The Chicago School at Chicago
Chicago, IL · private nonprofit
Official site ↗Admissions
| Admit rate | 33.3% |
| Applicants | — |
| Middle-50% SAT | —–— |
| Middle-50% ACT | —–— |
| Avg GPA | — |
| Test policy | — |
| Avg net price / yr | — |
| Grad rate | — |
| Median earnings (10 yr) | $56,899 |
| Source | scorecard_bulk · 2025 |
Application requirements
- •Personal profile: Name, address, demographics, citizenship.
- •Family: Parent/guardian education and occupation (used for first-gen context).
- •Education: Current school, GPA/rank if reported, courses & grades, planned senior courses.
- •Testing: SAT/ACT scores (self-reported); many schools are test-optional or test-blind — check per school.
- •Activities: Up to 10 activities with role, hours/week, weeks/year.
- •Personal essay: One 250–650 word essay from the Common App prompts.
- •Recommendations: Counselor recommendation + typically 1–2 teacher recommendations.
- •School supplements: Per-school essays and questions (the 'Why us', short-answer, etc.).
Supplemental essays
- 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.
- In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.
- If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?
- Left can mean remaining or departed. Dust can mean to add fine particles or to remove them. Fast can mean moving quickly or fixed firmly in place. These contronyms—words that are their own antonyms—somehow hold opposing meanings in perfect tension. Explore a contronym: a role, identity, or experience in your life that has contained its own opposite.
- The penny is on its way out—too small to matter, too costly to keep. But not everything small should disappear. What’s one object the world is phasing out that you think we can’t afford to lose, and why?
- From Michelin Tires creating the Michelin Guide, to the audio equipment company Audio-Technica becoming one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sushi robots, brand identity can turn out to be a lot more flexible than we think. Choose an existing brand, company, or institution and propose an unexpected but strangely logical new product or service for them to launch. Why is this unlikely extension exactly what the world (or the brand) needs right now?
- Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.
Copied verbatim from the school's official admissions page (2025-26 cycle).