Insight into the Admissions office of UChicago

The following article is quite dated (from a 1999 Newsweek issue), but quite telling as for the kind of thinking that admissions officers are forced to utilize when forced to meet so many quotas. What may seem to be a negligible distinction between two applicants often makes the cut, and the article lists a few great examples that most people wouldn't have caught on to.

I mentioned quotas before, and I think the U of C approach to them is interesting.

"Their ethnicity, something that many applicants don't divulge, still isn't known in the aggregate. Chicago prides itself on using no gender, racial, geographic or other quotas in deciding whom to accept. "We're not 'building a class,' creating this ideal little world with so many of these and so many of those," O'Neill says. "We accept the best, and hope to get as many as we can."

This is a constant struggle for me when I am looking into campus demographics; trying to objectively interpret a campus culture from mere statistics or snippets of student input. What I have found true for most schools is certainly not consistent with Chicago's statement above; most top colleges are indeed statistically (racially) diverse, but are still overly homogeneous in opinion and politics.

This statement is surely taken into account by people viewing "diversity" statistics, but I don't think most people account for how true this problem really is on college campuses. The product of this thinking is generally an unbalanced and overly liberal student body which, though open to new ideas, is intrinsically closed to much of America's real political sentiment, inadvertently hampering campus "diversity".

The article is linked here: University of Chicago Admissions - Newsweek