College Admissions and Financial Aid During academic year 1998–99, those of us in the offices of College Admissions and Financial Aid found ourselves engaged in very interesting and important debates. In Admissions, we were challenged to prove that we could increase the size and quality of the applicant pool sufficiently to allow for an increase in the size of the College. Concern was expressed that there could be a decline in the academic quality of the students or a lessening of their commitment to being fully engaged in this special intellectual community. In Financial Aid, we were challenged to think about our place in an increasingly competitive financial aid marketplace. On the high end, some Ivy League universities became significantly more generous in their financial aid packaging. On the low end, a new Web site, similar to priceline.com, allows families to say what they are willing to pay for college and gives member colleges a chance to sign up that student. This year’s entering class is the result of a two-and-a-half–year effort to increase our outreach. Increased recruiting is necessary because the University of Chicago is not as well known as many of our peer institutions. We know this because of exhaustive market research consisting of reading the backs of T-shirts on campus. One T-shirt lists the “top ten reasons why hell is better than the University of Chicago.” Reason number six is “Everyone has heard of hell.” Our effort to be better than hell started with new information systems which have worked very well for us. In Financial Aid, we are able to get award letters out much faster to both new students and renewing upperclass students. And we are able to respond to appeals with no delay. In Admissions, the biggest benefit has been our ability to track inquiries. This has allowed us to get the right information into the right hands at the right time and to identify early on our most serious applicants. After we had our systems in place, we contacted more students earlier. For this year’s entering class, we mailed to 45,000 students at the end of their sophomore year. For next year’s class, we have mailed to 112,000 sophomores. Our response rate is over 30 percent for sophomores and over 20 percent for juniors. Adding those responses to inquiries from students who contact us in other ways, we received 69,000 inquiries, up from 57,000 the year before. We expect close to 90,000 inquiries for next year. We then developed a new series of publications in which we tried to establish our distinctive identity while reassuring students that The Life of the Mind is in fact a life. Finally, we increased the number of our on-campus programs. Interviews on campus last summer increased 52 percent. While the increase in interviews was smaller this summer because of space and personnel limits, visits in general this summer were up 41 percent. All these efforts had a dramatic effect. Applications increased by 24 percent. Applications for Early Action increased by 44 percent. The percentage of students in this year’s entering class who were admitted through the Early Action program increased from 23 percent to 30 percent. Including students who were deferred and admitted later, 35 percent of this class were early action applicants, indicating a strong early interest in the College as a top choice. The increase in applications allowed us to decrease our admit rate from 61 percent to 48 percent. The entering class numbers 1,011, which is within target but down slightly from 1,017 last year at the end of second week. In addition, we welcomed 78 transfer students. Incidentally, the target for next year remains the same. Our one disappointment was in the low number of African-American students enrolling. We were hopeful after last year when we enrolled forty-nine African-American students, the highest number ever. This year we had good increases in both applications and admits, but enrolled only thirty-six students. For next year, we have mailed literature to more students of color and are developing two new recruiting pieces addressing their concerns. We continue to do relatively well with our recruiting of Hispanic students. There are fifty-nine in this year’s entering class, and that places us slightly above the median for COFHE universities. COFHE is the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. The entering class shows solid improvements in all academic measures. The mean SAT-Verbal score increased from 670 to 695, while the SAT-Math mean increased from 677 to 687, for a total increase of 35 points. The percentage of students with a rank in class who ranked in the top 5 percent increased from 41.6 percent to 54.7 percent. Students are somewhat less likely to be from Illinois (24 percent of the class last year to 20 percent this year) and somewhat more likely to be from other parts of the Midwest. There were also smaller gains from the South, the Southwest, and the West. There are fewer students who indicated pre-med as a first choice for likely concentration. There are 73 such students in this class compared to 109 last year. The gains in interest were spread among computer science, philosophy, history, and physics. These statistics are reassuring. Chicago has always attracted top students. These statistics suggest that this class may have more students like them and somewhat fewer students who may have not been the best academic match for our demanding curriculum. But the word “match” raises the question of whether these students were attracted to Chicago for different reasons than students in previous years. Did our new publications and mailings and visit program give students a different image of the university? These questions are harder to answer, but we do have some data which are reassuring. Every two years, we ask all admitted students to complete a survey instrument sponsored by the College Board called the Admitted Student Questionnaire. We just received