<p>Yale’s yield rate is 67%, which I’m pretty sure is second highest after Harvard. They are not experiencing “Tufts Syndrome” and deferring fantastic applicants because they are worried that they would go to another school instead of Yale-- there is simply no reason for them to fear that. Further, why wouldn’t they focus on accepting and then wooing these incredible students instead of deferring them and letting them get away to other competitive colleges? I just don’t think they are trying to do some sort of strategy.</p>
<p>Instead, it was probably just that there was a large amount of highly qualified applicants in the EA round, and the fact is that they just can’t accept all of them. So, a lot of people who seem like they should be shoo-ins (high SAT scores, gpa, etc.) get deferred or rejected. Because Yale just can’t take all of them.</p>
<p>Also, I think you should consider stopping talk of “Tufts Syndrome” in the future, even if you think its true. It devalues the acceptance of those who got in by suggesting they didn’t truly deserve it.</p>
<p>I really wonder about the school deferring people because it ran out of time. </p>
<p>I had completed the entire application by mid-October. Yale doesn’t post its full application status page until Nov. 15th. At that time the status page stated one of my teacher recs was missing. However, the common ap website said it was downloaded by Yale in mid-October. After calling up Yale a few times, it turned out there was a computer glitch on there end and they eventually “found” the missing recommendation. However, my application wasn’t completed and ready for review until the third week of November. Sort of annoying - they should have that application status page up in October.</p>
<p>^^wagsthedog, Stanford’s yield rate of 72% is second-highest of the top schools. (Harvard’s yield was 76% last year. Princeton’s was significantly lower than its peers.) However, I don’t think Yale, nor any of its peer schools, is practicing yield protection; I just think Yale is taking a rather haphazard approach to early action. It seems to me they should either take an approach similar to Stanford’s, or just do away with early action altogether if they are going to defer so many students that the designation signifies little about the deferred students’ prospects in RD.</p>
<p>"To Mr. Brenzel of Yale: What is the purpose of deferring 2,644 students in this year’s round of applications? You say that the deferred student will be reevaluated in the regular application process, but seeing as your freshmen class this year had 1,892 students, there is no possible way that most of these applicants stand a chance of being accepted in addition to the 742 accepted early and the regular applicant pool yet to come. Why do you prolong the misery?
— Alexander</p>
<p>Mr. Brenzel of Yale: This question makes two false assumptions: that being deferred is a misery and that deferred candidates have relatively poor chances of admission. Though odds of admission to Yale are always long, each year we accept about the same percentage of the students deferred from the early round as we accept of the regular decision applicants. We are often looking to see how applicants perform in the first half of senior year, when many students are taking their most challenging schedules or seeing their primary activities outside the classroom bear fruit. At the same time, we do try very hard to give final decisions to as many students as possible, where we feel certain that we will simply not be able to offer admission in the spring. This year we let over 2,100 students know that we were closing our consideration of their applications, about 38% of our early candidates. Virtually all of these applicants were very strong students, who are going to attend great colleges and have great success. We only chose not to defer them so that they could focus wholeheartedly on their other applications."</p>
<p>In my experience, there have been a lot of applicants this year who just applied to Yale SCEA on a whim since they wouldn’t have to be committed to the school if accepted. In my opinion (I know some people will disagree), they should double or even triple the price for applying SCEA (low-income students can get more fee waivers based on the higher rate) in order to discourage some students from just applying without any real knowledge of the school. This would lower this ridiculous deferral pile that the school now has to deal with in addition to the RD applications…</p>
<p>If it’s really true that in the RD round, about the same percentage of deferred students are accepted as those in the regular RD pool, to me this means that some different criterial are used in the SCEA and RD rounds. So don’t despair if you were deferred–you get another chance at consideration, and this time you will be judged by a somewhat different standard. That’s a good thing.</p>
<p>I thought Yale received almost exactly the same number of SCEA applications this year as it did last year. I also thought that Jeffrey Brenzel said Yale would offer admission to almost exactly the same number of applicants this year as it did last year…and I’m not aware of anything that indicates that wasn’t the case. So, help me understand why the so-called “lessons” from this year’s results are not “sour grapes” reactions. What’s clear now that wasn’t clear from last year…except maybe that it happened to you or people you know?</p>
<p>The facts have not changed one bit. In fact, the facts are uncannily similar between this year and last year. What has changed is the frame of reference for individuals. For some, hope of a mid-December offer of admission has been erased. Or deferred. And that may open some eyes. Or it might cause people to see things a little differently than they did 24 hours ago. But the facts are eerily similar to last year and I can’t figure out how there is any lesson here other than these three: (1) bad news can be a sobering experience; (2) life can be a beetch; and (3) love thy safeties.</p>
