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

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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In the fwiw department, I can give you my impression of UC - as a parent of an “elite” boarding school sophomore. I am probably more typical than you might imagine. I never heard of UC until about a year ago.

Background: My son was in public school through 8th grade. My husband and I both have graduate degrees from public universities and are quirky egg heads. So is our son. The plan was never for him to attend boarding school - heck we had barely heard of boarding schools before he applied. The choice for boarding school was precisely because he loves learning for the sake of learning, and was a fish out of water in public school. You will find a surprising number of kids like him -public school escapees - in boarding school these days.

First time I heard of UC was about a year ago - when a friend of mine was talking about her daughter’s college search. She told me my child should “just apply to University of Chicago and get it over with.”

Not knowing what that meant, and egg head that I am, I have now researched the heck out of UC, including reading far too many threads here for someone who has absolutely no connection to the school. I have checked out the athletic team rosters to see where those kids come from, and compared them to most Ivy plus schools - as a way to figure out how important sports are there compared to others. Including sports my son doesn’t play. I have watched You Tube videos of students talking about the core curriculum.

My conclusion: reputationally, vestiges of “fun comes to die” still exist, but more as proud heritage rather than current reality. It resonates with the types of students who apply these days, they like the tradition of it, but they are far more well-rounded than they used to be. They want to go to a school that is academic first, and everything else just adds to that experience. My hunch is that prep schools are nudging like-minded kids in that direction. And there are lots of them these days, because that is who boarding schools are selecting. Much like with elite universities, boarding schools have seen a huge uptick in applications, and they give out a huge amount of financial aid to get the students they want.

So, yeah, my guess is my kid will apply when the time comes.

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That’s a pretty audacious distinction you’re attempting to make, Cue. One would have to believe that Boyer’s grand plan for the College calls for admitting a type of kid the exact opposite of the type he says its education is intended to produce. Does that seem plausible? No, either as a reading of his remarks or as a strategy for the College you get a D, accompanied by this comment in the margin: “You have been led astray by a most unChicago-like personal taste. There are plenty of schools that immerse their students in plain-vanilla collegiate culture and nurture them to their heart’s content. This is not one of them. ‘Well-roundedness’ is in any event a juvenile aspiration. You will outgrow it.”

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@CateCAParent - welcome aboard! Let me guess - you and your husband went to Cal and your son is in Cate (Boarding) School just north of 101, East of Santa Barbara? Even if I’m totally off, good to have you ?

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@Cue7

Simpson’s comment about “intellectual leadership” was made decades ago. UChicago has always encouraged intellectual leadership. The majority of alums have NEVER gone on to academia but pursued professional careers just as they do today.

Behnke never said they were seeking to admit more “well-rounded” students. He was referencing the fact that prospective students need a better balance between the academic and non-academic side of College life. Better dorms and activities obviously helped with that. As mentioned upthread, Behnke was able to increase enrollment significantly long before a good chunk of that even came into existence. Per Boyer, the remark would have totally made sense among the university community since many had been saying the same thing for decades (before Cue’s arrival). Also mentioned upthread: Hutchin’s immediate successor back in the 1950’s actively sought out more “normal” admits to replace the “oddballs.” This has been an old point of discussion; it just took the university until the 90’s to address once and for all. It’s not like “better balance” was a new idea in Cue’s day.

Totally agree that UChicago and other Ivy+ schools are competing for the best and brightest and that each has its own brand of liberal education to offer. A Harvard education is meant to be “transformative: academically, socially and personally.” A Brown education is meant to prepare students “to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation.” Princeton focuses on “The value of service (which) is central to the mission of Princeton as a liberal arts university.” For Yale ‘This philosophy of education corresponds with that expressed in the Yale Report of 1828, which draws a distinction between expanding [the mind’s] powers, and storing it with knowledge.’ Acquiring facts is important, but learning how to think critically and creatively in a variety of ways takes precedence." And so on.

UChicago’s own brand of liberal education starts off this way: “The College residential and curricular experience is predicated on the community that students build by attending classes together and by learning from faculty and each other in academic and social settings. We believe that successful education at the college level depends to a large extent on regular attendance at classes and laboratories, and therefore it is the expectation of the College that students will attend all classes for which they have registered. Nevertheless, it is up to the individual department, faculty member, or instructor to set the attendance policy for their individual courses.”

