Who gets accepted to UChicago?

JHS
Tue, 20 Feb 2018 15:39:46 +0000

@JustEthan:

I am going to try to go back and give you a more understandable answer, but it’s not going to help you much.

As of 10-15 years ago, it would have been relatively easy to tell you what the University of Chicago was looking for in an applicant. There were really only two questions, closely related: Does the applicant have the intellectual capacity and writing ability to perform well at the University of Chicago? Does the applicant have an intellectual attitude that is compatible with the University’s principles regarding undergraduate education, i.e., an intense love of learning for learning’s sake, and broad interests but a desire to go deep where one’s attention is engaged, and a willingness to follow intellect and logic where they lead, regardless of social pressure and preconceptions? Back then, Chicago was getting about 9,000 applications per year, and accepting a little more than a third of them. Because it was known to be very hardworking and intellectually demanding, and not especially a fun place, it didn’t get a lot of casual applications from people who weren’t committed to hard work and an intellectual focus, so admission was more competitive than the percentages suggest. But the admissions department was able and willing to overlook “flaws” in an applicant’s resume if recommendations and essays clearly showed that the applicant was a Chicago kind of student.

About 95% of the existing alumni came through that system, and they have a tendency to think it was pretty good. It definitely gave the University a special character at the undergraduate level: hardworking, hyperintellectual, sardonic, self-deprecating. Since people’s social skills or non-intellectual talents didn’t play much into admissions, there were more socially awkward people, and fewer accomplished athletes, artists, musicians, etc. than you might find at many of the other colleges where very smart students congregated, like the Ivies or Stanford. Compared to its peer colleges, life for undergraduates at Chicago was much more focused on the classroom and courses than on extracurricular activities and networking for career advancement. Many people in the Chicago community have a lot of pride about those qualities; no one thinks they were entirely a bad thing.

There were some longstanding problems with this model, however, that the University began to address 30-40 years ago, but as to which the speed of change has accelerated rapidly in the past 10-15 years. I won’t go into the problems, but the upshot is that three really important trends have changed Chicago admissions a lot:

First, the University has done a lot of things to attract more applications, and the volume of applications it receives has increased 3-4x in little more than a decade. The increased volume of applications probably includes some people who really have no business applying to Chicago, but by and large Chicago still has a reputation for being hard and hyperintellectual, so it doesn’t get a lot of applications from people who mainly want to party in college.

Second, although the University has expanded its entering class size about 40% in the past 15 years, it is sending out only about half the number of admissions offers it did then, in part because more students it accepts are choosing to go there, and in the last two years because it has admitted well over half its class on an Early Decision basis where the applicant commits to enroll if he or she is accepted.

Third, while never entirely abandoning the idea that a Chicago student is somewhat distinct from the average student at Harvard, Penn, Stanford, or Duke, etc., Chicago has deliberately broadened the types of students it tries to attract and it tries to admit. It has upgraded its varsity sports programs and its traditional major ECs like theater, music, and journalism. It is trying to admit a more economically/culturally/racially/geographically diverse student body. It is trying to admit some “leaders.” It has introduced a limited engineering-type major (where it had no engineering at all in the past), and it is planning to introduce an explicit business-oriented major.

What all this means is that admissions has gone from being highly predictable to being completely unpredictable. It used to be, not so long ago, that if you were a good student with good test scores, good writing ability, and a track record of challenging yourself academically, and your essays and recommendations showed you were a Chicago-type student, you were in, and you had a decent chance of admission even if some of those other qualities (besides being a Chicago-type) weren’t quite at 100%. Now, you can have all of those qualities and still get rejected, and a few of the people accepted may not clearly be Chicago types. What’s more, there’s a radical difference between the results for people who apply ED vs. people applying EA or RD. Chicago hasn’t disclosed its numbers publicly, but a good guess is that it has been admitting 15-20% of ED applicants, and something like 2-3% of other applicants.