Getting to Know: UChicago
The University of Chicago, aka UChicago, was another stop on my Windy City College Tour. After touring the campus, I tried to understand why UChicago has been labeled “The place where fun goes to die.” I did some research and watched several YouTubes after I came home. UChicago undergrads work quite hard, but they do know how to have fun on their terms. It’s really silly for me to give UChicago a report card. UChicago has every resource that diligent students could possibly want from a research university within a city where they would never run out of things to do.
UChicago is a city school much like Columbia, Harvard, or Yale.
City life helps young people to mature in more ways than a college town ever could. However, UChicago also has a residence life that will help its students to get to know their own community versus being “student citizens” within a large city as they might be at a school like NYU or Penn. I’ll drop some photos of UChicago’s beautiful campus into this article and invite you to check out some photos that I collected on Pinterest.
How does UChicago help new students get settled?
UChicago runs residence life on a house system with 48 individual houses within seven residence halls. The houses have their own histories and traditions. Each house also has full-time Residence Heads and student Resident Assistants who help to organize events, coordinate regular meetings, and help residents become better acquainted with the city. Each house also has its own table in one of the four dining commons. First-year and upper-class students live together in the houses. On average between 25-30 percent of new students are assigned to single-occupancy rooms.
UChicago’s freshman retention rate is reported to be 99 percent, which says something positive about the residence life system’s role in helping students to find their circles of friends. It also shows that the students find their own ways to have fun while tackling a challenging workload, and they get some help at the start.
UChicago has been featured in several movies and television shows.
These have featured either the campus or created fictional alumni. When Harry Met Sally, starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, is the most memorable campus-based movie for me. However, botanist Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon in The Martian, might be the fictional alumnus who best represents what UChicago is all about. While The Martian was not a scientifically perfect movie, Watney hits on the main point about being a UChicago student as he works through the problems of trying to survive and get home and at the end of the movie.
Truly smart people find original solutions to problems. And, when they work together, they find ways to enjoy each other’s company. That’s what fun is. Hyde Park also has its festive side near campus on 53rd Street where students can get together to have fun. UChicago students also receive a pass for free or discounted admissions to museums and arts centers around the city as well as the UPass to use mass transit.
Admissions essays should leave some impressions about what ‘UChicago is’.
UChicago looks for original thinking in the answers to all but one of their supplemental essay questions. That question asks: How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago. Interesting to me: UChicago does not mention a word limit for answering the questions on their admissions web pages.
By comparison:
- Harvard’s admissions application asks short-answer questions, to answer using no more than 200 words apiece. These ask prospects to cover life experiences, extracurricular achievements, a single intellectual experience, post-Harvard plans and three things that your future roommate should know about you.
- Yale asks short-answer questions about academic interests (choose up to three), a topic that excites the applicant related to one or more academic interests, and what had led them to apply to Yale. Applicants must also write a longer essay (400-word limit) asking them to reflect on a time when they held a strong viewpoint and confronted someone who held an opposing view, or reflect on a community where they belong, or an element of personal experience that may enrich their college life.
- Columbia asks a mix of short-answer questions similar to those asked by Harvard and Yale but limits responses to 150 words per question.
In all of these cases you have to know why you believe this school is the one for you. Harvard, Yale and Columbia ask you to write more about yourself in as few words as possible. UChicago lets you choose an “interesting problem to solve,” and have fun trying to solve it. I can see why a young Mark Whatney would get into UChicago.
Harvard, Yale, and Columbia are fair comparisons to UChicago.
Aside from a real possibility that students who applied to UChicago also applied to one of these other schools, I considered that all three were in large cities. They also have large residence life programs versus schools like NYU. Each school is located near neighborhoods where safety questions are likely to come up on a campus visit. These schools all have between 6,500 and 7,500 undergrads and graduate no less than 88 percent of their freshmen on time. They’re similarly diverse; over half of a freshman class are men and women of color. All of these schools also try to meet full need. However, according to the most recent Common Data Sets that I found, Harvard and Yale graduates who borrowed owed significantly less than Columbia and UChicago grads.
What are some other differences between UChicago, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia?
- UChicago has a male-majority undergraduate student body. The other schools are female majority.
- However, UChicago first admitted women in 1892. Harvard operated a separate women’s college (Radcliffe) staring in 1894, but did not end sex-blind admissions until 1977. Yale was all-male until 1969. Columbia College of Columbia University was all-male until 1983.
- A greater share of UChicago classes (77 percent) have fewer than 20 students than those at the three Ivies At the same time a lesser share of undergraduate classes (seven percent) enroll over 50 students.
- UChicago’s student body is less residential, imposing only a six-quarter (two-year) residency requirement. Sixty-one percent of the undergrads live on campus. No less than 80 percent of Yale undergrads live on campus. Over 90 percent of Harvard and Columbia undergrads do, too.
- The three Ivies compete in D-1 sports against schools that grant athletic scholarships. UChicago competes in D-3 sports where no school grants athletic scholarships.
- UChicago competes in 20 sports, fewer than the three Ivies. UChicago has traditions, superstitions and campus-wide events. But none are based around sports.
- I never got a sense that there were high-profile clubs and organizations or performing arts groups at UChicago that were difficult to join as I have heard about in Ivy lore.
Columbia and UChicago require a Core that has been a curriculum staple for a long time.
The Core curricular models at both schools have been proven to produce brilliant people for over 90 years. If you’re in love with the idea of having more freedom of choice in your first and second-year courses, don’t apply to Columbia or UChicago. And, if you dread having only nine weeks to cover what you might cover in a semester at Columbia, aim for Columbia. UChicago, like Northwestern and Stanford, works on a quarter system.
UChicago does not seek to bond a student body and the alumni through athletics.
Formerly a charter member of the Big Ten, UChicago was one of the nation’s dominant football schools, winning seven national championships from 1892 to 1932. In 1935 running back Jay Berwanger won the Downtown Athletic Club trophy as the best football player in America. Since 1936 that trophy has been known as the Heisman Trophy. While he was selected first in the very first NFL Draft in 1936, Berwanger chose not to turn pro.
UChicago dropped football in 1939 and left the Big Ten in 1946. The football stadium, Stagg Field, was demolished in 1957 to make way for a library. By then the field became more famous as the site of nuclear energy experiments during World War II. However, the NCAA Division III National Championship Game was named for Amos Alonzo Stagg, UChicago’s head football coach during their glory days. Today, the sports program, which includes football, is lower profile. However, the university recently finished sixth in the Director’s Cup standings among all 323 NCAA D-3 athletic programs. That’s a high-performing athletic program, if not a high-profile one.
Conclusions
UChicago is a very rigorous place. However, the latest yield rate, the percentage of accepted students for the Class of 2025 who deposited, was a more-than-phenomenal 83 percent. This, as well as the extremely high retention and graduation rates, tell me that those who came really wanted to be there and stay there and they were having fun on their own terms. That says more about a school than anything else.
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