University of Chicago establishes new binding early decision program

Colleges & Universities University of Chicago
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I agree Chicago’s hardcore intellectualism reputation is (or at least was) well-earned, and that it doesn’t (or at least didn’t) make sense to funnel people to Chicago who would not enthusiastically embrace that spirit.

But I would suggest in the modern Internet 2.0/3.0 era, the story of a kid from Texas arriving surprised to find out this was Chicago’s vibe is not very likely anymore.

I really think in the modern era, this working paper on revealed preferences is critical background:

This is getting pretty old at this point, and includes LACs, but poor Chicago only ended up 27th on this revealed preference list nationally (right ahead of Hopkins at 28th, which is a school with similar branding issues).

Perhaps even more telling, in its own region (Region 3 including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin), it was down at 29th, now even below Hopkins! The people who knew it best did not like it better, if anything a bit worse.

Now some would say this is as should be. Chicago is not for everyone, not indeed for most kids, and if it ends up losing a lot of kids to cross-admit battles and such, so be it. The ones it wins are the kids who should be there.

But it appears the current administration is discontent with such a laissez-faire attitude (somewhat ironically given this is Chicago). It actually wants to pressure as many kids as possible into not actually having a choice, to being bound to go to Chicago if Chicago admits them.

And that is one way to deal with this revealed-preferences/cross-admit problem. But is that really the best way to get the kids who most really fit Chicago? To prey on their anxieties about an increasingly competitive admissions landscape in an effort to get them to give up being able to make a fully-informed choice?

That to me is not a very traditional Chicago approach to such things. And I do think there is a serious danger that it will, indeed maybe already is, gradually transform Chicago into something less special, something more generically appealing but less specifically appealing to those special few who actually loved Chicago as it was.

But again, the current administration thinks differently. And in fact has a budget to balance.

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Let’s start with where we agree, @NiceUnparticularMan - that Chicago has never been the choice of most of those kids with the qualifications that could get them in to the Harvards and Yales of the world. To have those qualifications AND to want to go to Chicago - that’s a special subset. As an alumnus I want to see an admissions policy that captures that subset.

The problem as I see it, paradoxically, is that Chicago’s reach has for a variety of reasons expanded in recent years far beyond what it was when I was a student. It has become way too popular - so much so that the old true believing types who once had little competition and little trouble getting in now find themselves swamped in a sea of applications, most of which are from kids outside that special subset, for whom Chicago will always be a sort of glorified safety. Some of those kids no doubt have the ability to talk the talk about the life of the mind and whatnot. They might even come to believe the talk if admitted. But nothing says sincerity like committing oneself up front. I don’t see this as Chicago putting pressure on kids to come to a school they don’t really like but as Chicago sussing out just which kids really and truly like the school - for what it is, not as a pale imitation and fallback of a preferred school. My tenderness is for that kid, whom I fear getting lost in the crowd. He or she will of course have to make their case in other ways than the choice of a binding admission option - and making the choice hardly secures admission - but it has the virtue of being a b.s.-proof way of declaring unambiguously that this is the school for me. That ought to be taken seriously by the Admissions people, and I trust it is.

No one today would wander into Chicago without a lot more knowledge than we two had long before the days of information overload. The point of my anecdote was simply that, even with the ameliorations of social life in recent years, it’s a school that best fits a certain type. I turned out to be that type; my friend was not. And not all the 20,000-plus annual applicants are, however good they look on paper. A wise Admissions policy needs all the tools it can get to figure out who belongs and who doesn’t.

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Thanks for sharing and interesting….

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IMG_06831179×2025 130 KB

For ease of reference.

Only Chicago people want things made difficult :grinning:

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That just isn’t the reality I have seen in recent years.

To me the intellectual kid who might like Chicago usually still also wants to apply to other colleges, maybe to see financial offers, maybe just because they want choice. They might come around to Chicago in the end if offered admissions and enough aid, but they don’t have the financial means or the certainty at the time of ED to commit.

Instead, these days most of the kids I see applying ED to Chicago are the sort of kids who really are into prestige/rankings. And they are specifically the sorts of kids who see a distinction between the “T10” and the rest of the “T20” private research universities (let alone publics or LACs or whatever). The “T5”, however, do not have ED. But Chicago (and others plausibly in the “T10”) do.

And then these kids evaluate where they think ED will do them the most good. They are not choosing Chicago because they actually like it better than Penn or Duke or Columbia or Brown or Hopkins. They are choosing it because they think ED will do them the most good at Chicago, and Chicago is a T10, and they don’t think they can get into a T5.

Now, to be sure, a few kids are exceptions. A few kids actually really do like Chicago best, and can comfortably afford it, so ED Chicago.

But Chicago is incredibly aggressive about pushing kids to ED, including this new program. And the more they push like that, the less it is about the kids who really love Chicago, and the more it is about the kids buy into the idea they need an ED boost for a T10, and Chicago offers the most boost.