<p>Ahhh…I see there are facts to go along with my point.</p>
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<p>What is it about this year’s results that provokes revelations or lessons that weren’t fully evident after last year’s results? Is this really about the ~315 extra deferrals breaching some sort of tipping point?</p>
<p>Let’s be honest. Imagine the reaction here a week ago if Brenzel had said, “This year, we’re going to act on 25 fewer applications but we’re going to admit 30 more SCEA applicants than last year and defer 315 more, while rejecting 370 fewer applications.” </p>
<p>That’s what happened this year. And that news would have been cause for celebration across the board a week ago. The difference is not some shocking or questionable turn of events. The difference is that lots of highly qualified people who reasonably envisioned a singing Bulldog possibly popping up on their computer last night found themselves in the position this morning where that vision was no longer reasonable in light of the fact that they actually received different news.</p>
<p>What is unjust or unfair this morning was just as obviously unjust or unfair when those SCEA applications were sent in this past October. If these results are surprising, don’t point fingers. It wasn’t Yale that made any of this year’s applicants blind to last year’s results.</p>
<p>Good luck in the RD round (or ED2 round for some) at finding the right place, whether it’s Yale or elsewhere. If you find that Yale is one of your options in the spring, don’t harbor ill will towards the school that might keep you from making a wise, well-considered choice. The deferral news is understandably disappointing but it’s basically what should have been expected for everyone receiving that news.</p>
<p>VERY good advice. I will admit that by April 1 last spring, I had done a pretty good job of convincing myself (after being deferred) that Yale really wasn’t my first choice after all, and that I would rather go to Brown, Cornell, JHU etc. if I were to get accepted to one of those schools. Now, I am sitting in my dorm at Yale, studying for the last exam of my first semester here and incredibly thankful that when I did end up getting into Yale, I gave it a second look after all. Don’t keep your heart set only on Yale, because the chances of admission in the RD round are still slim, but don’t discount Yale just because of a deferral either.</p>
<p>D’yer Maker, my observations that began this thread were not based on any sort of personal disappointment; I’m a very happy student at a peer school of Yale’s, and though Yale is of course an amazing university, it wasn’t one I had on my (very) short list. Nor do I know any disgruntled Yale candidates. I’m a neutral observer wondering about the utility and effects of an administrative policy. The fact that Yale has taken the same approach to early action before as it has this year doesn’t address the issue of whether that approach does a disservice to its prospective students (and perhaps to itself as well, as other posters have suggested). Many schools regularly re-evaluate their early action policies and procedures.</p>
<p>@ zenkoan : These are fair, debatable points you make. I just don’t think anything changed…apart from the fact that the reality that already existed has hit home with some people here. Applicants have only learned what they should have already known. That makes this a good opportunity to find new, sympathetic ears for the argument you make. And while I don’t argue for or against your main thesis, I do want to urge deferred students not to become bitter towards Yale or feel duped in some way that they got had. Nothing happened that wasn’t as billed. So, in the spring, if some students have the option to choose Yale, they may do so. Or they may not do so. But one thing that shouldn’t enter into that decision is a sense that they were manipulated in some way or that something surprising took place when they were deferred.</p>
<p>I thought the SCEA applicants were generally “stronger” than the RD applicants.
So how is it that a similar percentage of deferred SCEA students get accepted as the percentage accepted for RD students? Shouldn’t more deferred students be accepted because they’re the “stronger” applicants?</p>
<p>The “strongest” candidates (according to whatever standards Yale uses) have already been picked out of the pool, leaving the deferred pool at about the same strength as the RD pool. Thus the initial SCEA pool would appear to be much deeper overall.</p>
<p>^agree that the strongest(by whatever standard yale uses) have already been accepted but I do want to ask why SCEA applicants are necessarily stronger than RD. RD applicants have more time and therefore have(generally speaking) more awards, potentially more polished essays, etc.
I thought SCEA was mostly for recruits and people who wholeheartedly wanted to go to Yale, which would explain the higher rate of acceptance…</p>
<p>So Yale accepts the same percentage of deferred SCEA apps in RD as regular candidates…but surely not all first-time RD applicants stand a reasonable chance of admission. If you skim off the impossible admits, wouldn’t RD kids then have a higher acceptance rate? </p>
<p>It seems to me that Yale should defer only those they actually want to see more from–ie, those cases where high first semester grades or an extracurricular accomplishment would clearly tip that applicant into the RD accept pile. Those cases that are vaguely not good enough to accept/not bad enough to deny shouldn’t be deferred by default.</p>
<p>Look at it this way–what Yale’s admission office does each year is put together a complicated puzzle. The SCEA admits are the edge pieces. For everybody else, it’s how it all fits together that determines who gets admitted.</p>