Can anyone find a class attendance expectation anywhere in one of the Ivy undergraduate bulletins or catalogs?

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Thanks! ?

Close. Yes, Cate - but my name is a give away, so no bonus points for you, lol. ?

But we met at UC Davis (grad school). I went to William and Mary undergrad (but grew up in California). We live not too far from Cal, though.

Over on the prep school side of CC, college counseling and matriculation comes up a lot. Across all schools , parents are the ones pushing the Ivy League, not the schools - even at Andover and Exeter. The schools do a lot of managing expectations- if you take the legacies and athletes out of the picture, the college admissions scene at prep schools ain’t what it used to be. Not complaining, as college isn’t the main reason why kiddo is at the high school he is. Suits me fine to leave the college search to the experts - I have sworn to stay out of it. It is definitely a perk to have people who know my kid and know the colleges be the ones guiding him. I just can’t help myself with the whole research thing. ?

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@marlowe1 - most elite colleges seek well-rounded applicants. Very few seek to export (graduate) well rounded people - to nearly the same degree. Indeed, college - anywhere - is about expanding horizons but also honing in on specific areas. How many three sport athletes do you see in college? Or triple majors across varied fields?

Chicago used to seek lopsided inputs. Now, not as much so. It’s perfectly possible for there to be dissonance between what Boyer says, and what Behnke and nondorf have done.

@JBStillFlying - if Benke convinced applicants Chicago could offer a balanced life, wouldn’t that incentivize balanced students to apply? The U. May have sought more balanced applicants for decades, but the 90s and oughts saw a confluence of factors that allowed this to happen. (And, the u made hires in behke and nondorf - the right sort of people to see this through, in ways O’Neill never cared to).

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@CateCAParent - welcome! Glad you want to know more about Chicago. It looks like your son’s boarding school is offering good advising! From what I can see, Chicago is “academics first” nowadays. Back when I applied (in the 90s) I would describe it as “academics only.” There’s a big difference, and one that leads to many more well rounded types applying these days.

Also, as legacies and athletics count less at Chicago, we probably get more unhooked students from boarding schools. It seems like a sweet spot has emerged between many boarding schools and Chicago. (I imagine on the boarding school end, it’s still a nice feather in the cap - while not Harvard or Stanford, having lots of matrics at a ~top 5 usnwr uni is a nice stat to have.)

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@Cue7 , you’re reading Boyer with a tin ear, or maybe just hearing what you want to hear. When he praises Chicago students for not being well-rounded you think he is only talking about their doing one sport instead of three or electing one field of concentration to the exclusion of others or something about “expanding horizons”. That fits well enough with your Pleasantville concept of college, but it has little to do with what Boyer is actually trumpeting as the peculiar virtue of education at this institution. Alan Simpson (the same Simpson who twitted us as being “maggoty minded monks”) said that well-rounded students simply “roll in whatever direction they are pushed”. Does that sound to you like praise? Does it sound like Chicago students as you knew them? Honestly, Cue, it doesn’t even sound much like you yourself.

And when Boyer talks about “the luminous power of a Chicago education” do you think he is only talking about course requirements and majors, of a school that is a “feather in the cap” even if it lacks the prestige of Harvard or Stanford? Is a Chicago education about getting you a fine job and a fine life and rounding all your rough edges? That may be your vision, but it is not his. It is not what he means when he talks of Chicago students “living lives of discernment, judgment and courage”. Many factors go in to such lives, but successful ones are about more than accumulating prestige and rolling the way that makes you most acceptable.

And note this: He is not describing merely what you will be after four years of a Chicago education; he is addressing the present student body in all stages of their educations, and he is praising all of them as they now are, including those just arrived at Chicago, for not being well-rounded but for having those sterner virtues that brought them to Chicago and which Chicago prizes. To me this all had a distinct echo of Pericles’ address of the Athenian People in his famous funeral oration. That too was a time of crisis. Pericles set out to describe to the Athenian people what it was about them and their lives that was precious and worth fighting for. He told them it made them unique among all the Greeks. Boyer began his talk by referencing Thucydides, and I believe he saw his project in the letter to the student body in very much the same terms as Pericles as channeled by Thucydides. Indeed, I believe he was inviting Chicago students, most of whom have read or will be reading the Funeral Oration, to grasp the parallel.

