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有点标题党，
这个是说undergrad的，不过如果MBA applicant 也上升40%的话，就不难理解为什么今年chicago waitlist那么多人了。
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=axWjWXCvTPXQ&pos=15
Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The University of Chicago, whose faculty and alumni have won 85 Nobel Prizes, is getting harder to get into.
The university, which accepted 27 percent of applicants for the current freshman class, is reporting a 42 percent surge in applications after a push to increase interest in the school. The campaign is designed to escalate competition for scholars with top-rated schools such as Harvard University, which has a 7 percent admission rate for freshmen, and Princeton University, at 10 percent, that are more selective.
Admission rates are more than numbers in a ledger. They are a crucial tool in the business of U.S. higher education, so relentlessness about recruiting makes sense, said Jack Maguire, chairman of Maguire Associates Inc., a Concord, Massachusetts, consulting company.
Alumni may donate more when they see that their alma mater “is the place everyone wants to go and few are chosen,” Maguire said in an interview. Professors prefer to go where the top students are, he said.
While the ranks of the rejected will swell as more high school seniors apply, not everyone courted by Chicago is taking the bait.
David Floyd, a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist at Westminster Schools in Atlanta, received e-mails from the university that enticed him to visit the campus in October. The communications are part of Chicago’s campaign to attract more of the smartest students, said John Boyer, undergraduate dean. Floyd said he found “over-intellectual angst” and not enough fun.
‘Showed Me Up’
“I really wanted to like it,” said Floyd, 18, a wrestler who applied instead to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and four other institutions, and will learn by April of their decisions. “I’d always thought that I was more academic than social, but they showed me up.”
Chicago’s deadline for first-year applications was Jan. 2. The eight colleges in the Ivy League in the northeastern U.S. also had early-January due dates.
So far, Chicago’s recruitment campaign appears to be paying off. Chicago today said a record 19,306 students applied for undergraduate admission to next September’s entering class.
Harvard received about 30,500 applications for undergraduate admission, about 5 percent more than last year, :S:d1" target="_blank">William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, said today in a statement. Brown’s applications increased 20 percent to about 30,000, James Miller, dean of admission, said in an interview.
‘Overwhelmingly Positive’
Chicago’s numbers are “really astonishingly encouraging and positive,” Boyer said in an interview. “It’s a blend of better communications and also having high-quality programs to communicate about.”
In December, :S:d1" target="_blank">James Nondorf, vice president and dean of college admissions and financial aid since July 1, sent potential applicants copies of an admission essay -- which he called “lighthearted” -- in the form of a love letter.
The submission began: “Dear University of Chicago, / It fills me with that gooey sap you feel late at night when I think about things that are really special to me about you.”
The writer was one Rohan, whose last name wasn’t made public, and he won entrance to the college. Nondorf’s e-mail provoked hundreds of responses to the Web site College Confidential. Nondorf, in another e-mail, called the feedback “overwhelmingly positive.”
‘People Do Care’
The quality and quantity of undergraduate applicants, and the percentage rejected, influence a college’s image, said :S:d1" target="_blank">Henry Bienen, who retired Aug. 31 as president of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
“People do care,” Bienen said in an interview. “Faculty care. Alumni care. It’s another data point that you’ve done better in the marketplace for strong students.”
High school counselors say there’s a downside in the quest for applicants. Chicago may be jeopardizing its reputation as “an intellectual think tank for a particular kind of brilliant and serious undergraduate,” said Laura Clark, director of college counseling at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York.
“One of the things I loved about Chicago is, it didn’t fall into this kind of crazy marketing boondoggle that has nothing to do with education,” Clark said in an interview.
Financial Aid
While Clark said merit-based scholarships might help Chicago attract more of the applicants it wants, Nondorf said the university has no plans to increase such aid. Merit awards account for almost 10 percent of a financial aid budget of about $70 million that’s tilted toward need-based assistance, Nondorf said.
The cost for freshmen this academic year is $55,200, covering tuition, fees, room and board, books and personal expenses, according to the university’s Web site.
Adam Katz, a senior who sings, plays viola and piano, writes for the newspaper, and plays tennis and basketball at Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York, said he received 17 e-mails from Chicago, the most from any college.
The messages told of the core curriculum, “courses that create a strong foundation of critical skills, which will transfer to any field of study” and said students play hide- and-go-seek in the library, attend “bad movie” night, and play inner-tube water polo and midnight Frisbee.
Hearing From Drexel
Katz, 18, said he also got nine e-mails from Columbia University in New York, six from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, five from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and four from Brown, all institutions in which he had indicated interest when he took college-entrance exams. He also received unsolicited e-mails, including 15 from Drexel University in Philadelphia, he said.
While he accepted an offer last month of early admission to Brown, Katz said he gave Chicago -- which he visited twice without applying -- more thought than some classmates did.
