At one of those cramped, sticky tables tucked in the back corners of Bartlett Dining Commons, a group of second-years debates whether or not the Italian brainrot characters could be considered the basis for a Durkheimian totemic religion. Nearby, a student diligently updates their LinkedIn, artfully crafting a new post about how they are “excited to announce” their 2026 summer associate offer from JPMorgan between bites of overcooked pasta (they hesitate a bit before posting, wary of the flood of coffee chat requests that will surely follow).

It’s a scene that could only happen at the University of Chicago—“earnest” philosophical debate and unapologetic pre-professionalism seated side by side—though some students and alumni might say it hasn’t always looked like this. For much of its history, any overt careerism at the College was met with skepticism, sometimes even scorn. But in recent years, the community has become increasingly concerned that UChicago is no longer a home for pure intellectual inquiry, that its students are no longer as “quirky” or devoted to the storied life of the mind—the ideal of learning for learning’s sake—and are instead more focused on building resumes for the world beyond the quad.

Outside Impressions of the University

The University of Chicago often promotes itself as quirky or different, though “uncommon” is the word it prefers. And, truly, this is how the public tends to see it, with many college consulting services dubbing it the “‘oddball’ Ivy Plus school.” As Sylvia Plath once wrote in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar: “I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.”

That image hasn’t faded much since. In fact, UChicago actively works to cultivate and maintain it. Its student organizations host events like “Uncommon Nights,” its admissions office blog is titled the “Uncommon Blog,” and, of course, there’s the infamous “Uncommon Essay.” Colloquially referred to as the quirky essay, it is one of the main avenues through which the public forms its perceptions of UChicago. From zombie apocalypse survival guides to where Waldo really is, the prompts are widely shared and often draw comments for their “absurd[ity],” but they also seem to signal: this is a school for weirdos (pardon my French).

“I think generally people are… weirded out by UChicago kids—they think they’re kind of weird,” fourth-year Ricky Gonzalez explained.

Juan Pablo Paez Chaves, also a fourth-year in the College, reflected on his preconceived notions about the University before attending. “I certainly, like everybody else, had the idea that this was a very quirky school, and the Uncommon [Essay] was certainly a [contributing factor],” he said. “And I did see from all the promotional activities and [traditions] that the student body would be very highly intellectual, quirky, and whatnot.”

This perception has been around for decades: “One thing I was very struck by [while applying] was the idiosyncratic essay questions,” Alexander Korbonits (A.B. ’10) said. “It seemed more human and personal than simply listing down your SAT score or sending your transcript, grades, classes, and GPA from high school. It was really more like: ‘Who are you as a thinker and as a student—what do you do? What interests you? What piques your intellectual curiosity?’”

Yet, there’s also a longstanding undercurrent to that image: the constant fear that the University’s distinctiveness is being watered down. Former Dean of the College John Boyer noted that this anxiety is actually something of a tradition in its own right: “There wasn’t a year that went by when I was dean when I wasn’t interviewed by a Maroon reporter with a slightly different question, namely: ‘I’m a third- or fourth-year student, I’ve heard that the new first-year class is very different. They’re not worthy of the College, they’re more pre-professional, more vocationally oriented.’”

Still, that ethos of curiosity for curiosity’s sake that Korbonits refers to has staying power. Just last year, The Atlantic called UChicago “the last bastion of people who do read things.” It’s an exaggerated reputation, certainly—“highly intellectual” teenagers and 20-somethings sound somewhat ridiculous—but it’s also what many students expect when they arrive.

The “Fun” in “Where Fun Goes to Die”

Like those frostbitten Chicago winters that seem to stretch into April and May, UChicago has long been haunted by its unofficial slogan. According to Boyer, the moniker dates back to the 1990s, when UChicago was at the bottom of a national ranking conducted by Harvard students measuring campus “party life.”

“We were with West Point and Brigham Young—[at the] bottom,” Boyer said.