And the more Chicago relies on these sorts of kids to enroll, there are predictable consequences.

One is just it becomes less a community of the kids you are describing, and more a community for kids who see a connection between maximizing “prestige”/rankings in undergrad and $$$ professional careers.

Another is it becomes easier to get as many high pay kids as Chicago needs to balance its budget. This is not some crazy conspiracy theory, it is being reported on.

But again, as those things happen, it is becoming less of a place for kids, including non-wealthy kids, who really love the intellectualism that used to define Chicago’s appeal. And ED as Chicago practices it isn’t pushing back on that trend, it is part of what is driving it.

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Some other background observations.

Brown as a school with more appeal than its academic rankings alone would suggest is not a new thing. Notre Dame too, for different kids (usually). And so on. It can be good to be known as the “best in kind”.

And then the “top” LACs have also long been very competitive for the hearts of a lot of kids. The “top” Northeast LACs and Pomona most of all, but pretty quickly others too.

And this just was, and probably still is, a hard competitive set for Chicago. There are not just plenty of kids who will prefer a Columbia, Penn, or whatever. Some will prefer a Brown or Dartmouth. Some a Notre Dame. Some these LACs. Some in fact Northwestern! They are just getting hit from every angle.

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You’re making some assumptions here, @NiceUnparticularMan , based on your observations of - what, a dozen or so, Chicago ED applicants you have known? I am quite ready to concede the motivations you attribute to that sample you’ve observed, but are the ones with those motivations the ones selected in the end? Even among ED applicants the rate of rejection is very high. All applicants in all categories will have to make their cases to Admissions. Even you don’t rule out the sort of applicant I envisage, and it would be my fond hope that it is just those applicants who would prove most likely to get themselves accepted. Certainly they will have a better chance of being identified and taken seriously than if they are dropped into a large undifferentiated pool of all applicants.

Chicago needs both the type you describe and the type I prefer, of course, and a Chicago education can take hold both of those who arrive on campus with some premonition of what to expect and those with little knowledge or commitment.

I’m a little mystified by your contention that “they are just getting hit from all angles.” Is it your belief that the quality of the Chicago student body is suffering these days? Everything I hear is quite to the contrary. That most college students, even very good ones, prefer less intense schools is hardly news.

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It seems like you have forgotten that most students are limited by their budget…and applying ED generally does not make sense for those students. It can for an SAI -1500 kid who thinks they will fit in and has a straightforward financial situation.

ED never makes sense for a family who wants to compare financial aid offers (no matter how much they love Chicago or whatever school we are talking about). Families who want/need to compare offers is not an insignificant proportion of families. This is why ED gets knocked for favoring affluent and/or already advantaged students.

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Obviously we are all making a lot of working assumptions, and Chicago is notoriously lacking in transparency as to what is actually happening with ED. That said, the kids I have encountered, while not a random sampling, actually track fairly well the sorts of kids we know generally are more likely to apply ED.

Again we don’t know the actual numbers for Chicago–they refuse to fill in those lines on the CDS–but at many colleges the ED pool has gotten quite large.

Generally, all the highly selective private colleges I know about have processes in place to do a thorough, multi-step review of the kids that are at least superficially competitive for admissions. So I see no reason to assume a kid who is in fact a good fit for Chicago will not have their essays read in RD, their recommendations read, their transcript gone over carefully, and so on.

The difference is really just that they have not applied binding. And if it were true that people only applied binding if they had thoughtfully considered all the detailed pros and cons of the college and determined it was actually the best fit for them as an individual, that might be a somewhat useful signal, although of course Chicago would want to form its own opinion on that.

But we know that at a minimum, it is not that for at least many kids. We don’t know how much “signal” and how much “noise” there is exactly in the Chicago ED pool, although again the tactics they are using will predictably increase the noise to signal ratio. But in any event, once that “noise” effect has happened, then Chicago really has no choice but to reevaluate those applicants in the same way it would have to if there was no such “signal”.

So I actually do not believe an applicant choosing to ED is a meaningful aid to Chicago in determining whether that applicant is in substance a good fit for what Chicago might be looking for. I think it just is what it is–it binds the applicant to yield if Chicago choose to admit them.

I would not put it exactly that way. Rather as I suggested before, I think Chicago wants its admits to yield, but in recent history has likely really struggled to yield all the admits it wants unless they can bind them in advance with ED.

And then I think relying on pushing as many kids as possible to ED, including by encouraging kids and parents to believe it will give them a “boost” if they apply ED, is likely changing the composition of the student mix. Whether that is reducing the “quality” of the student mix is a very subjective question.

It is not, but I do think a relevant background understanding is that a few decades ago, like say when I was applying in the late 1980s, applications per applicant were a lot lower, and a lot of applicants applied to very few if any colleges outside of their state or perhaps region. Of course some schools were more “national” than others even back then, but even the more “national” schools had a lot of regionalism evident in their application mix.

