you want to apply to vet school? You figure it out.)

Your kids may not actually need these resources, but I imagine they are important to a growing number of chicago undergrads. Having outlets for student life, greek life, the arts, career counseling, etc. It’s not just putting lipstick on the pig - these are vital components to residential student life.

There are some students who want to be floating brains. That’s fine. There’s a difference between choosing this approach, and having little to no choice about the matter.

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  • Yes they feel supported. From what I can gather, the academic resources at UChicago are fine-to-excellent overall, and whether my kids utilize them are largely a matter of choice not accessibility. Also, many first year sequences (hum, Calc 130's, etc.) actually require you to attend the tutorials. Not sure how it was back in your day. My son has a great relationship both with his hum prof. and his writing tutor.
  • Yes, there are plenty of people to talk to about "next steps;" however, my kids don't necessarily rely on them, or have used them very minimally. My D has built up her portfolio of interests based on her part-time work experience and her internship last summer; both of which she obtained without any input from advising. I'd say that for them, it's the jobs portal and not the advising that seems most useful. Both are good at doing their own job search and both understand how to conduct themselves at an interview.

(I want to make two comments at this juncture: 1) my kids may or may not be typical of the kids admitted now. But they ARE typical of the kids admitted back in your day. That’s been my point all along. From what I’ve seen, I actually believe that a good number of kids today would have been fine back then as well; while surely the College has met student needs by leaps and bounds, they haven’t really changed the criteria of student who would do well there. They just have more ability to be choosy now. 2) We do tend to know a skewed bunch: lots of former grad students and College alums who went on to grad school. Someone hoping for a top job on Wall Street might well have been disappointed with UChicago, while someone hoping for a top graduate program would have been fine with it.)

  • I thought Greek life existed back then?
  • I agree that my kids are fairly self-directed. I'm more like you: I LIKE those resources! I would be the career advisor's dream come true because I soak up that sort of advice and run with it. What I don't recall is that undergraduate career offices in general being as good back then as they are today. My brother's at Harvard, for instance, didn't assist him in the least (and he was thinking of law school!). He found his "next step" on his own, and then got jobs for his buddies at the same firm. There was definitely more of a "Harvard degree will open doors, but you need to go find those doors" kind of attitude - at least for the relatively "unconnected". (Frankly, I was a tad surprised to learn that. My very small obscure LAC had better career advising than that!). Did those guys blow off career advising to begin with, or was career advising simply not as comprehensive and pre-professionally-focused and, dare I say, Nurturing - as it is today? Not sure. But I'd beware of judging UChicago's deficit back then with the lens and expectations of today. Career advising everywhere has improved greatly over the past generation. No doubt UChicago still needed improvement. I'm just saying that it wasn't the only top place that kind of kicked you out and told you to go find yourself.
  • You use "floating brains" like it's a bad thing, Cue. Look: you HAD a choice. You CHOSE UChicago. Your GC gave you sound advice and you - for whatever reason - over-rode it. If UChicago was filled with floating brains, and you didn't care for floating brains, then why did you attend?

It’s not UC’s fault that you made a bad choice.