At the time, the University’s Vice President for News and Information came to Boyer, declaring the ranking and new moniker “a real problem.” Boyer’s response?

“Given the questions they’re asking [in the survey], wouldn’t parents be proud to send their children to a place like us?”

Unfortunately for that VP of News and Information, the slogan would stick, with students even printing it on t-shirts to sell to their housemates for a little extra money. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, I could go and try to confiscate the t-shirts,’ but that would be ridiculous,” Boyer said.

Some designs would even become canonized in the history and culture of UChicago undergraduates, like “The level of hell Dante Forgot,” or “That’s all well and good in practice… but how does it work in theory?”

Although t-shirt making has become somewhat of a relic lost to time, its spirit and that distinctive version of “fun” endure. “Most of the students I meet have a lot of fun [here], but they’re also getting a real education and they’re going to end up getting a great career, so I think that’s what you care about,” Boyer said.

Korbonits recalled his time at UChicago being marked by those “nerdier” pursuits. “Sometimes we’d want to talk about Kant at two in the morning,” Korbonits recalled. “That was our version of fun.”

Though the slogan initially gave him pause, he came to find that campus life was full of a different type of fun: “critical thinking.”

“[We loved] talking about Kant or helping someone with their calculus homework or doing math on a whiteboard,” Korbonits said. “You know, it was a very nerdy, special place. I hope that hasn’t been lost.”

That spirit lives on today, at least for Gonzalez. “I love this anthropologist, David Graeber, and I was reading his book at a pregame—it was at my place,” Gonzalez said. “And somebody said, ‘Dude, that’s so UChicago.’”

“I like to think I’m different from maybe a Scav kid, but I’m definitely dorky,” he continued.

Historically, UChicago students have had inventive ways of deriving fun; even I have produced a Kant meme or two to much critical acclaim on Sidechat. At the heart of “fun” at UChicago lies a distinctive spirit: taking stupid things extremely seriously or taking serious topics and making them stupid.

Scav, one of UChicago’s most beloved traditions, may be the clearest expression of UChicago’s approach to fun: take the ridiculous seriously and make the serious ridiculous. The four-day annual event has seen students attempt everything from reciting excerpts from Beowulf at fraternity parties and collecting worms at 3 a.m. to building a working nuclear reactor in a dorm room and miniature dioramas depicting the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

For many, the “Scav kid” remains the archetypal UChicago student.

The Myth of Change: The Evolution of the Core, the Death of the Uncommon Application, and the Age of Shotgunning

The Evolution of the Core

There is a persistent image, among both students and alumni, that the Core has been “diluted” over the years—a casualty of the University’s attempts to broaden its appeal and expand its applicant base; in 1999, under Boyer’s leadership, the Core’s size was reduced from 21 courses to 18, much to the outrage of the community. At the time, more than 1,300 students gathered on the quad for a satirical “Fun-In,” protesting both the reduction of the Core and the planned expansion of the undergraduate student body, which at the time numbered less than 4,000; today, that number has climbed to well over 7,000.

As Boyer explained, the myth surrounding that period goes like this: “People thought we were reducing the Core to dumb the school down to attract more students because back then we had very low success rates [at] getting a class.… We were not a popular college back then—that was a hard thing to say to the community, but it was the truth.”

UChicago’s acceptance rate went down from 61 percent in 1998 to 48 percent in 1999 after the changes to the Core were unveiled. Notably, that was the first time the College’s acceptance rate had ever been below 50 percent.

“It was not an irrational assumption on the part of the people who were seeing all this to say, ‘Oh yeah, they’re going to dumb it down—dilute it in order to get more [students] and then you’ll end up with… the kind of student who doesn’t belong here, who is not a real Chicago intellectual,’” he continued. “It was a question of ‘Are we going to make these changes and drive our car over the cliff, or… is the plan actually going to be able to fly and go higher?’ The latter happened, but… it could have gone the other way.”