But since then, there has been an increasing nationalization of applications, associated with an increase in applications per applicant, particularly among the sorts of applicants most likely to be interested in the “top” “national” private colleges, and the few public colleges with OOS programs that compete for such applicants.

A lot of this is just technology-related. The Internet has made it increasingly easy for people to do detailed research of colleges far away, and indeed the interactive version of the Internet has made it easy for them to get peer reviews, share tips, and so on. This forum is a great example–there was no equivalent way to find out about all these great college options back when I was applying.

And of course the Common App has also made it much easier to apply to many colleges generally, which can include colleges outside your region.

Anyway, what this means is really every famous private college like Chicago has gotten more and more applications from outside its state/region, but also more and more of their applicants are applying to competing colleges outside their state/region.

The point I was making before is you can see in that revealed preference list how this has been problematic for Chicago in particular. Again, there are just so many different types of colleges that are beating Chicago on that list, which is how it ends up so low on the national ranking. And again, even more telling, it ends up below that same sort of mix even in the regional ranking.

So normally it isn’t going to be clear whether this nationalization trend helps or hurts a given college on net–they get more competitive applicants, but they are going up against more competing colleges, which way does it net out?

But in Chicago’s case, that revealed preference data at least suggests nationalization may have been problematic for Chicago on net, because of how many different sorts of colleges nationally are effective competitors against Chicago.

Or, in other words, it was bad enough back in the day when Chicago was losing intellectual kids to Yale because Yale sounded more fun. But now it is also losing them to Rice? To Wesleyan? There are just too many colleges nationally that have that “intellectual but more fun” sort of branding.

Or maybe not, but it would certainly help explain why Chicago in particular has seen the need to so aggressively push ED.

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At my kid’s tippy-top boarding school, the ones applying to Chicago (mostly in one of the early decision stages, yes) tend to be extremely smart and interesting kids, of various financial conditions, who lack a hook, and want a very rigorous education. The ones applying to and getting into the bulk of the Ivies tend to have hooks of one kind or another, or more than one.

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And just to be clear, I do think those kids are the ones who unproblematically can apply ED to Chicago if they feel like it is the best school for them, and it is comfortably affordable.

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Not familiar with ED/EA transparency with other schools but I have yet to see a school fill out information on the CDS with their waitlist statistics. Harvard surely left it blank too.

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From a school’s perspective, this makes sense to me. It helps increase class utilization, vet potential applicants to see how they perform in a real life setting, and market to a target audience more directly. I am not sure how this program increases yield rates. Those who partake in this program will likely apply ED I or II anyways.

From a parent’s/student’s perspective, I could see how it adds another layer of angst during the application process.

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For what it’s worth, I just did a quick runthrough of a few CDS reports, and while you’re right that Harvard left it blank, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Berkeley all have waitlist data in section C2.

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Or will choose not to apply at all. My kid went to a summer session this year with the intent to get a feel for the school.

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Very true. It also helps vet the school as well.

Out of curiosity, had your kid not gone to the summer session, would he have applied ED?

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My first kid? LOL No way in hell would I have endorsed applying ED anywhere. Yes there were the NPCs but I’m not a gambling person.
This (Summer program kid) is my second kid. They’re a year out from applying to schools and after having the reassurances that NPC’s are more or less in line with actual FA offers, I’d probably let them ED to a school that we have determined we can afford. They loved the program. Had a lot of fun. UChicago is definitely is now in the ED consideration but it’s their first actual exposure to a university so we will see what eventually shakes out.
UChicago, out of all the schools, is the one I am most concerned about with respect to “fit”. I feel it’s a high risk high reward sort of situation wherein if it’s the right fit for my kid, then it’s going to be the best 4-6 years of their life. But if it’s not a good fit, it could be very miserable.
Whereas I don’t quite share the same concern with Brown, Harvard, or even neighboring Northwestern. I feel like kids there can have a so-so fit and still have a good 4-6 years.

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I had similar concerns when my first decided to go there.

My observation is that UChicago offers a lot of leeway on what courses it offers, and some of the more difficult paths are truly challenging, such as honors analysis that are graduate level courses. For those kids who are really keen on going into advanced physics or math, it prepares them well, but it definitely is a step up from what they learn in high school. I hear MIT is similar. With that said, there are other paths that are not as difficult (although likely to be a bit more rigorous than usual). It all depends on what the student wants to do, and whether they want that challenge. You can manage that risk.

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Thats how we felt. I just hadn’t wrapped my head around what having a kid in college (both financially and logistically) looked like. She LOVED the school (which surprised absolutely no one who knows her). She was deferred on EA and the ship sailed… she found more interesting waters.

I am much more comfortable with ED now because I am confident on my knowledge of the schools, the system, and what the numbers actually look like for our family.

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That is good to know. I am optimistic that UChicago knows what it is doing as far as selecting students that they know will be successful in the type of school they want to build.

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My son attended a program this summer. However, to my knowledge, this was offered to those attending the free summer sessions. There are like 4-5 different free programs.

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