The University of Chicago

Chicago, Illinois
August 9, 2009

I don’t even know where to begin the account of my experience with UChicago. Just the name gives me goosebumps. Growing up in a suburb of the city itself, it has long been a college on my mind, and is a relatively popular choice at my school, due to its notable prestige and academic prowess. Of course, plenty of people, even in the Chicago area, don’t understand how important the school really is, often mistaking it for the University of Illinois at Chicago and not realizing that the 7th best university in the world (QS 2009) is in their backyard. Even more dangerously, many of my fellow prospective students don’t realize how unique Chicago is. They don’t know enough to understand that Chicago caters to a relatively small, specific demographic of students: those willing to sacrifice a raging social life, extra-curriculars, and their sanity, all for a nearly unmatched academic atmosphere and all around collegiate education.

Let’s begin with just that: the education. The main components of Chicago’s curriculum can be broken down into three sections, each consuming about one third of a student’s time at Chicago; Core classes, or required classes of all undergraduates, major requirements, or classes required for each department’s major, and elective classes, or free choice classes to round out the experience. This is an alarming level of requirements for a modern college curriculum. There are few other top colleges with such extensive core-curriculums, much less ones so rigorous. Courses required of all undergraduates range from exposure to great books and philosophy to more general math and science reasoning courses. Because of these demanding requirements, it is a long hike to earn a Chicago degree. It is a truly stimulating amount of work, and one has to make a lot of personal sacrifices to complete it. However, Chicago is one of the leading schools in terms of sending grads on to get PhD’s as well as other professional degrees. Employers and graduate schools know how demanding the academics at Chicago are, and they look highly upon how well the school prepares its students for academic life.

Chicago’s campus is equally amazing. Located about twenty minutes (by subway, bus, or car) south of downtown Chicago. Though the immediate area surrounding the university’s neighborhood of Hyde Park is quiet and upper class, as little as a few blocks off the campus can put you right in the middle of some of Chicago’s worst south side neighborhoods. The school takes advantage of its location, offering field studies in Chicago and urban studies to study these surrounding areas. Due to the campus’s location, crime is fairly high, and students are always on the lookout. This is a downside to any city campus though, and should be taken with a grain of salt; the immediate area surrounding the university is well policed (by the largest private police force in the country) and well lit, so as to provide a bubble of relative safety around the campus.















Chicago is a city I think everybody should see sometime in their lifetime, and the university only adds to the city’s magnificence; UChicago has a jaw-dropping campus. The reason it is so beautiful and symmetrical is because it was built from the ground up from Rockefeller’s fortune, so the school was planned from its first days as a university, unlike most college campuses, which are architecturally eclectic because they were built over time and on budgets. It simply looks like a place to learn. The campus is still mostly composed of the original collegiate-gothic buildings, but plenty of interesting, modern, buildings add to the scene. When I first visited the campus, I couldn’t help but to just lie down for a few minutes in a quad and stare at the hundred year old oaks and the ivy on the buildings rippling in the wind.

Among these buildings, the Regenstein Library, also known as simply “the Reg”, seems to be a campus favorite. This building has seven full sized floors of material, and the university is expanding the library this summer with a state-of-the-art underground book retrieval system to house even more books. There are plenty of rumors surrounding this building, but nearly all have to do with students “never leaving” to fulfill their tremendous workloads. The Reg is an amazing facility which I really enjoyed my time in, and it provides a great atmosphere for Chicago students to work in, in addition to the many great coffee shops on campus.














Essentially, the best way to wrap your mind around Chicago is that it is a uniquely academic place and that a school can’t have everything. The university has accordingly been nicknamed the place “where fun comes to die” due to its weak social scene and high workload. Though the school is making great steps towards introducing a more vibrant social scene to the campus, it seems almost counter-intuitive to add this element to only increasingly rigorous academics. One of these elements that seems extremely popular is the House system of first year housing. Students are assigned to a social house (think Harry Potter), which becomes their family for the next four years. Students eat meals at their house table, and even after upperclassmen move off campus, many still attend social house events.

However extreme the school might seem, keep in mind that the Princeton Review dubbed Chicago “school of the year” in 2007 for overall undergraduate experience. I see that ranking more political in purpose than genuine (the Princeton Review has for quite some time been labeled as too focused on social aspects of institutions), but the point still stands that this is truly a great place to spend your four years. As long as you have done the research and have truly established academics as your number one priority, Chicago could very well be the place for you. This sort of self-selectivity where students are “afraid” of the school has kept the school’s admissions numbers relatively lenient compared to it’s Ivy League competitors. However, Chicago saw a 100% increase in Early Action applications for the 2009-2010 admissions season, so the school may well be on the track to catching (back) up to the biggest names out there.

The Value of U.S. News Rankings

Whether or not you have used or even seen a college ranking from U.S. News & World Report, you are probably aware of the controversy regarding college rankings; can a college or university really be condensed to a number?

I first read about the issue in Michelle A. Hernandez's "A is for Admission." Though the book is now fairly dated (1997), the impression of U.S. News rankings has been a problem in academia since the rankings' inception in 1983.

The basic argument against the rankings is that squeezing a school into a set number ranking is unfair to the colleges because a number can't represent the "intangibles" of a college. Many colleges believe that such numbers based rankings of schools are making students numbers obsessed and limited in their applications to only the most highly ranked schools, thus eliminating applications to schools that can't compete in the numbers game.