For Boyer, “dumb[ing]” down the University and expanding its applicant and student base are not inherently linked; it’s possible, he argues, to increase enrollment without sacrificing the character that made the University special, a balancing act in which he believes UChicago succeeded.

In fact, Boyer noted that today’s version of the Core—the same one that was established in 1999—is actually closer in spirit to the original 1930s structure, then known as “the New Plan,” than many of the versions that came later. “The original core in 193[1] was one third [of the curriculum],” he explained.

In 1942, under former President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the University’s Core expanded dramatically, encompassing the entirety of a student’s time in the College. According to Hutchins, the previous Core placed too much emphasis on what he described as memorizing facts over engaging with ideas.

Composed of 14 year-long classes, this new general education sequence eliminated the existence of majors altogether. Over time, it would slowly shrink in size, growing closer to its original form, but by the 1990s, it was still “over half the courses you need to graduate,” with students required to fill 21 of their 42 total course credits with Core classes—half their time at UChicago.

“People were adding too much of a good thing,” Boyer said. “And what this was doing was cutting into the [space for] free electives… which for me were very important because… shouldn’t we allow our students some freedom and flexibility to take other courses on the 200, 300 level, or even on the minor level, that they’re just interested in?”

The intention in 1999, Boyer said, was to rebalance the College experience: roughly one-third Core, one-third major, and one-third electives.

At the time, the reform drew major criticism. Student protesters feared that any reductions to the Core meant the University was compromising its academic integrity. “We are not here because we think the University stinks,” Leo Dokshutsky (A.B. ’99) told the Chicago Tribune while protesting the then-impending changes to the Core. “We are here because we love the University and want to maintain it and fear it will change.”

Despite this backlash and the fact that all current students were given the opportunity to graduate under the old version, 95 percent of students chose to graduate under the new, sleeker Core.

Much of the anxiety surrounding this shift may have stemmed from a forgetting of the original purpose of the Core. Boyer explained that when it was first developed in the 1930s—then called “The New Plan”— it was meant to be an equalizing force. At the time, he noted, high school education in the U.S. was extremely inconsistent due to a lack of funding during the Great Depression, and UChicago wanted to ensure all its students could stand on equal footing.

“It had a kind of democratic—with a small ‘d’—effect,” Boyer said. “By the end of the first year, they’d all be up to a certain level of accomplishment and experience in critical learning.… There was also a sense that [students are] coming in as 18- or 19-year-olds, do you really want to tell the student[s]… ‘Okay, day one. Decide what your life is going to be about, and we’re going to lock you into it’? So the Core was meant to give students self-knowledge.”

Even today, the Core does seem to fulfill that purpose for some students: “I like to say the Core saved my life because I had no idea what I wanted to do when it came to college,” Gonzalez said. “I loved school, and so I took all Core classes my first year, and my favorite professors here were sociologists, anthropologists. [I] didn’t even know sociology was a thing until I came to college, and I fell in love with it, so I owe a lot to the Core.”

Unlike traditional general education sequences at other universities, many students, like third-year Claire Barbosa, attend UChicago specifically because of the Core. More rigorous than its counterparts at other institutions, the Core is designed not merely to educate students but to prepare them “for a lifetime of intellectual inquiry.” For many students, it’s not just a set of classes to get through, but rather something that’s ingrained in student culture, with many students discussing overlapping course material years later, treating it almost as a shared language. After all, at how many schools will “collective effervescence” casually come up in conversation? (Admittedly, whether that’s something to brag about is up for debate.)

Still, that ideal doesn’t resonate with everyone. In Barbosa’s experience, the Core is increasingly seen by current students as just another box to check rather than a period of true exploratory study.

“The Core is the reason that I came to UChicago, and I personally love the Core,” Barbosa said. “However, I do think that it has become kind of a check box requirement for a lot of people.… And I don’t know if that’s a reflection of the students who are coming or if that’s a reflection of how the Core is being taught, but I think that it could be a little bit of both.… And I think that the way that the Core is advertised and emphasized is starting to lean [toward] a gen-ed… and not [as] an essential to a UChicago education.”