the results for 1999 and can compare them to 1997. One section asks students to tell us whether they think a particular image of the University is one which is widely held. Significant increases were seen in familiar images. The percentage of students who think that “intense” is an image of the University of Chicago which is widely held increased from 75 percent to 84 percent, “selective” from 73 percent to 77 percent, and “excitingly different” from 34 percent to 42 percent. But let’s get to the heart of the matter—the “f” word—“fun.” The percentage of admitted students who think that “fun” is an image of the University of Chicago which is widely held also increased—from 9 percent to 11 percent. The image most often associated with the University of Chicago is “intellectual,” and that held steady at 96 percent. The second most common image, “challenging” increased slightly from 88 percent to 90 percent. It is clear that the images that these students have taken away from their earlier and increased contact with us are the right ones. The increased contact resulted in some other important changes in how students perceive us. The admitted students were asked to rate various college characteristics as “excellent,” “very good,” “good,” or “poor/fair.” The characteristic receiving the highest percentage of “excellent” ratings was once again “academic reputation,” which increased in “excellent” ratings from 87 percent to 90 percent. The biggest change was in the rating for “campus attractiveness.” The percentage of students rating that characteristic as “excellent” increased from 30 percent to 52 percent. We also had a positive change in the perception of our “quality of social life.” While those rating it as “excellent” stayed very low, increasing from 13 percent to 16 percent, the percentage rating it as “fair/poor” fell from 24 percent to 16 percent. Turning now to financial aid, many of you are aware that two years ago, Princeton shook up the world of the Ivy League by announcing that they would reduce or eliminate student loan requirements for families from lower- and middle-income groups, replacing the loans with additional grants. They later announced that if a student received an outside scholarship, they would not reduce the amount of grant the student was receiving, but would instead allow the student to use 100 percent of the outside award to reduce loan or work. Princeton was faced with two interesting problems. The first was that they had not been successful in attracting sufficient numbers of students from low- and middle-income families. In 1997, only 38 percent of Princeton’s entering students were receiving aid. In that year, 62 percent of our entering students received aid. The second problem was that Princeton was not spending all of the income from endowment for financial aid. In 1997, only 2.6 percent of Princeton’s grant aid came from current unrestricted funds. At Chicago, 67.6 percent of our grant aid came from current unrestricted funds. It is estimated that Princeton’s change in policy will cost $6 million per year when fully implemented in FY’02. After Princeton’s move, many colleges and universities responded with changes of their own. At Chicago, we decided to let students keep the full value of their outside awards and apply them to their loan or work expectation. We do not see any need to make other changes at this point. Contrary to Princeton’s experience, we do not have a problem enrolling students with financial need. In 1998, 58 percent of our entering students received aid. Only one COFHE university has a higher percentage on aid. Further, our loan and work expectations have generally been lower than those of competing institutions. We are more concerned about losing our best applicants with low or no need. As you know, the University has long had a merit scholarship program, the College Honor Scholarships, with awards equal to full tuition. This past year, we instituted, on an experimental basis, a new merit program called the University Scholar Awards. The program is partially underwritten by a generous donation from John J. Huggins, a graduate of the College in 1980. Consideration is given to students who receive top admissions ratings and who apply for but do not receive a College Honor Scholarship. Amounts vary and are substantial but are less than full tuition. The fact that we doubled the normal yield for students of this quality suggests that these awards remove a financial barrier for a significant number of outstanding applicants. I am told that it has always been a pleasure to work in Admissions and Financial Aid at this university. Our high admit rates of the past masked from many what you all knew—that we attract some of the best students in the country. Finding them, advising them, admitting them, aiding them is noble and rewarding work. My wife is a lecturer here in Latin and the Core. After her first few classes, she told me that she felt as if many of her students had been on a pilgrimage, and that they had now found a place in which other students cared as much as they did about ideas. When we saw how dramatically our applications were going to increase, I met with Dean of Admissions Ted O’Neill. We agreed that we would work not to be seduced by credentials. Chicago has always paid close attention the quality of an applicant’s writing and to what teachers tell us about that student’s intellectual curiosity. We agreed that becoming more selective should be more about that, about admitting the student who is the best match and who may complete a pilgrimage, than about grades and test scores. When you become more selective, grades and test scores take care of themselves, as you can see they have. We hope you will find these students worthy members of the University of Chicago community.
Michael C. Behnke is Vice-President and Associate Dean of the College for Enrollment.
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