What’s in the water in Chicagoland? (Univ. of Chicago & Northwestern)
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Anonymous
What exactly is inauthentic about this thread? |
Anonymous
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NP and my kid was accepted this year to UChicago.
Not sure how to abbreviate it; we are from CA and here, UC means "University of California" Anyways, I agree that the "new" dean is charismatic. A couple of years back, my kid went to an info session where he was speaking, and came away enthused. I was attracted by the UChicago Letter and their marketing towards free speech. I am old-school in that way; I think it's essential to have an environment where people are comfortable to say stuff that isn't popular (a saying comes to mind, "In order to change someone's mind, you have to know where their mind is." So even if it's fluff and marketing, I think this marketing will attract kids who want to talk about and grapple with issues. |
Anonymous
| UChicago is good or the U of C if you want to be old school. |
Anonymous
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U Chicago games the system by mailing kids who will never get in and encouraging them to apply. This makes the school
Appear competitive. |
Anonymous
| Not a new thing |
Anonymous
It's like Wake Forest saying, "Hey look, we are T10!" |
Anonymous
Wake Forest is not even remotely close to the caliber of either of these schools. |
Anonymous
They are great schools. You wish the administrators at U Chicago were as confident, they are not. So much so they have to adopt ED to lock students, then still not enough, and have to device an ED II to lock more rejects by other top schools. High schoolers were bombarded by Chicago's flyers every couple of weeks throughout the year to invite them to apply. This is the only school doing this much ad aside from U of Pheonix. If not for that we already know it is a legitimate school we would think this is some scam. Why so? How about some confidence. |
Anonymous
+1 Same back in the late 80s. |
Anonymous
Agree. UChicago has always been more of a niche place--the place where professors like to send their kids and very well-known among academics. I went to high school deep in flyover country. When I went there in the late 1980s, my parents (MD) had basically hardly heard of it and figured it was nice enough but my uncles with PhDs thought it was awesome. And it turned out to be a great choice for me--not unlike a liberal arts version of MIT (high nerd quotient). Anecdote: one of my h.s. teachers ran into one of her university professors and the conversation went: HS teacher: "Larla here is going to HARVARD." Professor: "Oh, and where are you going, Larla2?" Me: Chicago. Professor: "Oh, I would much rather go to Chicago." Also Chicago back then was also a fallback for New England kids who couldn't get in to Ivies. Those kids tended to be grumpy that their Ivy high school friends were definitely not working as hard. |
Anonymous
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I don’t think it’s confidence UChicago lacks. I think the Adm is just eager to rebrand (and expand). And it knows it could be(come) a second-choice school for a bunch of HYPSM-focused kids, some of whom will predictably be shook/chastened/more risk-averse after SCEA doesn’t work out.
Rebranding explains media blitz and 2nd choice explains ED II. Both are rational responses to the US’s decentralized market for elite schools. Personally, I’m not keen on either strategy (I valued UofC’s distinctiveness and I think ED II exploits kids’ anxiety) but I can see how they make sense and could be justified. |
Anonymous
LOL. My DD has gotten lit from Brown, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale in recent weeks. They are just as eager to encourage her to apply as is U Chicago. |
Anonymous
Wow, similar experience wrt both your anecdotes (except it was more recent dinner with a bunch of my college profs talking about DC’s plans and my BIL who went to UofC back in the 80s is one of the New Englanders you describe!) Random sidenote, my parents (who grew up working class in Ohio) knew of Northwestern (and were impressed by it, at least partially as a rich kid’s school) but had no clue about Chicago when I was applying to college. But DH’s Dad sure as hell knew what it was (and I have no idea why — unless it was regional and UofC had a better rep in NE than in the Midwest (in the 1950s-70s) among people who were neither academics nor rich/focused on private universities). |
Anonymous
| Curious about the neighborhood. My impression of Chicago is that they have a high (violent) crime rate, but that may be distant from the U of Chicago campus. |
Anonymous
It's the South Side, so it's not the safest part of town, but it's not as bad as other parts of the South Side either. Violent crime is down since I was there (https://safety-security.uchicago.edu/police/data_information/crime_trends/), and my impression from more recent grads is that neighborhood is safer than it was then. It's a city. You might get mugged, but you probably won't be. |