While students are required to take courses from the arts and humanities to the biological and social sciences, they can choose which specific sequences within each category best align with their interests. Chaves has found that this flexibility allows for both depth and shallowness of engagement, depending on the student’s chosen path.

“You do still have your classic UChicago courses—Power, Self, Phil Per… and the students who take those do so because they want to have that sort of traditional ‘UChicago experience’ and [have] interesting conversations,” he said. “But… there are options for people who don’t want to engage in that—your sort of ‘easy’ track—[courses] like Media Aesthetics, Mind, regular bio.… They’re cool and they might have intellectually stimulating conversations when they have the right people in them, but they’re kind of a cop out.”

Still, despite nearly a century of changes, the Core’s status as a symbol of the University seems to have remained intact, at least according to Boyer.

“One of the things that the College presents to prospective students is the Core curriculum—it’s kind of this iconic symbol—almost like the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument,” Boyer said. “It’s a curriculum, but it’s also a kind of symbolic statement of values and norms.”

Often, that symbolism only fully registers after students leave.

“As you go through the Core, you will have varied experiences,” he continued. “Some of your Core courses you might like, some of them you might not like… but then as alumni, [these same students would say], and this is almost a consistent thing, ‘it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I may not have liked it, but it was great, so you should make the young students do it, don’t change anything.’”

The Death of the Uncommon Application

In 2007, UChicago announced its decision to switch to the Common Application. The change, spearheaded by former University President Robert Zimmer, came after  a “long-standing, unique rejection of the Common Application,” according to the Brown Daily Herald.

“There was a view of the University and the College back in the 1990s that we were so unique and so special that we could only ask people to fill out an ‘Uncommon Application,’” Boyer explained.

But beginning with the graduating Class of 2012, the infamous Uncommon Application would be no more.

This flip from Uncommon to Common sparked controversy. Over 1,200 students signed a petition against it, and some even staged protests, concerned that removing that self-selecting aspect would make UChicago indistinguishable from its other elite school counterparts.

Korbonits, who was a student in the College when the change was announced, recalled the reactions of his peers to the news. “I think the undergraduates were upset, incensed, like: ‘Oh, we’re supposed to be different. This is the college caving to conventional demands. Now everyone’s just going to check an extra box on their Common App, and we’re going to be flooded with all the normies who wanted to go to Harvard but got rejected.…’ That was one of the arguments being made at the time—people were upset [because] this is part of our culture, that’s our identity.”

Nevertheless, the administration proceeded with the change.

“Uniqueness is a wonderful thing, but like many wonderful things, you could have far too much of it at some point,” Boyer said.

In reality, Boyer explained, applying through UChicago via the Common Application still maintained the main spirit of its “Uncommon” predecessor, i.e., the Uncommon Essay supplement. It just also made it so that students didn’t have to keep retyping their addresses and test scores and GPAs—the “common” information across all applications. “[It lets us] spend time talking to you about things which are really unique, like the nature of the Core, [so] it seemed to me that [switching] was a no-brainer,” he said.

Korbonits echoed this sentiment, explaining “We eventually got over it, because the University wasn’t going to change their mind on it and I think, probably, switching to the Common App was a good idea because they added the [Uncommon] supplement, so it really retained a lot of the original flavor.”

“We always think that each subsequent class entering is more normal than the last one—I remember that being the mood on campus at the time, too,” he continued. “But that was just part of the culture.”

The Age of Shotgunning

The “shotgun method” refers to students who apply to a large number of colleges—often highly selective ones—in the hopes that at least one will result in an acceptance, that at least one of their “shots” will land. Often, these students don’t have any connection or strong personal desire to attend these particular schools, only a strong desire for the prestige that accompanies an acceptance. As college admissions have grown increasingly selective—UChicago’s acceptance rate, for example, has dropped from 8.81 percent for the Class of 2017 to 4.48 percent for the Class of 2028—this method has risen to prominence. The rise of the Common Application has only made it easier: on a single platform, students can apply to dozens of schools with minimal additional effort.