Some would say that Pericles’ description of the good life Athenian-style involves some concept of well-roundedness. That’s a pleasant irony, but perhaps not the contradiction it might first appear to be. The modern world is not the ancient world. Our well-roundedness is nothing like theirs. Perhaps that idea set Boyer thinking, and his thoughts took him to the College of the University of Chicago - a place very different from Periclean Athens but nothing like the blandly innocuous Pleasantville of your dreams.

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@marlowe1 - if Boyer derides the “well-rounded student,” why would Chicago invest so much in creating a well-rounded experience for its students? Why have Behnke convince prospies they could have a well-rounded, balanced life at Chicago?

I’m sure there are still faculty on campus who say: instead of investing (literally) a billion dollars making the student experience more balanced, why not invest minimally in student life, and instead pour most of that money into our academic enterprise?

Instead of debt-financing to create all these student services/structures, why not debt finance to recruit more all-star faculty, lessen use of adjuncts, and lure students with the promise of hands-down the best faculty anywhere?

The “pointiest” students - those who crave the most distilled academic experience - would then flock to Chicago. While Yale invests $500M to create two new dorms, Chicago is the place that invested millions to bulk up their collection of Ottoman scholars.

If Chicago exceptionalism is anything like what you assert, the past 20 years was a time for Chicago to draw a line in the sand, and distinguish itself further from its peers. Instead, most of the prospective parents and students on this thread (and others) point to Chicago offering a “flavor” amongst the top schools they like - rather than being an anomalous outlier (as it once was).

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By offering a more balanced life, the College actually incentivized a greater number of highly talented and accomplished students to apply. They aren’t necessarily more “balanced.” Plenty are admitted who uber-specialize in academics - like the kid that Nondorf was raving about last year who covered his bedroom walls with white board in order to write down and solve mathematical proofs. Totally agree that Nondorf and Behnke were “the right sort of people” to increase the applicant pools and attracted top kids to the university. Both happened to be very good at their jobs and, as “outsiders”, could point out the obvious to the higher ups w/o losing friends among the faculty. Both were also from other top and/or academically rigorous institutions: MIT (Behnke) and Yale/RPI (Nondorf) and both “got” how central the academic culture is at UC.

Despite his Yale/Wiffenpoof background, Nondorf is one of the most lopsided admissions dudes I’ve ever met. The guy is all work and no schmooz. He also breaks the mold when it comes to making sweeping and controversial admissions policies. Definitely an outside-the-box thinker in a department not exactly known for being innovative. And after meeting him, I would call him “quirky.” Nondorf is also the guy in charge of exit strategies as well as admissions, so does he oversee the latter with an eye to “employability”? Perhaps. But guessing this isn’t a tough call anymore as many more brainy, accomplished and employable applicants are passed over than admitted. That’s what happens when you drive the admit rate down to 6%.

IMO, the biggest indicator of how the College student body has changed over the decades is feedback from the faculty. They don’t care so much about new dorms or RSO’s or even career outcomes. They care about academic strength, preparation, and degree of intellectual engagement and interest. The faculty at UChicago aren’t exactly interested in dumbing down their curriculum to please the undergraduates. And it was the fear of admitting the less academically capable that contributed to the notable resistance to expansion in the in the '90’s (Gray managed to increase the size of the College during her tenure but Sonnenschein was proposing something more rapid and was far more direct and less politic about it). Anyone can speak to faculty who have been there awhile and get their take. Anecdotal, but still insightful.

