<p>Hi all. I compiled the admission data for all of the Ivies + Stanford/MIT. Based on last year's admit numbers and this year's application pool, Yale will have the lowest RD admit rate out of all the schools (5.0%). In contrast, Harvard will have a 6.3% admit rate and Princeton will be at 8.4%. Cornell's RD admit rate is the highest among Ivies, at 16.1%. For the non-Ivies, Stanford will have a 5.5% RD admit rate and MIT will be at 5.9%.</p>
<p>If you would like to see the data (total admits, defer rate, etc.) for the remaining schools, see the spreadsheet I made here:</p>
<p>Hopefully this can keep everyone distracted while we all anxiously wait for results.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I made this out of boredom. This is just a projection, and is by no means an exact representation of what will happen come April. There are also many lurking variables affecting the numbers (e.g. ED/EA/neither).</p>
<p>@op, for Harvard, I thought 2,100 is the target enrollment/class size. So, the final admission number = (RD admission + adm off waitlist) = 2,100/yield = 2,780. So the adm rate should be 2,780/35,000 = 7.9%. Is it not?</p>
<p>No, hopingdad. Harvard’s class is about 1,650, and it generally offers admission to around 2,100 applicants (i.e., an expected yield of just under 80%). That’s been fairly constant for a number of years.</p>
<p>JHS, thanks. I believe most applicants are losing hope. 95 rejectees for every 100 applicants, who can keep the hope? Harder than becoming multimillion dollar NFL draftees. High school kids better focus on sports that they have a meager talent in, go for the life as pro athlete, at least this has hope for multi $1M salary. These 5 kids out of 100 – what would be their earning potential come graduation?? And who says Amy Chua is a Wimp for raising her children like that, because perhaps thats almost the only way to make her child belong in the 5 kids.</p>
<p>hopingdad - as the parent of an unhooked member of the class of 2013 I can assure you that Dr. Chua’s parenting methods are not a prerequisite for raising a child attractive to Harvard. And for all of you, whether you get into Harvard or not I am sure that you are applying to a host of excellent colleges and will have a number of attractive options on April 1st. Good luck!</p>
<ol>
<li><p>As I calculate it roughly, a Harvard applicant (already a member of a pretty elite group) has about the same chance of being accepted RD at Harvard as a NCAA Div-1A scholarship football player (already a member of a VERY elite group that is about 1/10th the size of Harvard’s applicant pool) has of ever appearing in an official NFL game. Only an handful of them, however, will even arguably qualify as “multimillion dollar NFL draftees”. The odds of even a high-level college football player becoming a multimillion dollar NFL draftee are much lower than the odds of a Harvard applicant getting into Harvard.</p></li>
<li><p>But there’s a huge difference. If a college football player does not make it onto an NFL roster, his expected earnings as a professional football player are practically nothing. If he is not drafted in the first couple of rounds, his first year compensation may be a small fraction of what a top draft choice earns. But a Harvard applicant rejected at Harvard . . . may wind up at Yale. Or Cornell, MIT, UChicago, Berkeley. The actual difference between any of them and Harvard – in terms of educational quality, certainly, but also in terms of reputation and expected earnings – is almost negligible. Unlike the NFL, there is no chasm separating the fates of Harvard applicants who are accepted and those who are rejected. There isn’t a single student anywhere so smart, so talented, or so special that he would actually be harmed by having to “settle” for a world-class institution like Cornell.</p></li>
<li><p>Harvard may take only 1 applicant in 20 RD. But the top 20 private universities and top 10 LACs – to pick an arbitrary group – enroll somewhere around 35,000 students other than recruited athletes every year. And if you add the top publics, and high quality honors programs at other publics, the number zooms to 50,000, 60,000, or higher. And those are actual enrollments; many, many more offers of admission are handed out. (Of course, some individual applicants will receive multiple offers, but no individual applicant can enroll at more than one college at once.) The “worst” of those slots offers a student at least 90% of the opportunity he would have at Harvard, and most of them offer opportunities that are not inferior at all in any objective sense. In other words, there are LOTS of spaces every year for top-quality, talented, ambitious students entering college. No one has to lose hope because the odds of getting into Harvard are long.</p></li>
<li><p>If you DO lose hope because all you can care about is Harvard Harvard Harvard, and nothing else seems good enough . . . you aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are, and I question why Harvard should want you.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Very nice gift you have given the quant heads among us.</p>
<p>By the way, if you tally the number of applications, it is 395,125. Multiplied by a $60 application fee, that is $23,707500 to the schools. You can figure the College Board makes maybe 2/3 as much on CSS Profile and test scores. No way to know how much money is spent on AP tests, at $83 a pop. Pretty soon we’ll be talking real money.</p>
<p>JHS, a very nice presentation except for #4. Just because an applicant cares so much about this school, it doesn’t make him/her less smart.</p>
<p>Be careful also,
because also, a Yale applicant rejected at Yale … may wind up at Harvard.</p>
<p>The price tag also differs,
as many of these schools are twice as expensive as harvard for families earning, say $100k-$150k. Cornel, for example, will be easily double the cost of attendance of harvard. Another reason for Harvard, Harvard, Harvard, … hehe</p>
<p>Overall, you made a very good rebuttal to
altho you took it out of context somewhat, as the ‘hope’ was confined to the acceptance to harvard. But then my reference to the chances of an NFL draftee was a ‘sarcasm’, but could be taken seriously too. Anyway, it did bring out your rather thorough rebuttal which is amusing and informative at the same time. Well done.</p>