UChicago, frequently lauded for its self-selecting applicant pool, has not been immune. Between the Class of 2023 to the Class of 2028, UChicago’s applicant pool grew by nearly 9,000 students—climbing from 34,900 to 43,612.

“I know plenty of people who just apply to top 15 colleges because they’re the best,” Gonzalez said. “But honestly, I think the only thing that’s stopping UChicago from really just looking like every other university is our application process. I think all the nerdy kids in high school— that probably have a UChicago soul or whatever—they look at that [essay], and they bounce at it. I think that’s a perfect way to find UChicago kids.”

“I’ve met a lot of those shotgunners here, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, this is my second or third choice,’ and they don’t seem too thrilled to be here,” Gonzalez said. “And that’s sad, because I actually do really love this school. Those people like to complain… then you get a student body that is just kind of miserable being here, [thinking about] what could have happened.”

That tension isn’t new. Korbonits noted that, during his time at UChicago from 2006 to 2010, the students already feared becoming home to the “Harvard rejects.”

“But I think, historically, we’re the institution that accepts all the rejects, or people that places the other Ivys or top [institutions] don’t want,” Gonzalez continued.

Referencing professor John Martin’s 2015 Aims of Education Address, he added that UChicago has historically been a haven for the “unrefined.”

“[Back when] we were founded in 1890, we needed people, so we took anybody we could get,” Gonzalez said. “It worked pretty well, and I still think that works here.… [People say UChicago] is like a generic version of Harvard or an Ivy school, but it has its own distinct character. And I think of myself as an unrefined smart kid. I’m not perfect—I think a lot of people aren’t here—so I’m perfectly willing to accept all these shotgunners and I hope they fall in love with this school when they come here.”

The Pre-Professional Era

Since the 2000s, tuition costs for higher education have been steadily rising across the country. In 2024, US News reported that the average cost of tuition and fees for private universities had jumped about 126 percent since 2004. At UChicago, too, tuition has increased: for the 2004–05 school year, tuition was just $30,123—staggeringly low compared to the 2024–25 school year with tuition costing over $67,000. That rise has brought with it a growing pressure for students and institutions alike to justify the price tag—namely, with jobs.

“There’s been a slight emphasis on the pre-professional side of things.… When I joined [UChicago] in the mid aughts, that had been pretty frowned upon—to move beyond purely academic [pursuits],” Korbontis said about his experience in the mid 2000s. “Things like even having a major was controversial in the ’90s, I believe, because the Core was so important.”

According to Korbonits, more and more students are entering the College with practical career-minded goals, and the University has adapted itself to support those goals. “It’s attracted more students to the College who are less purely academically focused and more career focused, which isn’t a bad thing, because a lot of people I graduated with really struggled to find a foothold in the workplace.… They’d only known school and didn’t know how to translate their anthropology degree or even their math degree into a career.”

In spite of this shift toward pre-professionalism, UChicago does maintain an unusually high rate of graduate school attendance. Within five years of graduation, 85 percent of UChicago graduates will attend some form of graduate school.

For Korbonits, this new wave of pragmatism isn’t unique to UChicago; he noted that rising costs have pushed universities toward emphasizing job placement above graduate school and academia as “tuition has outpaced inflation.”

“They want to make sure that their graduates are placed in jobs eventually because they have endowments and they need to run as a business nonprofit,” Korbonits explained. “They want to have donors, and your graduates need to be able to earn enough money to give that back, so it creates a more sustainable ecosystem if graduates are earning money to be able to donate back to the University.”

Gonzalez sees this shift reflected most clearly in the popularity of certain majors. As of winter 2025, the three most popular declared majors among current students were economics, computer science, and mathematics, with 1,590, 501, and 363 students respectively, all of which are typically viewed as “practical” majors.