“I have a feeling a lot of people in Mamaroneck are trapped in the East Coast bubble and wouldn’t give anything outside of here the time of day,” Katz said in an interview.
Catherine Gerkis, a Mamaroneck senior who plays the flute and is ranked in the top 5 percent of her class, may escape the bubble. Chicago might have everything she wants, including access to internships and entertainment and a top-rated economics department, she said. Gerkis, 17, applied for admission.
Common Application
Chicago drove applications up 9.6 percent, to 13,564, for the current first-year class, largely by accepting for the first time the Common Application, a form students can use to apply to multiple colleges.
The university offered admission to 3,708 first-year students in 2009, and 1,335 enrolled, according to Chicago’s data. The institution, founded in 1890, has increased mailings to drum up still more candidates. A look at Chicago’s campaign shows the lengths to which marketers go in the rivalry of elite college recruiting.
Chicago for the first time sent “thousands” of letters with messages tailored to recipients who had expressed interest in the arts or premedical programs, Nondorf said. Students at Jewish day schools received a letter about Judaism on the campus.
Interest in Arts
Students who indicated interest in the arts -- by checking a box when taking a standardized test, for instance -- received a one-page missive in the mail from Larry Norman, deputy provost of the arts. Norman wrote of a cappella and filmmaking groups on the campus, an arts center due to open in 2012, and professional venues in the city such as Steppenwolf Theatre Co.
For students who responded to initial inquiries, the university also sent e-mails telling of 82 Nobel Prizes won by faculty and alumni, largely in physics and economics. That number has since increased to 85, including the Nobel Peace Prize received last year by U.S. President :S:d1" target="_blank">Barack Obama, who was a lecturer at the law school. A new brochure tells of Rhodes scholars from the university and boasts of alumni such as U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice :S:d1" target="_blank">John Paul Stevens, from the class of 1941.
Other graduates of the university include the author :S:d1" target="_blank">Philip Roth; :S:d1" target="_blank">David Axelrod, an adviser to Obama; and :S:d1" target="_blank">David Rubenstein, a managing director and co-founder of Washington-based Carlyle Group, the second-largest private-equity company.
‘It All Adds Up’
The admissions office in the past wasn’t so aggressive in contacting students, and relied mostly on the U.S. Postal Service, failing to recognize “the world students live in now,” Boyer said. Chicago now sends more e-mails, he said, and began opening the admissions office on Saturdays to accommodate visitors. “It all adds up,” Boyer said. “It’s like an election campaign. No one thing gets you over the winning line.”
Chicago wants more undergraduate applications than Columbia University’s Columbia College gets, Boyer said. That college -- also urban and focused on a core liberal-arts curriculum -- said it drew 21,273 applicants last year, 57 percent more than Chicago. This year’s total isn’t available yet.
Chicago and Columbia are tied for eighth in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of U.S. universities. Elements of “student selectivity,” such as admission-test scores of enrollees and the acceptance rate, account for 15 percent of the rankings, according to the magazine’s Web site.
Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shares the No. 1 rank with Princeton, in Princeton, New Jersey, receiving 29,114 undergraduate applications for the class that entered in 2009. Harvard also is increasing communications to recruited students, Fitzsimmons said.
Rejection Rate
Chicago’s 73 percent rejection rate for the class that entered in September, while more than triple the 23 percent in 1993, was the lowest among the top 10 universities ranked by U.S. News, according to data from the institutions.
Applicants must answer essay questions augmenting the Common Application. For 2009 admissions, Chicago asked writers to describe a “street, path or road -- real or imagined or metaphorical.”
The questions are “quirky and distinctive,” said Kirsten Madsen, 19, a first-year student from Crowley, Texas. She compared Choke Cherry Lane in her hometown with visions of a figurative Wall Street.
Chicago began acquiring its “hyperintellectual” reputation under Robert Maynard Hutchins, who led the school from 1929 to 1951, Boyer said.
On the Road
Hutchins pursued the brightest 16-year-olds, who skipped two years of high school, Boyer said. In 1939, Hutchins abolished varsity football, and it wasn’t reinstated until 1969. T-shirts sold at the student union bear a slogan mocking the intellectuality: “Where Fun Goes to Die.”
Nondorf, 42, was on the road during most of October, including a trip to Stuyvesant High School, a public institution in New York that emphasizes math and science.
“Our kids really love to learn,” Nondorf told the Stuyvesant audience of about 50. “There’s a lot of discussion and intellectual vibrancy. You can feel it. It’s like a vibe on campus.”
Caterina MacLean, a University of Chicago freshman from Scarborough, Maine, said she frets that the push to increase applications may change the vibe.
“We do want to keep the student body relatively unique, with that special intellectual drive,” said MacLean, 18. “A lot of us worry that it might be watering itself down.” |
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发表于 2010-1-15 17:57:57
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