<p>Yale</a> Daily News - Bucking trend, Yale's applications dip</p>
<p>25,800, about a 0.7% decrease.</p>
<p>A very small decrease, but an exception to the general upward trend this year. I wonder how much of the decline can be attributed to safety concerns stemming from Annie Le’s murder.</p>
<p>THANK GOD! I’m overjoyed right now. At least numbers didn’t skyrocket like the other schools. </p>
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<p>I’m betting a lot.</p>
<p>i just started a thread on the same topic at the same time as you did – sorry about that! i suspect the flatness is because of the murder over at the medical lab. you see this with colleges that suffer a crime on campus. and this one got unusual amounts of publicity b/c she was missing for days and there was this “love” angle to the coverage.</p>
<p>what’s interesting to watch is that it’s all about timing. schools suffer more when crimes happen during the fall (which is when this one did) rather than the late spring. harvard had a murder in an undergrad dorm last may (or maybe it was june) – a lot scarier for prospective undergrads, but decisions for 2013 had been made and the new cycle hadn’t started.</p>
<p>Personally, I didn’t even consider the murder when applying – but whatever the reason, I’m glad there’s at least one school whose apps aren’t going up by some crazy factor.
( See: UChicago - my god, 47% increase?! )</p>
<p>Though, as rockermcr wisely said in another thread, awhile ago - </p>
<p>I doubt that the numbers of truly competitive candidates fluctuate too much from year to year.</p>
<p>that’s what yale gets for deferring 99% of early applicants from cc</p>
<p>Of course, the ONE SCHOOL I decide not to apply to because of I-have-too-many-already-although-I-really-waaaant-to (And because they wouldn’t waive my TOEFL requirement) is the ONLY SCHOOL whose number of applicants doesn’t quadruple. Nice. </p>
<p>I wonder why? I can’t imagine Annie Le’s murder to be such an important factor… </p>
<p>Good luck to all the CC-ers applying this year though! 
This must be pretty good news! (Although it doesn’t really matter in the end…)</p>
<p>I think it <em>is</em> a really important factor, though. I mean, she was murdered in one of Yale’s own labs. Sure, New Haven, Philly, NYC aren’t the safest urban places, but most students know the difference between being killed on the street and being killed in a university building.</p>
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<p>Logical causation fail.</p>
<p>To be sure, the building she was killed in is not a part of Yale College. It is a part of Yale Medical School. Still, the psychological effect is there. Also, the surrounding of Yale Medical School is not as nice as compared to Yale College. (or should I say Yale Bubble?) Many life science majors may go there to do research.</p>
<p>If you are a humanity or social science major, there is zero probability that you will go anywhere near that building.</p>
<p>I think a bigger issue here may be that Yale does not manage these animal technicians well. When you mix PhD candidates with somebody who might be barely graduated from a high school in the same lab, and the latter may have more power than the former just because they (or their “gang” of relatives) are long-time employees there, it is not easy to manage them. (But the technicians are cheap.) Sometimes I feel sorry for these potentially powerless student researchers. Rumor has it that if a researcher gets on the nerve of the technician, the particular mouse his research depends on may be dead the next morning. (I know it is just a rumor, but it could happen, considering how Raymond Clark treated Annie Le.)</p>
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<p>lol. It’s true, though. Think of the number of applicants to small, uncompetitive colleges who, in completing their Common Apps, thought they’d give the Ivies a shot. After all, “there’s no hurt in applying.”</p>
<p>The murder definitely had a big influence in my opinion. New Haven has always had a bad reputation of being unsafe, full of crime, poor etc… and the murder just solidified the false thoughts that many prospective students and parents had. I know my parents freaked out about it.</p>
<p>Of course many Elies like New Haven and people make things into so much they really aren’t.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the murder of a drug dealer in a Harvard dorm doesn’t seem to have suppressed applications to Harvard, which set a new record. I think it’s silly to attribute cause and effect like this.</p>
<p>The murder at Harvard happened last spring. Ms. Le’s murder took place in the middle of this year’s application season. The public has a short memory.</p>
<p>The murder at Harvard also wasn’t as highly publicized (to my knowledge). Annie Le, however, was headline news for almost a week as the public followed her disappearance, case, and ultimately death.</p>
<p>I think it was all about Marketing. Harvard and Princeton recruited heavily by sending out applications. Perhaps many kids may have gotten smitten by this gesture.</p>
<p>Additionally, with the mega Harry Potter movie star being admitted at Brown, that could have been an attribute to some of their applications. As far as I know, Yale never sent out applications.</p>
<p>Whatever the reasons, each kid will like a specific college for a specific reason. People who liked Yale still applied irrespective of the tragedy.</p>
<p>I’m sure Yale’s numbers will go up next year because of “That’s Why I Chose Yale.” Best of luck, '15ers.</p>
<p>Also, the Annie Le murder was extremely publicized. I live north of the border, and it made it onto some local news channels here.</p>
<p>I know almost no one who had heard about the Harvard murder in the undergrad dorm. by a drug dealer. but millions heard about Annie Le. </p>
<p>the difference? for the Harvard murder, very little media coverage (a day or two on local news) and it happened in May between admissions cycles. for the Yale murder, a ton of international media coverage and it happened in fall at the start of the admissions cycle.</p>
<p>^^Yeah, I agree. I don’t think Yale is or will lose any star applicants at all. I suspect its those “hope on a prayer” type students, who casually toss out a fishing line to an arbitrary reach university, who will be swayed by the bad publicity and go “hmmm…lets try somewhere else”, whereas the serious applicants will apply regardless. </p>
<p>All in all, no big worry for Yale, and it doesn’t really lower the competitiveness for applicants either way because remember, no one person is competing with the whole 26k worth of students. Students only compete within a given context or type - maths whizzes against maths whizzes, harp prodigies against other harp prodigies etc.</p>