I think that my own viewpoint can be condensed into the following quote from U.S. News Report Editor Robert Morse (2007):

"in terms of the peer assessment survey, we at U.S. News firmly believe the survey has significant value because it allows us to measure the "intangibles" of a college that we can't measure through statistical data. Plus, the reputation of a school can help get that all-important first job and plays a key part in which grad school someone will be able to get into. The peer survey is by nature subjective, but the technique of asking industry leaders to rate their competitors is a commonly accepted practice. The results from the peer survey also can act to level the playing field between private and public colleges." [citation from U.S. News]

"Some higher education experts, like Kevin Carey of Education Sector, have argued that U.S. News and World Report's college rankings system is merely a list of criteria that mirrors the superficial characteristics of elite colleges and universities. According to Carey, '[The] U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity.' He suggests that there are more important characteristics parents and students should research to select colleges, such as how well students are learning and how likely students are to earn a degree." [Citation NAICU]

Among organizations opposing the rankings, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) has pledged to make its own system of rankings which will focus on aspects like graduation rate and the actual quality of education, criteria which U.S. News has now preemptively adapted into its rankings.

There are still a plethora of problems with the rankings, though, notably how seriously they are taken by readers. From a Stanford University School of Education article,

• within 3 days of the rankings release, U.S. News website received 10 million page views compared to 500,000 average views in a typical month
• 80 percent of visitors access the ranking section of the website directly rather than navigating via the magazine’s home page
• the printed issue incorporating its college rankings sells 50 percent more than its normal issues at the newsstand

Stanford University President Gerhard Casper criticizes the rankings in the following letter in which he demands to know how a university like Johns Hopkins could shoot from 22nd to 10th in a single year. In this sense, the rankings are more like football team rankings, including the most outrageous of leaps simply to sell magazines.

For me, the quantity, quality, and consistency of U.S. News and World Report's yearly rankings has kept me coming back to subscribe to the "premium online version" for three years now. The websites wealth of information (not just statistics!) is far better than any comparable site's, including the College Board's. Much has changed since the two Stanford University sources above were written in 1996. Their arguments still stand to a a lesser degree, but the magazine has become much more stable in its rankings. Overall, I'm impressed with the way the rankings have changed in the past few years, now including a peer survey and focusing on more "intangible" aspects of colleges rather than merely admissions numbers such as test scores and yield rate.

Book Review: The Gatekeepers, by Jacques Steinberg

This book is essentially an outsiders account of the college admissions process. In 2001, Jacques Steinberg, then a journalist for the New York Times Review on Higher Education, took a few months off of his desk job to shadow a college admissions officer at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Steinberg chose to shadow officer Ralph Figueroa, a Stanford grad who attended UCLA Law School before ending up at Occidental College (Obama's Alma Mater) in California as an admissions officer. The book is constantly revealing more about Ralph, from his relationship experience and connections within the college admissions field to the way he fits his Mexican-American heritage into a traditionally "WASPy" field.

A lot of what I deduced from the book was in fact the diversity of the readers in admissions offices and that as a general rule, especially at schools that have a committee decision process, there will usually be someone to speak out for your application. Many times during the admissions round at Wesleyan, counselors got personally attached to applicants and there was a surprising amount of give and take in how the admissions process works. On one hand, this can be seen as more random and less formulaic, but in general I think it speaks to the desire to bring interesting people to the campuses of elite institutions, culminating in genuinely diverse campuses.

The race card came up several times throughout the book, especially in respect to Ralphs Mexican-American heritage and the role of one African American young woman who ends up at Yale. After reading the book, I believe that I have a further understanding of how ethnicity and geographic location really play into the process. In the example of the African American and another Native American applicant, it really all boils down to the unique cultures and hardships that those applicants have gone through that culminates in them being interesting. Likewise a white applicant who has gone through financial hardship or problems at home has an equally unique story to bring to the campus.

The format of this book is really what made it so enjoyable. Though much of Steinberg's observation occurs in the traditional college admissions office, a lot of his story is told through profiling six or seven individual students from across the country. It's interesting to see where the students apply and how the college admissions officers interpret the paper representation of each person.

Overall, this was a really fantastic book that was able to squeeze the rough details and objective advice into an easy to read and ultimately enjoyable package. Now I'm even considering a career in the admissions field, as an interesting way to funnel all of your experience in life to evaluating others - each person in their own way.

Breakthrough Webcast in College Admissions

Jordan Goldman, founder of leading college site Unigo.com recently coordinated a panel of leaders on the college side of admissions to give students an inside peek on the college admissions process.

The Webcast features admissions officers and deans of admissions from some very prestigious colleges, including Bryn Mawr College, Grinnell College, Marquette University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University, and Williams College.

I found the Webcast extremely helpful and many of the answers extremely telling of the way in which applications are viewed. Pointers on how to complete applications parts like extra curricular lists and Standardized testing were very informative. Much of the information and general comfort with the process used to be limited to lengthy books about the process; this is a great opportunity to get ahead and to build your understanding. At least part of the ninety minute Webcast should be worthwhile.

The video is linked below:
WSJ On Campus | Unigo