<p>I’m assuming that nearly everyone getting into Harvard EA is going to take the spot, because in 2007 pretty much every other competing school had an early program. If students had a preference for any other competing school, they would have applied there early instead.</p>
<p>so given that someone would apply to Harvard’s single choice early action program, Harvard would be their first choice and they’d be unlikely to change to another school in the spring, or even apply to any others after getting into harvard.</p>
<p>so I assumed a 99% yield for Harvard’s EA program, but you can even take a 96% yield, which would be conservative, giving you an RD yield of 70.6%.</p>
<p>if you want me to go through the actual calculation using these EA yields, I’m happy to do so.</p>
<p>If a student slightly prefers an ED college to Harvard, they might still EA to Harvard, since being accepted at Harvard and free to apply wherever might be better than being bounded at their real first choice. Furthermore, financial aid was more of a concern then, when policies were less generous than they are now - another reason to go Harvard EA over an ED program. Lastly, some people often change their minds in the few months that pass.</p>
<p>The bottom line is 99% and 96% are gross overestimates. If JohnAdams12 only gave ED programs 97% (which is perhaps a bit harsh - 98% or 99% is more appropriate), what makes you think Harvard can match that with just its EA? Though I lack the data to support this, 90% - 93% would probably be a much more reasonable guess. 90% would put it at a 75.02% RD yield while 93% would put it at a 72.80% RD yield.</p>
<p>FYI, in 2007, Harvard enrolled just under 94% (93.60% - 761/813) of its SCEA applicants to the Class fo 2010. Without making an exception for the 18 WL admits, the yield for the RD round was just above 70% (70.35%.) </p>
<p>Now you can actually keep on bickering with some non-speculative numbers.</p>
<p>Harvard enrolled SCEA 761 students in 2010, not 804 which was the (also wrong) number of admitted students. And, I do not have a link for the Class of 2011 exact numbers. At least not one I can share.</p>
<p>First of all, ND’s yield actually came in slightly under 50% last year. Assuming a similar yield this year, that would put ND at best at the bottom of the Ivy League. To its credit, ND offers EA vs. ED unlike the lower ivies.</p>
<p>Second, ND has a self-selecting applicant pool due to its religious affiliation. Many religious schools (BYU, Yeshiva, etc.) have relatively high yields which belie their academic quality and reputation.</p>
<p>Third, last year ND’s acceptance rate was over 27% which is much higher than that of any ivy. To put it into context, it is approximately 4X higher than that of HYP.</p>
<p>Last but not least, ND’s financial aid cannot compete with that of the ivies. It cannot even compete with the FA of some of its peer schools such as Vanderbilt, which has an endowment that is only slightly more than half that of ND. So expect to see ND’s yield to stay under 50%, not to mention slowly and steadily decline in the foreseeable future.</p>
<p>Chicago’s 39% is the highest it’s ever been. Last year was 36%. Lots of people were assuming its yield would plunge because of increasing competitiveness and therefore increasing cross-admits. Apparently not.</p>
<p>Its yield still suffers because of sub-par financial aid for the middle class and lack of ED. (However, I think that 39% with EA is much superior to Duke’s 42% or Northwestern’s 35% with ED (and potentially even Cornell’s 49%). It’s still got a lot to go to catch up with its Ivy peers, though. Nondorf will probably help raise it to the mid-40s in the next few years, if we predict results based on Nondorf’s recent history with other institutions.)</p>