“The more pre-professional your major is, the less likely it is to be filled with interesting people—the quirky intellectual types,” he said. “If you look at Bizcon, for example, there, you’ll find your least intellectual people, but I will say that with a little bit of a caveat, because I do think that there are a lot of people who do Bizcon as well as humanities or social science. So the Biz econ major [is] what they present to the public in terms of professional career prospects, but on their own personal time, they will be enraptured in more interesting and niche topics.”

While no data is available specifically for business economics students, as of winter 2025, 327 students have declared economics a secondary major, indicating that many career-minded students balance other interests. Similarly, of the 35 students pursuing a Fundamentals major—often viewed as one of the more eclectic programs at UChicago, wherein students focus their studies on answering a single “Fundamental” question—five are doing so as a secondary major. These numbers suggest that quirkiness and practicality needn’t always be at odds; students can straddle both worlds.

Yet, in spite of the complexity Gonzalez describes, the perception remains that the economics major with a specialization in business is the fast track to lucrative finance jobs, not a place for academic depth or a commitment to learning for learning’s sake. “It is sort of antithetical to the whole ‘life of the mind’ thing,” second-year Angie Seul said. “It seems like [Business Economics is] pretty much exclusively focused on careers and what happens after college.”

Seul’s view does seem to align with outcomes. Among the Class of 2024, 29 percent of students went into “financial services,” making it the most common industry for graduates by far; its closest competitors were “consulting and corporate” at 17 percent and “science & technology” at 15 percent.

And yet, for Gonzalez, the life of the mind hasn’t disappeared, it merely evolved. “Everybody still suffers together and likes suffering together,” he said. “I feel like… the ‘life of the grind’ is kind of like replacing the life of the mind, but the life of the mind is still there as well.”

Intellectualism Reimagined

At UChicago, students have long been enamored with the life of the mind, that core ideal of a true UChicago education, of embodying what Boyer calls the “Chicago intellectual.” But what that looks like has changed over the years. For Gonzalez, that evolution is precisely what makes this school special.

“I think everybody here has passion,” he said. “They’re very driven. Like, I don’t think the kids are all dorks—some of them are just passionate in very different ways.”

When he arrived at the University in 2021, Gonzalez encountered plenty of those “weird, dorky kids,” and counted himself among them. But over time, he says, the character of this school has broadened.

“It was a lot of just those dorky, smart kids [during] probably the ’90s, mid 2000s, but I think since then, there’s a lot of range.… Jocks, spoiled kids, poor kids, anything in between.”

For Gonzalez, today’s UChicago students may not all share the same interests in academia, but they’re all driven by something else equally important: passion.

“I want the life of the mind to be a life of passion, too,” Gonzalez said. “So if that means it moves away from academics slightly, go ahead by any means, as long as it’s because of passion.… I think the standard UChicago kid… is definitely different from how it used to be, but I think the essence is still there.”

He added that UChicago isn’t any less unique than it has been previously, it’s just now inhabited by two archetypes instead of one: “the Scav kid” and “the Bizcon kid.”

“I think they’re a unique population to us,” Gonzalez explained. “Even if consulting pipelines are common among a lot of universities, they’re still UChicago kids going through the Core. You… go to Night Owls, [and] it’s not just philosophy kids, it’s econ kids with business ideas, too.”

The average UChicago student’s goals may look different than they did decades ago, but for many, the intellectual core (pardon the pun) underpinning them often remains constant.

When asked whether or not the typical UChicago student has changed, Boyer suggested that the answer is both yes and no. On the surface, students may appear different, products of an environment inundated with social media, technology, and a very different culture to the world 30 years ago. But inside, “the academic appetite and ambition for academic work, for learning, for being able to think through complex issues, for being willing to pursue complex ideas [is] maybe even a little better than it was 10 years ago.”

Editor’s note, June 4, 11:45 p.m.: One of Korbonits’ quotes has been updated. The original version contained a transcription error.