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  • It’s already been pointed out that UChicago’s “well rounded” offerings are still pretty “middle of the road” compared to other top institutions. If you poll students, they are still there primarily for the academics. Compare to 30 years ago, when students were there because they “landed” at UChicago.
  • Faculty by and large don’t say that. Most of the faculty we’ve spoken to believe that student quality has increased over time. There might be a grumbler or two but they are likely to be emeritus by now. At a time when many of our top schools are described as “summer camp” for their nurturing, even luxurious approach to providing an undergraduate education, UChicago is still considered to be pretty spartan.
  • Not sure what your issue with “adjuncts” is. UChicago’s teaching talent has increased substantially since your time. Complaints about the quality of teaching in the Core was one of the primary reasons it was restructured.
  • Chicago has a great reputation in Near-East civilizations! NELC has “bulked up” their collection of Ottoman Scholars as well. Compare number of faculty and grad students to those at Yale.
    https://nelc.uchicago.edu/people/profiles
    https://nelc.yale.edu/people/all
    And my kids love the Oriental Institute. All of them, even the ones who aren’t at UChicago. But they are fairly “pointy.”
  • UChicago is, w/o doubt, “flavor of the decade.” But most of the parents on this forum have kids who either applied ED or who chose UChicago over other great-to-top choices. To them UChicago is, indeed, distinct, but most would likely chalk it up (and have chalked it up) to Fit. Fit was just as important in your day, Cue. As Behnke pointed out.
  • The primary reason for building new dorms wasn’t to offer something shiny and new to prospective families as much as it was to provide additional support to academic life with dorms that were close to campus. The satellites were tiny, scattered, and far away. Again, this was a plan that was decades in the making and had even started before getting chucked due to financial crises. It’s a no-brainer that dorms should be close to classrooms, libraries and dining.
  • Also of note: in 2012 (when Pierce was knocked down to make room for North), applications were 7x higher than 20 years before that. Common Ap. helped but so did other decisions Nondorf was making at the time. Since that time, with the newest residential addition to go online this fall, the building projects wrapping up, and Metcalfs higher than ever in number and dollar amount, applications have soared an additional . . .5k. That’s a 2% year-over-year increase. Not very indicative that “balance” has had huge payoffs. The most rapid growth happened between 2008 and 2013, when Nondorf came on board. He didn’t have the benefits of RGG or Logan or North or WRC or (yet) a top-notch career advancement department to convince applicants to apply. Those things were in the works, of course, but the students matriculating in those years would not be benefitting from them. What increased apps. during those years was simply that more families learned about the school and their kids felt that the academic focus and rigor were a good fit.
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@JBStillFlying -

I’m now not sure what you are asserting: that chicago is a difference in kind from other top schools? Or, is it a difference in degree? What do you contend?

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Not anymore. And they haven’t for a decade or so. They stopped looking for BWRK’s back in the early 90’s.

Instead, ‘elite’ colleges seek well rounded classes, made up with many individuals who can be lopsided as heck.

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As is your wont, Cue, you are setting up and knocking down a straw man: no one disputes that improvements in the amenities of student life were necessary. There just weren’t enough Aristotle Schwarz’s to fully populate the old College, and Schwarz himself didn’t go on to make a bundle on Wall Street and to recycle it to his alma mater. The necessity to put some water in the wine at this school is an old and oft-told story. Even in my day nobody thought that the College was as “pure” as Reed or St. John’s. It has not since the Hutchins era been a place where quirkiness reigns undiluted.

But you might ask yourself why it is exactly that kids who are thinking of coming to this school perennially fret about whether it will be too hard, too academic, too party-less. And why current students and alumni, on the other hand, are always fretting about the decline of standards and loss of academic rigor. As one recent alum put it in a comment on another board: “You’re going to be in a much more intellectual community at UChicago. Do you want to be around smart people or people who spend four years trying to find the best frat party?” And in a thread titled “What is something that you genuinely dislike about UChicago?” there is this: “I’ll start by saying that you won’t find another place with people as passionate and driven about their intellectual/personal interests as UChicago”. The writer then enunciates some drawbacks that go with that sort of intensity, only to assert that he/she loved the place because of that intensity. So it goes. There’s a lot of that sort of thing: love of the intensity; concern about the overwhelmingness of it; fear that it will be lost; nostalgia for it when one’s schooldays are done. An uninformed person reading these comments would conclude that this is a school conscious of its difference on the very lines I love and you hate.

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University of Chicago is not alone.
Across the country, tuition and costs went up in the last 20 years. The competition for full pay families increased and the table stakes for dorms and other amenities went up in general, no? Full-pay parents who weren’t getting an Ivy brand name for junior’s diploma demanded to see evidence that the high cost was worth it. Upgraded facilities are a way to signal that.

