<p>"The only big drawback to Yale's SCEA is that lots of the Pton and Harvard applicants flood it." </p>
<p>that's absolutely correct. </p>
<p>This is a hypothetical example: a student who wants to go to Columbia (let's say Columbia engineering just for the heck of it) is persuaded out of applying ED because his/her parents want him/her to use "the early to the best potential and aim really high". so this applicant applies early action to yale. </p>
<p>the problem is...yale EA is COMPLETELY FLOODED WITH harvard and princeton hopefuls. i can name so many people in my own high school who want to attend harvard and princeton (and have a legitimate shot) and are applying to yale EA. yale can accept them, harvard and princeton can accept them later, and they may dump yale for H or P-ton later. </p>
<p>yale fully knows this, so that's why EA to yale is very, very risky. you're competing with people who want to go to harvard who are just applying for the hell of it. and why would any college accept someone EA when he/she may just reject the college later? thus, ED for yale would be better. </p>
<h2>back to my situation: the kid is rejected from yale EA and rejected from columbia. now, if this person had applied ED to columbia, he/she might have stood a solid chance. however, this person threw a great opportunity down the drain and wasted a potential ED for yale SCEA. </h2>
<p>i think so too.. =( maybe it could be better for those who want to be yalies to apply to other colleges early(EA) other than yale, and then apply
to yale regular so that they can stand out more.<br>
so hard to decide!</p>
<p>There is an inaccurate premise to all of these recent threads about Yale EA: that Yale gives a hoot about improving the "yield" of applicants it accepts who decide to enroll. That is pretty unlikely. The well-known "revealed preference" survey showed that, as between Yale and other competitive colleges, students are significantly more likely to choose Yale than any other college if accepted to both, with the sole exception of Harvard, where 35% of joint acceptees choose Yale. Vs. Princeton or Stanford, the percentage choosing Yale is around 70%. There's no reason for Yale not to accept an applicant because he or she may be thinking about Princeton or Harvard, because there's a perfectly good chance that student will wind up at Yale.</p>
<p>Only about 450 acceptees -- about 25% -- turn Yale down each year.</p>
<p>If, somehow, Yale were to limit its acceptances to students who were committed to attend Yale if accepted, it would be even MORE difficult to be accepted there. Instead of accepting 1800 students, it would only accept 1350. And what would it gain from that? It's not playing the USNWR ranking game. It would perhaps lose a shot at some really impressive students, students half or more of whom would wind up choosing Yale and being fully committed to it once there. And for what? To accept maybe 300 applicants who would otherwise be on the wait list, and who will doubtless be accepted to fine colleges (including even Harvard or Princeton)? Not worth it.</p>
<p>thnx for your post JHS. I was skeptical about any affects of the supposed "flood" of H and P applicants to Yale's SCEA. Your points make lots of sense.</p>
<p>But i'm still with JHS: Yale is not terrribly concerned about yield. I don't think an applicant's status as a legacy of another school will affect Yale's admissions decision.</p>
<p>Single Choice Early Action. No, it is not binding. You can't apply ED or EA to any other school, but you can apply RD to as many schools as you want, and you can also apply to public institutions with rolling admissions. If you're accepted SCEA, you can wait until the rest of your decisions come in to decide whether to attend.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Just to be clear: All "Early Decision" acceptances are binding on the applicant. But "Early Action" acceptances aren't. Colleges have either one or the other program, or none; I don't know of any college with both. Yale and Stanford are both "Early Action" colleges, although uniquely they forbid early action applicants from applying EA or ED anywhere else. There are lots of other Early Action colleges that don't have that rule -- MIT, Cal Tech, the University of Chicago, Georgetown, Boston College, to name a few. </p></li>
<li><p>Legacies: A couple of years ago, a friend was told by a senior admissions officer at Harvard that the admission rate at Harvard for Yale and Princeton legacies was not meaningfully lower than the admission rate for Harvard legacies. Obviously, they don't publish that data. I would be surprised if Yale is much different.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>^ Actually I just found out that University of Miami has both EA and ED</p>
<p>And this legacy thing scares me a bit too. I don't want to get rejected from harvard/princeton/everywhere else I'm applying simply because I have a connection to yale :(</p>
<p>I know I'm just being contrary, but Yale is really facing a quite different situation now. It is highly likely that Yale is getting a signficant number of SCEA applicants whose first choice is Harvard or Princeton. I suppose the argument is that if they are highly qualified enough, Yale will admit them in the hopes of luring them away from Harvard or Princeton.</p>
<p>I'm sure Y would be delighted to raise the number of cross-admits it wins from both of its main rivals. But I can't imagine that they'd strategically reject an EA applicant because of his/her ties to another institution. What Yale is doing is carefully courting the kids they do admit EA with a private facebook-type site they've created on the Yale website. I'm sure the hope is that by April, the EA admits will feel an unbreakable connection to Yale. I think the revealed preference study is based on data collected about a decade ago. I wonder if H and P's elimination of their early plans and Y (and S's) retention of theirs has benefited anyone in the battle for cross-admits.</p>
<p>Well, in 2008 Yale's yield went up slightly, and Harvard's (pre-wait-list) actually went down a skootch. So it seems unlikely that Yale lost a much greater percentage of its EA admitees than in the past. Not impossible, but unlikely, given that it actually reduced the number of RD admissions vs. prior years.</p>
<p>Yale lost EA admittees to Harvard in the past, even when Harvard had EA, too. I know some such.</p>
<p>i'll give my personal experience. i knew a lot of people that were accepted SCEA with me last year, and a very significant number of us were also admitted to harvard. what i found was that, among us, even the ones who had said that yale might not be the first choice, the vast majority (definitely not the 35/65 ratio from the revealed preferences study) ended up choosing yale because yale did SUCH a good job of recruiting its early admits. we got individual calls from heads of departments, we got SO many handwritten letters from students and admissions officers, we got the amazing admits website, we got it all. </p>
<p>and i actually reading an article in the crimson--the one that reported harvard's yield for the class of 2012--that said that for the yale scea and harvard cross-admits, harvard probably lost close to, if not more than, half of those students to yale because we already had 3 months of imagining ourselves as yale students before we even heard from h or p.</p>
<p>so even if yale is "flooded" with potential harvard/princeton cross-admits, those students are really going to grow to love yale during the 3 month period between scea decisions are released and RD are released. and believe me, no student admitted SCEA is arrogant enough to say "oh, i only got into yale...i'm going to be accepted to harvard in a few months, so let me ignore the fact that i got into yale." most early admittees, even the one whose first choice was not originally yale, come to love love love the school after 3 months of hardcore recruitment.</p>
<p>
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we got individual calls from heads of departments, we got SO many handwritten letters from students and admissions officers, we got the amazing admits website, we got it all.
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</p>
<p>That was my son's experience, too, and no small part of the reason he chose Y over H. Contacts from students, contacts from faculty members, contacts from his regional rep. He also received a warm reception during BDD from leaders of a student group in which he's interested, and follow-up calls and e-mails. He developed friendships before he even committed to Yale. In the end, he was swayed by that strong sense -- so often cited as cliche, but accurate -- of just how much Yale students love their their school and their experience. He also sensed a collaborative, collegial spirit at Yale that suits him well. </p>
<p>Is it easy to turn down Harvard? Of course not. It's an incredible institution. He didn't pull the trigger until 11 PM on May 1. But in the end, no matter what acceptances you're weighing, it comes down to fit.</p>