You expressed a concern, on behalf of ED institutions, that in trying to avoid over-admitting they may have to waitlist the applicants that they would otherwise like to admit.
A simple solution to this is a ranked waitlist. BOOM! Problem solved. ED institutions can donate my exorbitant yield management consulting fees to the charities of their choice (probably their own endowments).
Except you can’t do that if you need a tuba player and the #1 kid plays the cello.
Sorry, not sorry. All these schools defend their current opaque admission system on the ground of there being way more qualified candidates than they could possibly admit even if their class was expanded many-fold.
So, still not seeing a problem. If I were to believe everything them, that is.
I get your point, but isn’t it also about building a class at least initially? So a preference is being made for this tuba player over that tuba player. Or this literature student over that literature student. But when the college goes to the waitlist, they may be pulling a student who is stronger in a different area than the admit who turned down their spot. Though I am unclear whether waitlist selections are ever meant to be an exact replacement for the kid who said no. If a wanna-be physicist who was editor of his high school newspaper turns a college down, will the admissions office look for another kid interested in both physics and journalism? I kind of doubt that it could ever be an exact match. But if not, what other factors come into play in deciding who to admit off the waitlist?
ETA: I see you just addressed my question above as I was typing it. Good mind-reading skills! 
Ok, so ED institutions care about yield because they want to make sure their orchestras are not left without tuba players - not because of how it affects their yield stats, as you initially suggested. Got it!
If they had been direct offer instead of WL they still could have turned you down in favour of a different school (which is why WL exist in the first place) and while WL students may not be the best that you could possibly have gotten, they still must be pretty darn good or else they would have been flat out denied
A problem that would be solved by direct admit to a music major via auditions supplemental to meeting the regular academic bar or do the same as they do for athletic recruits. Just because you admit the tuba player are they required to play in the orchestra? What if they choose not to?
Sure, for someone who was in charge of giving preferences to legacies and who has family members benefited from such preferences.
Yes, if you admit 50% of your class by ED, then underestimate yield on the remaining admits by 10%, you’ve only got 5% too many admits, overall, which is less of a problem than if you have no ED and have 10% too many admits.
An alternative solution to this problem is to use a waitlist in the manner it was originally intended - to truly fill seats (rather than a consolation prize to various non-admits). Target filling, say, 97% of your seats naturally. If you go a little over, fine. If you hit 97% (or less, if you overestimate yield), fill from the waiting list.
Of course, colleges can and do use the waitlist now, but because the waitlist is so often a consolation sop, colleges get less benefit from it for actually filling seats. WL’d kids see that colleges only admit 0-10% or so off the waitlist, so they move on to other options. We did this ourselves - second kid got WL’d at a school he might have preferred to the school he ultimately attended. IIRC, I judged WL admission odds at about 5%, and so, rather than be strung along for months on a 5% chance, he accepted the plan B and moved on (didn’t keep the WL spot).
But if all that matters is childhood math performance . . .
What if the tuba player prefers to write for the school newspaper? How does admitting them help the orchestra then?
I thought we showed that their typical mission statement was more along the lines of “using the transformative power of a liberal arts education to make our oligarchy a somewhat more benevolent oligarchy.”
How about the ability and willingness to pay full freight? With matriculation, as well as admissions, to elite colleges increasingly uncertain, many of these colleges expanded the use of their waitlists. Because need-blind admission policies often don’t apply to waitlisted applicants, applicants who don’t need financial aid and who are clearly willing to be full pay enjoy an advantage. Extensive use of waitlists is another problem (or potential problem) affecting the socioeconomic composition at some of these colleges.
I thought that was partially the idea of the possibly mythical z-list. Wealthy, famous, and legacy students who are admitted post-regular admissions and post-waitlist offers. But I have no idea if this is a real thing or not.
By the way, I know we keep circling back to the same high level observations (maybe not in a bad way, though). Still, in another discussion, attention was focused on Figure A.4:
I would point out once again that there is in fact a type of school that has the sort of attendance distribution many people here seem to want, not coincidentally the dominant form of school in most of the world: the in-state public college. See A-4(d), which is very distinct from all of A-4(a), (b), and (e) (A-4(c) is just the summation of (d) and (e)).
What distinguishes the US is two basic things.
One is that we ALSO have a robust private college system, which does not typically follow the same mandates as our public college system.
The other is not everyone in every locale has the same quality/range of affordable public colleges available to them.
And I will observe again that while some here keep treating that first thing as the big scandal, that second thing is probably adversely affecting way more families in far more meaningful ways.
It was real at the time of the Harvard lawsuit analysis. In that sample, z-list had admits had the following distribution:
On Dean/Director Special Interest List – 59% of z-list admits
Is a Legacy – 47% of z-list admits
Is a Child Of Staff- 3% of z-list admits
Is SES Disadvantaged* - 1% of z-list admits
*Corresponds to below ~median US income
Examples such as the University of Michigan and Berkeley were mentioned in the Brenzel podcast. But TBH the panelists found the existence of so many private US universities at the top of the world-wide pecking order (roughly 30 out of 40 universities around the world) to be the more interesting subject. I guess because it involved great sums of private wealth invested over the century-and-a-half since Americans adopted the German model of advanced research in specialized graduate schools.
Actually Brenzel had no family members going to Yale. He doesn’t have a personal dog in this issue. He makes it clear it is not a hill to die on as far as he is concerned. His position is that legacies are not taking the spots of more qualified applicants, that getting rid of legacy preferences will not increase racial or social diversity and that a private university can rationally favor alumni/donors who contribute to the university and are largely responsible for the enormous resources built up over the centuries
To Brenzel the arguments about legacy are a distraction from the damage of the Supreme Court case to diversity efforts for the future leadership class of the country and from the poor public school system that too many URMs are trapped in.