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Re: #89. Wow, I met Jim Nondorf in 2004, shortly before he went to RPI (and I knew his older brother slightly in college). “Quirky” isn’t one of the first 100 adjectives that would occur to me about the person I met then. Who, by the way, had top-grade schmooze. Maybe he’s changed.

JBStillFlying also failed to mention a few other of Nondorf’s credentials of the sort that make marlowe1’s skin crawl: Skull & Bones, and a number of years in consulting before founding a charter school – where he served simultaneously as administrator, athletic coach and music director, talk about well-rounded – and then going into college admissions. Nondorf is anything but an outsider swimming against the tide. He’s an insider acting like a leader.

Anyway, here’s my meta-take on this debate, and on the original topic of this thread:

Demand for elite-college education has skyrocketed over the past 30 years or so, for a variety of reasons: the combination of prosperity and inequality in the U.S. and abroad, increased globalization, the demographic Echo Boom (and the fact that our generation of parents had far more women with elite university educations than any previous generation), the complete devaluation of high school degrees and significant devaluation of run-of-the-mill BAs as employment credentials, constant funding issues at public universities, The Gilmore Girls (and other pop culture).

In the face of that increased demand, the elite universities of 30 years ago have generally failed to expand their capacity. Princeton and Yale have, a little, but the number of first-year slots available at Ivy League universities is only about 5% higher now than it was in 1980.

So all that demand has created the opportunity for other private universities to join the ranks of the elite. Stanford did it first, and so successfully that people barely remember it wasn’t always that way. MIT and Caltech were always elite for STEM, and STEM was becoming exponentially more important. But there was still plenty of excess demand. Chicago was well positioned to take advantage of it – its academic reputation has always been first rate, and academic reputation is at the core of what everyone wants – and did. (So did others, but Chicago has taken some of the wind out of their sails. E.g., Duke.)

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Agreed with @MohnGedachtnis - I’ve met Nondorf (albeit briefly) at a couple receptions over the past decade. I’ve heard him speak multiple times. “Quirky” isn’t what comes to mind at all when I see him. The man can schmooze and can sell - and that’s what he’s supposed to do. He also was a college athlete and a scholar - a combination Chicago has more of now than before.

I also see Chicago capitalizing on excess demand, but also being far less tone deaf than in years past. Amenities/support sell. Expanding the career placement office, building the shiny dorms, the nice arts center, etc., sells more than putting all the resources into academics. Chicago heeded the writing on the wall.

(Also, @JBStillFlying calls these additions middle of the road, but I’d take what Chicago has built over most of its peers - including Cornell, Brown, UPenn, Georgetown, etc. It’s really created a lot of ways for its students to thrive.)

To bring this back around, w\ Chicago vs. the Ivy set, is it a difference in degree, or a difference in kind?

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I’d agree with marlowe that in the essentials it’s a difference in kind.

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I am still catching up with informative and entertaining Chicago threads. Just discovered this old one. Perhaps some of the newer parents like me will enjoy it:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/1956361-university-of-chicago-the-meteoric-rise-p1.html

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  • Interesting. I actually know several “outside the box” thinking parents who have also founded schools, serving in multiple roles simultaneously. I wonder how many other deans of admission have that background. That doesn’t exactly contradict my earlier observation. These parents tended to be anything but “well rounded!” Multi-talented, dedicated, and incredibly principled - yep. “Well rounded”? Nope.
  • I’ve spoken to Dean Nondorf a few times and, sure, there is some schmooze potential to his personality but I chalked it up to being super-extroverted. He reminds me of another friend - an alum of the College - who is both very bright and very gregarious and who definitely struck me as “schmoozie” when I first met him but is also pretty “thinky” and a great conversationalist. By “quirky” is not meant odd appearance or mannerisms or inability to interact with large groups of people. It’s a bit more subtle than that. Both my friend and Nondorf strike me as “quirky.” Perhaps those seeking to unlock what that means at UChicago should study Jim Nondorf as Exhibit A. After all, it’s his admissions office that monetized the term :wink:

-This makes sense.